9/11 attribution of responsibility describes John Kiriakou’s account of how his views on who bears responsibility for the September 11 attacks have changed over time. Asked directly which individuals or governments he believes were responsible, Kiriakou says his position has shifted: he still believes al-Qaeda carried out the attacks, but he now believes al-Qaeda was “allowed” to carry them out — not necessarily by the United States.[1]
A distracted Bush administration
Kiriakou says the Bush administration was foolishly focused on the strategic threat from China at the time rather than on terrorism, despite CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Council counterterrorism official Richard Clarke “shouting to anybody who would listen” that al-Qaeda was going to attack.[2]
Unanswered questions about Saudi Arabia and Israel
Kiriakou says it raises a red flag that the 9/11 Commission elected not to investigate the actions of the Saudi government or of individual Saudi intelligence officers, and that the CIA would not permit its own officers to testify before the Commission or allow Commission investigators to interview Guantanamo detainees: “What do you have to hide? It’s a commission. It’s a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the president of the United States — let them do their investigation.”[3]
He extends the same suspicion to Israel, arguing that a government with intelligence services as thoroughly embedded in Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Palestinian factions as Israel’s could not plausibly have known nothing about al-Qaeda’s planning for 9/11. Kiriakou says he believes Israel had a vested interest in allowing the attacks to go forward, reasoning that it knew the American response would be to go immediately to war and “kill as many Muslims as we possibly could” — which, he says, is exactly what happened, with no one ever held to account for it.[4] He points to a specific, concrete episode as grounds for that suspicion: Israeli intelligence officers were arrested by the NYPD in New York in the weeks before the attacks for photographing the World Trade Center, and were seen dancing after the towers were hit — before quietly being released. Kiriakou dismisses the idea that this “dancing Israelis” story is an antisemitic fabrication, insisting it happened and that the Israeli government subsequently worked hard to discredit it.[5] He has said at a conference that he believes the Saudi government was at least indirectly involved in the attacks, and that the Israeli government had advance forewarning of the plot — through what he calls Mossad’s excellent penetration of al-Qaeda — but never passed that warning on to the United States, a decision whose motive he says he still wants explained.[6]
A silver lining for CIA liaison relationships
Kiriakou also says 9/11 gave the U.S. an opening it otherwise would never have had: the chance to establish intelligence liaison relationships with Central Asian countries — the former Soviet “-stans” — that the CIA would have had no other reason to deal with.[7]