Lee Hamilton Feigns Surprise That FBI Knew Bin Laden Was Planning Terrorist Attacks In US More Than 8 Years Before 9/11

Osama bin Laden (a.k.a. Tim Osman) with Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezniski

The Washington Times reports that the FBI had a source working directly in contact with Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 and learned of his plan to fund terrorist attacks in the United States. Supposedly, the FBI source helped thwart a planned terrorist attack on a Los Angeles masonic lodge at the time. The information came to light in 2010 during courtroom testimony in a former FBI agent's discrimination suit against the department.

“It was the only source I know in the bureau where we had a source right in al Qaeda, directly involved,” Edward J. Curran, a former top official in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, told the court in support of a discrimination lawsuit filed against the bureau by his former agent Bassem Youssef.

Mr. Curran gave the testimony in 2010 to an essentially empty courtroom, and thus it escaped notice from the media or terrorism specialists. The Times was recently alerted to the existence of the testimony while working on a broader report about al Qaeda's origins.

Upon learning of the revelation, former 911 commissioners, including Indiana's former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, who were charged with investigating the cause of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, put on their best Captain Renault impersonation:

Members of the Sept. 11 commission, congressional intelligence committees and terrorism analysts told The Times they are floored that the information is just now emerging publicly and that it raises questions about what else Americans might not have been told about the origins of al Qaeda and its early interest in attacking the United States . . .

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission with former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, said that as far as he can remember, the FBI never told the commission that it had been working a source so close to bin Laden that many years before 9/11.

“I do not recall the FBI advising us of a direct contact with Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Hamilton told The Times in a recent interview.

Exactly how the information was omitted from the various congressional reviews and the 9/11 Commission report is a mystery. FBI officials and staff involved in the review said they couldn’t determine definitely so many years later whether the information was kept from the various investigations or whether it was simply overlooked by staff in the thousands of pages of documents and electronic records made available during the exhaustive reviews of al Qaeda's history. . .

Of course Hamilton and the other 911 commission members knew much more than what bin Laden supposedly had planned back in the early 1990s. After all, bin Laden traveled in and out of the U.S. frequently under the alias, Tim Osman, given to him by the CIA when he first started working for the intelligence agency back in the late 1970s as part of the United States' covert effort to train, arm and fund the rebels seeking to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The CIA paid hundreds of millions of dollars to bin Laden's family to build the terrorist training camps he ran in Afghanistan before he supposedly turned on the U.S. and began plotting terrorist attacks inside our country. Our government worked hand-in-hand with bin Laden and his Saudi family right up to the day of the 9/11 attacks.

Hamilton, who now works as an external adviser to the CIA, along with other 911 commission members, knew their job was to whitewash the CIA's role in funding, plotting and executing the September 11, 2001 attacks with the assistance of the CIA puppet regime in Saudi Arabia as part of a larger goal of establishing a Nazi-styled government in the U.S. 911 was their Reichstag moment to enact the Patriot Act, our own version of the German Enabling Act, which would allow for a full-blown police state with limitless spying and endless wars around the world to perpetually feed the military-industrial complex former President Dwight Eisenhower tried in vain to warn us about in 1960. For the moment, former President George W. Bush's infamous declaration of "Mission Accomplished" remains operative. We can only hope that more Americans learn the real truth and take appropriate action to bring those responsible for these hideous crimes against humanity to justice. So Mr. Hamilton, we're not fooled by your "shocked, shocked" claims on this day, even if your lapdogs in the mainstream media are buying it.