John Kiriakou

Almost all the hijackers, was it 17, 16 or 17 of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, right?

And we know that the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, his wife transferred $50,000 from her personal bank account to the hijackers.

What are we supposed to make of that?

Seriously, you know, the only time I ever saw George Tenet, who was the CIA director at the time, the only time I ever saw George completely lose his shit was in a meeting with Prince Bandar.

He said, if we don't start getting help from the Saudi government,

on this case, we're gonna start killing people, a lot of people, and some of them are gonna be named Al Saud.

I go out to Pakistan as the chief of counter-terrorism operations there in January of 02.

So it's still fresh, we're bombing Tora Bora, all these Al Qaeda people are trying to get out of Afghanistan, cross into Pakistan, and my job was then to catch them when they came into Pakistan.

That's where they were living, all of them.

They launched 9-11 from Afghanistan.

At least theoretically, the ideas came when they were in Afghanistan.

And we should have.

But didn't you know that?

We did not.

We suspected, but we didn't have, there was no smoking gun.

So that's what I'm getting to.

We catch Abu Zubaydah, Zayn al-Abidin, Muhammad Hussein.

Abu Zubaydah.

who we believed at the time.

The profession, I know.