9/11 Commission
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The 9/11 Commission is, in John Kiriakou's account, an inquiry that was fixed before it began. Its information came to it "in a trickle": it was not allowed to interview anybody from Guantanamo, and it was not allowed to interview any CIA officers. Because no Guantanamo detainee was interviewed, no al-Qaeda fighter or leader in American custody was ever questioned by the commission at all.

The blocked Saudi thread

Kiriakou ties the restriction directly to what went uninvestigated. He asks why Omar al-Bayoumi was at President Bush's Crawford ranch before the attacks with Crown Prince Abdullah, and why al-Bayoumi then excused himself from that meeting to go outside and telephone the hijackers, and answers that it was never investigated "because the CIA wouldn't let us investigate it. The CIA wouldn't let the 9/11 Commission investigate it." The rhetorical question he puts to the room follows from it: "What kind of commission was the 9/11 Commission if it was not permitted to interview CIA officers? Or if it was not permitted to interview prisoners at Guantanamo? What did they just fill in the blanks by making it up?"

The case for a second commission

Kiriakou supports reopening the investigation, and frames a new commission as useful in two directions at once. It would allow the outstanding questions about the Saudi and Israeli roles to be put properly; it would also lay to rest what he calls the more outrageous rumours that have taken hold in the vacuum, that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than an airliner, watched by ten thousand people sitting in rush-hour traffic, or that the aircraft were empty and their passengers executed at an air force base. Twenty-four years on, his summary is that the truth about 9/11 is still not known, and that neither the Israeli nor the Saudi role can be known "because we're not allowed to investigate it."

See also

- Saudi princes and 9/11
- Omar al-Bayoumi
- Guantanamo Bay
- Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11
