CIA OFFICER DEBUNKS THE 9/11 CONSPIRACIES

We're at a moment here where there's more about 9-11 conspiracies online than there is education, real education, of American kids in school. So how do you feel about the main conspiracy theory that the U.S. was somehow involved, that the U.S. was in some way directing bin Laden or behind the attacks? People point to building seven coming down and say that, you know, that wasn't touched by any of the planes. It was it was detonated. It didn't fall, you know, and so on. You know, it's ridiculous. These conspiracy theory, look, Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. The United States was not involved in any way. I was a senior officer in the counterterrorism center working on all of these issues for a number of years. There was no American conspiracy to do this, to drag us into a war. This was horrifying for all of us. I'm originally a New Yorker. I was a firefighter as a young man. One of my closest friends was a firefighter at Ground Zero. He survived that day, thank goodness. But I'm from Long Island where so many of these people were from, the victims and the firefighters and the police that fought valiantly to save them. So I when I hear these things, I'm I'm I'm a little troubled by them that people would even believe them. But but, you know, there was no conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government to support or participate in any way in violence against its own country. No, I reject that completely. And Gary, you know, there's a came into a University of Texas class about 10 years ago, and the class was called Understanding 9-11. And so my first question to the class was, when did 9-11 begin? And they all looked at me like stunned mullets and nobody could answer. So I'm going to ask you that question because I know this is one you can answer. When did 9-11 really begin? 9-11, you know, begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back in the late 70s. And the the fact that the United States then jumps in and supports the Mujahideen groups, the Mujahideen to resist them, and and Arabs from around the Arab world jump into Afghanistan to try to fight the Russians off. And the United States had funded some of those groups, worked with some of those groups. There were six different militant groups. Eventually, bin Laden would come out of one of those. There was a group in a place in a city called Peshawar in Pakistan, an organization called Maqtab al-Khidmat, the services organization, run by a Palestinian by the name of Abdullah Azam. He had three deputies, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Mohammed Saeed. And those three guys would each run militant organizations, bin Laden Al-Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was Zawahiri, and Mohammed Saeed eventually would lead the left, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group. But out of those groups came bin Laden, the whole concept of of of having Arabs fight not just as part of these militant groups, but to have their own group, the army, the base is what it was called. Yes, because Al-Qaeda is literally the Arabic word for the base, right? When it's translated.