In the first of a planned series revisiting unanswered questions around the 9/11 attacks, Tucker Carlson sat down with former Congressman Curt Weldon in a wide-ranging interview that has already drawn over 1.7 million views on YouTube since its release on April 14.
Weldon, a former teacher and fire chief, served as Vice Chair of both the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees during his two-decade tenure in Congress, where he founded the Fire, EMS, Disaster Relief Caucus, which he chaired for 20 years.
He accuses U.S. intelligence agencies of actively suppressing warnings ahead of the 2001 attacks and says the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report concealed key information, calling it a “cover-up.”
His passion to finally uncover the truth about how and why 9/11 was allowed to occur is driven by many factors, chief among them his devotion to firefighters, including his good friend Chief Ray Downey of the FDNY, who died at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. Weldon and Downey had collaborated since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when they worked with the Gilmore Commission to address problems of communication between intelligence agencies and local responders, which became apparent in that attack.
Among the most striking claims:
• In 1993, the Gilmore Commission was established in order to create a “fusion center” of intelligence sharing, in light of poor coordination among intelligence agencies and the failure to stop the attack. On November 4, 1999, he met with the Deputy Directors of the FBI and CIA to propose creating an intelligence-sharing center out of Fort Belvoir in Virginia. The CIA deputy director’s response: “Absolutely not!”
• Sometime in the year 2000, an Army Special Ops Command and DIA project named “Able Danger” had mapped what Weldon asserted was “every Al Qaeda cell in the world, including the one in New York.” The group tried to inform the DOJ and FBI of an imminent terror attack, but they were rebuffed three times. The group’s analysis included the names of several of the hijackers, including Mohamed Atta.
• Weldon said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who worked on Able Danger, went to Afghanistan after 9/11 to follow leads on Osama bin Laden. It was then that his office was raided and files seized, after being summoned by 9/11 Commission Chair Philip Zelikow—whom Weldon accuses of obstructing the investigation.
• Weldon claims to have multiple sources who say that Osama bin Laden was actually in Baluchestan, Iran, and received medical treatment in Tehran, while “our boys were getting killed for no reason” hunting bin Laden in Afghanistan. Weldon was particularly incensed about that point. He also said that it was Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, assassinated on Jan. 3, 2020, on Trump’s orders five years ago, who arranged for bin Laden to be in Iran, not the Ayatollahs.
• Congressman Weldon travelled to Libya in 2011, (which he’d visited in 2004, and 2008), in an entourage including staffers of Joe Biden and George Bush and an ABC News camera crew. They received from Colonel Gaddafi a letter expressing his willingness to step down, rather than allow the country to be torn to shreds. He said then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had her own ideas, which led her instead to pursue the destruction of Libya and brutal death of Gaddafi.
Weldon insists that it’s time for a new, actually independent commission to be formed to get to the bottom of 9/11. He believes Trump’s presidency makes this possible. Everyone who was on Capitol Hill at the time of the report would agree that it is a cover-up, he claimed, and he recommended a documentary produced by firefighters called Bravo 7.
