Source: American Truth Project, September 25, 2019
Barry Nussbaum: Welcome to ATP Report. I’m Barry Nussbaum. We have a very special guest today, Clare Lopez. Clare is a former CIA officer and an expert in worldwide terror, especially in our topic for today. And since she left the CIA, she’s been at the Center for Security Policy, where she is the vice president of research. Clare, welcome to the Truth Report.
Clare Lopez: Thanks so much, Barry. I’m really glad to be with you.
Barry Nussbaum: So are we. It’s an honor to have you. Today we’re going to start off our segment talking about Osama bin Laden. With the anniversary of 9/11, it’s in the news constantly. And this is something that is very important. I understand you broke the story that actually after 9/11 and long before we found Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, he was in Iran. Why did that news never come out? It never came out until you started reporting on it. And tell us the background. Is it true that Iran harbored the world’s most infamous terrorist?
Clare Lopez: Yes, it is true. I can hardly take credit for breaking the news, though it was published. One of the ways that I learned about it myself is when I was working as an expert witness in the Havlish case. The Havlish case is a legal case brought by widows and survivors, family members of victims of 9/11 who came to a legal firm, the Thomas Mellon law firm in Pennsylvania after 9/11, to ask them to get to the bottom of what happened to their loved ones. And eventually, that one law firm grew to a consortium of eight and eventually later on in the course of things I joined the effort. And in the course of my own research and working out an affidavit that I co-authored with friend and colleague Dr. Bruce Tefft, this is part of what we found. It’s all open source. And part of where that came from is a post 9/11 interview done with one of the Taliban warlords by the name of Ghobadian Hekmatyar.
Ghobadian Hekmatyar formerly was one of those warlords that the CIA was working with when we were supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s war against the Red Army, the Soviet Union. But after the end of the Afghanistan war now we’re in the 1990s and the warlords, as we will call, went to fighting. And eventually, the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. That was the lead up to 9/11. Well, Ghobadian Hekmatyar was one of those key top warlords. And what happened is that in the lead up to 9/11, he fell out with the Taliban and went to Iran where he lived for quite a while. But that gave him a position inside of Iran where he was collaborating with and working with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, and their intelligence service, the MOIS or Ministry of Intelligence and Security. And what that allowed him to do, according to this media news interview that I found working on the Havlish case, is to set up one of the bolt holes, if you will, one of the escape routes out of Afghanistan. Because they knew that once the attacks of 9/11 were launched against the United States, that we would come into Afghanistan and go after al-Qaida and the Taliban. They knew that ahead of time, and they prepared the escape routes ahead of time. Well, some of the escape routes led to the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another was in Quetta and other cities of Pakistan. But one of the major escape routes was Iran. And Ghobadian Hekmatyar helped set that up pre-9/11 because they knew it was going to happen. And so, after the battles of Tora Bora and al-Qaida is ousted from Afghanistan, the Taliban are defeated by our forces and coalition forces Osama bin Laden, family members, and fighters fled to Iran. That was prearranged. It was set up ahead of time. And he stayed there for something like about nine years late 2001 until sometime during 2010, and that’s when he finally moved to Pakistan. Now, yes, the arrangement by which he remained in Iran was not just between al-Qaida and Iran. That alliance, of course, goes way back to 1990, the early 1990s. But the arrangement of his safe haven there also involved the government of Saudi Arabia, the George W. Bush administration here in the United States, and of course, Iran and al-Qaida.
Barry Nussbaum: Well talk about that a little bit because that to me is startling news. What you just said, I think, Clare, is the George Bush administration knew or should have known that Osama was in Iran with the support of Saudi Arabia. Did you just say that?
Clare Lopez: I mean, all of our presidents since 9/11 know this information. President Obama knew it, and one has to believe and expect that President Trump also knows that this happened. And you know, I can’t say why President Bush agreed to it. Maybe he thought that al-Qaida would be bottled up there, contained somehow, you know, not permitted to operate. Of course, that’s not what happened at all. They did operate out of Iran. Multiple plots were launched post 9/11 from there. But maybe that’s what they thought.
Barry Nussbaum: So, before I ask you the most pressing question, I have a preliminary one, which is why is this not common knowledge? Why has this not been in the press? I’m just shocked.
Clare Lopez: Well, I mean, for the same reason that the involvement of Iran and Hezbollah in its alliance with al-Qaeda has never been in the media, despite the Hamlisch case. By the way, the website for that Iran911case.com. You will find the judgment, the ruling by Judge George Daniels, Southern District of New York in Manhattan, who ruled in our case that we took to him in 2011. By the end of the year, December, he made the ruling, he ruled, and this was very public, he ruled that Iran and Hezbollah were co-responsible with al-Qaida for the attacks of 9/11. Now, yes, of course, Saudi Arabia was too, but it just so happened that the focus of our investigation was centered on Iran and Hezbollah. I don’t mean to leave Saudi Arabia off the hook at all here, but that was his ruling. It was a public ruling. It was a ruling from a federal district court judge in New York City, of all places. But the news was completely squashed. The media wouldn’t touch it. Obviously, during 2011, that time frame, it was the President Obama administration. They weren’t going to touch it. They were involved already at the time in the preliminaries leading up to what they wanted to achieve that nuclear deal with Tehran. They weren’t going to mess that up for any reason like this. And so, it never got to be really public. But the information is public. You know, I just gave you the website. All of our affidavits that were involved in the case, our affidavits are listed on that website. Iran911case.com. It should have been headlined all over the United States but was not.
Barry Nussbaum: This is shocking news. I mean, for someone that is very well informed, referring to me, I didn’t know this. And you’re telling me that it was simply ignored or covered up or both by all of the press, because Obama at the time wanted the Iran nuclear deal and this would have cast Iran in a terrible light, harboring the worst terrorist fugitive in American history. And so, they stepped on the story?
Clare Lopez: Well, I mean, certainly one can believe that this was the motivation of the Obama administration. I can’t speak for all the media, but simply to say that if you go now, you know, and do a Google search or whatever search engine on these data points that have just given you, you will find public writing, and media attention to the judge’s ruling, for example. But it’s just few and far between the articles, the coverage. Nothing ever made the major network news or cable news networks. They simply did not want this to be public.
Barry Nussbaum: Shocking news. Clare, thanks for that insight. And thank you for joining us on The Truth Report. Remember, FindBarry.com takes you to our website where you can sign up, so you never miss anything. And text TRUTH to 88202. You’ll get all of our mailers and our information right on your cell phone. Thanks for joining us on the ATP report. I’m Barry Nussbaum.
