Interview 1971 – Turning the Tide on 9/11 with Curt Weldon

Congressman Curt Weldon appears on The Corbett Report to discuss his appearance at the upcoming Turning the Tide: 9/11 Justice in 2025 conference in Washington, D.C. James and Congressman Weldon discuss 9/11, Able Danger, Osama Bin Laden, intelligence operations and where they agree and where they disagree on the subject of 9/11 truth.

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TRANSCRIPT:

James Corbett (JC): Welcome, friends.

This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com coming to you in September of 2025.

As we approach the 24th anniversary of the events of September 11th, 2001, I have a very special guest lined up for you today. Congressman Curt Weldon, who you might know or maybe not, represented Pennsylvania in Congress for nearly twenty years.

He’s a graduate of Westchester University. He also earned a degree in fire protection and served as a firefighter, fire chief and first volunteer administrator of the Delaware County Fire Academy. He’s testified in the federal courts and before Congress as an expert witness on fire issues.

He also served as vice chairman of both the Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee.

And he will be a headline speaker at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 Justice in 2025 Conference in Washington, DC. That’s going to be taking place from September 10th to September 12^th — helping gain momentum for potentially a new investigation into the events of 9/11.

The link to purchase tickets for that event will be available in the Show Notes for today’s conversation at corbertreport.com. But let’s bring him on the program.

Congressman Weldon, thank you very much for your time today.

Curt Weldon (CW): James, it’s great to be with you. I want to start by applauding you and thanking you for your diligence and hard work in bringing out the truth to the American people, the families, the firefighters, and the world about what happened before, during, and after 9/11.

JC: I appreciate that very much. For people of a certain vintage in the 9/11 truth movement like myself, I’m sure they’ll remember your impassioned speech on the House floor in defense of Lt. Col. Anthony Schaeffer and the way he was being railroaded at the time in the cover-up of the Able Danger program.

CW: Mr. Speaker, this is not some third-rate burglary cover up. This is not some Watergate incident. This is an attempt to prevent the American people from knowing the facts about how we could have prevented 9/11 and people are covering it up today! And they’re ruining the career of a military officer to do it. And we can’t let it stand!

 

SOURCE: Congressman Weldon on the floor of the House: “We can’t let it stand!”

But there are, I’m sure, people in the audience who don’t remember those events, let alone your other connections to 9/11. In your own words, why don’t you tell us not just about the Able Danger story but also your experience of 9/11 and why you’re motivated about seeking 9/11 justice.

CW: Well, James, I’m a teacher by profession, an educator at all levels from public school—middle school—to college and university. And then I worked for a large insurance company—the largest in North America—where I was responsible for risk management, training all of their professionals worldwide in buildings and fire protection loss control.

While doing that professionally, I grew up in a fire service family, the youngest of nine. I became a volunteer firefighter when I was sixteen years old and worked my way up and became chief of the fire department, state fire instructor. [Then I] went back to school after I got my degree in Education and got a second degree in Fire Protection.

When I went to Congress, there was no one focusing on the firefighters in America, so I organized the Fire Caucus. That caucus became and still is the largest in the Congress, with 370 members of the House and the Senate. I was and still am the leader, the founder. People like Joe Biden, Al Gore, John McCain were all my co-chairs. They did whatever I asked them to do. [In that capacity,] I traveled to all fifty states. I went to every disaster within days of the disaster happening, whether it was a hurricane, a flood, or a tornado. And I reported back to the Congress on what we should be doing to assist these local responders.

In that regard, I was on the scene at the 1993 World Trade Center attack the day after it happened at the invitation of the New York Fire Commissioner Howard Safir. I spent the day there with him and the DEA and the FBI. I went through the parking garage that had been bombed at the base of the Trade Center, and I met a young fire officer who was rising up in the ranks named Ray Downey. Ray would become one of my closest friends.

This jacket I wear today was presented to me by Ray Downey and the Fire Department of New York. On 9/11, he was the chief of all rescue. So he was the leader of the 343 firefighters, including himself, who died in that disastrous attack.

I felt responsible for Ray’s death. And I felt responsible because at the same time I was representing all the firefighters in the country, I was rising up in seniority on the Armed Services Committee, which oversees the entire defense budget for America. I was the vice chairman of the full committee, which had sixty members of the both parties. And I was the chairman of the Oversight Committee for all research funding, which at that time was about $180 billion a year. So, my job was to oversee the funding for all of our labs.

We have 100 laboratories, including DARPA and the laboratories that do work for the intelligence community’s “black” programs. I was funding them. So I had access to those programs if I wanted to get access, because I had the highest security clearances.

In the late 1990s—1997—I did a hearing on what I called asymmetric threats. I said the threats of the 21st century will not be what they are today. That hearing, which you can get from the congressional record, focused on four key areas.

It focused on drones and the use of drones. Back then no one was using drones. Today everyone uses drones.

The second was cyber. That’s where I got into the issues involving the intelligence of our Armed Services and the lack of fusion.

The third was EMP. I wrote the EMP legislation and I created the EMP commission. My staffer was the director. EMP is basically what’s causing problems today.

Which leads to the fourth: directed energy. The US and other countries are now using directed energy weapons, not just to take apart material things, but to affect the human brain.

The biggest concern I have for the future generations—and they’re not aware of this right now—is there is work going on in America and around the world on the use of wave patterns to penetrate the brains of human beings to control their minds, their actions, without their having any ability to stop that from occurring.

That hearing took place in 1997. And as a result of that hearing, I looked at what the Armed Services were doing in standing up information dominance centers. The Navy, Air Force, and Army all had their own.

The Army’s [information dominance] program happened to be at Fort Belvoir, which is fifteen minutes from the United States Capitol. I would go down there and I would look at what they were doing. I didn’t get read in to the program—I didn’t need to be—but I saw the process they were using and the fact that they were using new tools. Two of them were Starlight and Spires. They were software tools developed by one of our labs to do link analysis and data fusion of massive amounts of data.

And what they were doing down at Fort Belvoir was not just taking military data. They were using open source data. And I said, “Boy, this is really innovative.” I tested it a couple of times.

In 1999, November the 4th, Clinton’s Deputy Defense Secretary, John Hamre, said to me, “Congressman, you want to build a fusion center for intel?”

I said “Yes.”

He said, “I support you, but you’ve got to convince the FBI and the CIA, the two big behemoths, to allow us to use their data.”

There are thirty-three classified systems of the federal agencies, but the big ones are FBI and CIA. So, on November the 4th of 1999, in my office, I had Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, I had the Deputy Director of the FBI, and the Deputy Director of the CIA. And I handed them a proposal to create a fusion center. We called it NOAH—the National Operation Analysis Hub. A policymaker and warfighters told to deal with emerging transnational terrorist threats.

Hamre said, “We need it, I’ll manage it.”

I said, “I’ll get it funded.” I’m the vice chairman—the committee chairman of Oversight.

The FBI said, “We’ll support it.”

And the CIA said, “We don’t want it and we’re not supporting it.”

Now, why did the CIA say that? It’s still the unknown question. Did they not want other agencies to know what was at that time being planned so other agencies could have access to information that they were going to be bringing forth in a classified manner? That question is yet to be answered.

At the [upcoming Turning the Tide] conference you alluded to, I will have one of five intelligence officers who’ve now come public with me. It’s not just me saying this. The Able Danger team—the program at the Army was called Able Danger—was started by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton personally.

[Shelton] tasked the head of our Special Operations Forces, General [Peter] Schoomaker, to run the program. The program was housed at the Army’s LIWA [Land Information Warfare Activity] facility, which is what I visited, and it was called Able Danger. I have a book ready to be published on it.

The purpose of Able Danger, established by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with about twenty professionals pulled from various agencies—Army, Navy, Air Force, all intelligence leaders—was to create this program, this capability to deal with Al Qaeda.

On 9/11, I got five frantic phone calls on my cell phone. The Capitol’s under attack. The Trade Center had already been hit. I watched it on TV. The individuals making those five frantic phone calls were those five Army intel officers—not Army, they were from the Army Center.

They said, “We’ve got to see you right away, Mr. Chairman.”

I said, “We’re under attack. We’ve got to see you right away. It’s about this.”

I brought them to my office in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill, and they rolled out the charts. I have the charts. I can show you the charts. At some point in time, I’ll get you copies. They’re massive.

They had identified every cell of Al Qaeda worldwide by name and face. Every cell—hundreds and hundreds of them!—two years prior to 9/11. One year prior to 9/11, they identified five key cells of Al Qaeda in the hot spots where we had terrorist attacks occur. One was in Nairobi, Kenya. One was in New York City.

In the New York City cell, they identified names of Al Qaeda associated with that cell, including Mohammed Atta. Now, when I saw that on 9/11 and they came to me separately, not together, I said, “This is outrageous. Did you transfer this information to the Justice Department?”

They said, “We tried three times. We were blocked.” I have the name of the person in Justice who was contacted and who set up the briefings, which were canceled.

JC: Give that name right now. Who is that?

CW: I can’t give it to you right now, but I have it. It was Tony Shaffer’s high school friend. If you have Tony Shaffer on your show—Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, who will be at the program with me on September 11th—it was his high school friend, and she will verify that she was in the Department of Justice. Tony contacted her to brief them. Three times they canceled that briefing. The briefing never occurred.

The transmission of the information was never provided to the Justice Department. When 9/11 happened, I immediately got a call from the State Fire Marshal of New York saying, “Congressman, can you come to New York?”

I said, “There’s no way to get there now. The Amtrak has shut down.” I said, “I’ll be on the first train when they start running.” I was on the first Amtrak train in Grand Central Station in New York.

The Fire Department picked me up and took me down to Ground Zero. I was at Ground Zero—at the headquarters of the Fire Department of New York—while they were cleaning up the site. What really bothers me now is I never really in my mind even began to imagine that what I was looking at was nowhere near what would be the results of two towers collapsing. It just was not real. As I look back now, I can see that wasn’t the case.

I’m walking around the perimeter of the two towers because we’re looking for bodies. We’re looking for 3,000 people, and I’m helping Ray Downey’s kids look for a son. Two of Ray Downey’s sons are firefighters in New York. One today, Joe Downey, has his father’s job. That’s why I wear this jacket. Joe Downey is the Chief of All Rescue in New York City Fire Department. The other is also an officer—a Battalion Chief in the New York City Fire Department. I felt responsible that I allowed the CIA bureaucracy, for whatever reason, to back me down.

I’m a Republican. [Republican President] George Bush immediately publicly proclaims that he knows who did it within a day. He’s on national TV saying, “We’re going to get Osama bin Laden.” All the networks are saying this.

And I’m thinking to myself, “Well, how do they know this? I’m the Vice Chairman of the Defense Committee. This information wasn’t transferred. How do they know what I didn’t know?” And then they magically find a passport on the ground up in New York that magically fell out of an airplane when there’s nothing but rubble around. I said, “Wait a minute. This whole thing’s a scam.”

JC: Okay, you’ve already raised several points that I need to get clarification on. For example, you raised the point that the CIA blocking the creation of the NOAH fusion center pre-9/11. Sorry?

CW: 100%. I’ll take a polygraph.

JC: Yes, excellent. Well, you have said “Why was the CIA opposing that? That’s the mystery that needs to be solved.” But you have also said, “Two of the hijackers that were on one of the planes in New York, were working for the CIA. They were on the CIA payroll.” You are referring to Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi?

CW: I don’t remember the names. But I was told by one of the . . . I have a written letter in my files, in my archives—I have the largest archives in House history—from a senior FBI official who worked with one of my CIA friends who trusted me—who, by the way, died mysteriously of fast-moving stomach cancer four years ago after he was threatened by a guy who was one of three people in consideration to be the CIA director. This man in New York is a multimillionaire, he called my friend and said, “Why are you helping Curt Weldon?”

And John Quirk said, “Because Curt Weldon’s an American patriot.”

John Quirk died months later of fast-moving stomach cancer. That’s our country.

JC: Can you confirm that the technology exists to give someone fast-moving cancer? Is that something that the US government does to its enemies?

CW: Absolutely, and I have a second staffer. My staffer co-wrote the book with me called Countdown to Terror, which I talked to you about. Dr. Peter Pry worked for the CIA for ten years. He was their top analyst on [the] Soviet [Union] and Russia. I brought him on my committee because I was working all the Russian issues. I was the co-chairman of the Duma Congress with Steny Hoyer, and I was co-chairman of the Rata[?] Congress with [Ohio Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur. Peter worked for me. He was a brilliant analyst. He wrote ten books about EMP.

When I couldn’t get the response and when 9/11 happened, I said, “Peter, we’re getting information now that they’re about to use Iran for another terrorist event. I don’t think it’s the Iranian people, Peter. I think it’s being done by intel.” And Peter agreed with me. Because we knew then how bin Laden was placed in Iran. He was placed there by intel.

What people don’t realize is that when Iran was our ally and the Shah was in power, our intel people trained the Iranian intel. People like [John] Brennan and [James] Clapper trained Iranian intel. When the ayatollahs took over, they didn’t change their intel agency. They didn’t fire all the intel leaders. They stayed in place in the IRG [Iranian Revolutionary Guards]. We controlled the IRG. It didn’t matter who ran Iran.

And what I found out through ten silver bullets—and I’ll be happy to go through them—is that after 9/11, after George Bush stands up on a podium at 9/11 (and I’m a Republican) and puts his hand up in the air, and says, “We’re gonna come and get you,” bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan. He had been deliberately placed in Iran, in Baluchistan.

He was allowed to roam in Baluchistan while we sent tens of thousands of American kids to die in Afghanistan, allegedly looking for the guy who did 9/11. And I say “allegedly.” 2,500 of those soldiers came home in body bags.

JC: It’s important to clarify what you’re saying here, because there are two possible readings of that. One is that you’re upset that the young men and women were sent overseas to die in Afghanistan in the pursuit of this fictional terrorist bogeyman, when they should have been sent to Iran to die in pursuit of a fictional terrorist bogeyman.

Or are you saying that the fictional terrorist bogeyman /asset / whatever Osama bin Laden really was, was placed in Balochistan as a chess piece in a much larger geopolitical chess game that involves an incredibly sensitive region of the globe that just happens to be lusted after for its IP pipeline access as well as the Port of Gwadar connecting a logistical corridor there between China’s Xinjiang and its route out to Africa?

CW: I’ll let you pursue that, but what I’ll tell you, I can take a polygraph on that and we’ll do so publicly and we’ll state it here. After 9/11, after Bush made his famous speech, I, too, thought that’s where this group was, in Afghanistan. So what did I do? On my own, as the Vice Chairman of the Defense Committee, I didn’t go to the CIA. I didn’t trust them.

I went to friends that I knew who worked for intel, and there was a group in Washington called “the Cockroaches.” They’re all people who work for intel agencies. They’re all ex-military, but they wanted the truth to come out. And they would feed me raw data that wasn’t being given to me as the Vice Chairman of the Defense Committee.

And what bothered me was I would get reporters like Bill Gertz from The Washington Times, a great defense writer, come up to me and ask me a question about defense. And I would say, “Bill, that’s crazy. Where’d you get it from?” He said, “Well, it’s an anonymous source, Congressman, and I can’t tell you who gave me that.”

So I’d get back to the agency and say, “Wait a minute. You people gave him that information. I’m on the committee. I’m the Vice Chairman of the committee. You’re going to give it to a reporter who comes to me with an anonymous source? And I have to respond to that?”

So what I did, I formed my own intel team. I had twenty intel professionals. They didn’t get any pay. They met with me for breakfast once a week in the Capitol members’ dining room privately. And I said to them, “I want you to feed me raw data.”

Now, while this was going on, I took a delegation of three members of Congress to Europe, because the King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was living in exile with his family. If we’re sending troops into Afghanistan, I didn’t want the damage done to our troops that they did to the Russian troops, who had not been accepted in Afghanistan.

So, since the King was in exile, I went over and I met with the King. I have the photographs of me meeting in the home with two members of Congress, two or three, I forget which, meeting with King Zahir Shah to convince him to go back to Kabul and convene a Loya Jirga, which is basically a meeting of all the 1,000 tribal leaders.

The King agreed, went back to Afghanistan, and convened a Loya Jirga. I was doing what I thought was the right thing for our troops to protect them. While that’s happening, my intel team said to me, “Mr. Chairman, we’ve got some startling information here.” What is it?

Well, they have information that bin Laden has been sighted in a town called Ladiz. We don’t know where that is. We think it’s not in Afghanistan. I went up to the bookstore on Pennsylvania Avenue and bought a map. I still have the map. I looked all over Afghanistan. I could not find Ladiz. I looked in Pakistan. It wasn’t there. I found Ladiz. It’s ten kilometers inside the border of Pakistan in Iran. In Balochistan. In Iran.

So I go to a classified briefing for the full Armed Services Committee. Sixty members. I’m the chairman because the chairman wasn’t there that day. I’m the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee as vice chairman, and I ask the question of the CIA. I have information that Osama bin Laden has been sighted in a town called Ladeez, and this is their response. “Mr. Chairman, we’ve had similar reports. We can neither confirm or deny them.”

I went through the roof. Here we are sending American kids over to Afghanistan and my own CIA won’t tell me? That’s impossible. Three months later, my friends in intel come back to me and say we have information that bin Laden’s being treated at a medical hospital outside of Tehran. I go back to the classified briefing and I ask the same question, and I get the exact same answer from the CIA. “We’ve had similar reports. We can neither confirm or deny them.”

Then I get a question from the most prominent Democrat in the House, Jack Murtha—former Marine, Chairman of Defense Appropriations. He brings Ron Klink to me. Ron Klink’s still alive. Jack Murtha’s dead. Ron will verify what I’m going to tell you. Jack said, “You’ve got to go see Curt. Curt will investigate what you have, Ron.” It was something about Iran. So Ron Klink comes into my office with a tall gentleman who I still have all his contact information.

Ron said, “Curt, Jack sent me here. We’d like you to meet with this guy and see what he has about Iran.”

I said, “Okay.”

The guy comes into my office. He was a NOC for the CIA. You know what a NOC is?

JC: Non-official cover.

CW: That’s right. He worked for our CIA in the Middle East. And the guy went to Ron Klink, who went to Murtha, to say, “I want you to help me, Mr. Vice Chairman, to get into Iran.”

I said, “Why do you want to go to Iran?”

He said, “That’s where bin Laden is.”

I said, “How do you know that bin Laden’s in Iran?”

He said, “The people I worked with in that part of the world have told me they know he’s there. There’s a $25 million reward for his arrest and capture. If you help me get to Tehran, I’ll leave my ID at the hotel and I will be down, I’ll bring him back dead or alive.”

That’s the third source.

Then I get a request. It’s really amazing. I get a request from the Interior Department. The Interior Department’s top bird expert wants to come in and bring the nation’s number one falconer in. Now . . .

JC: They spotted bin Laden’s birds, didn’t they?

CW: That’s right. The number one falconer in the world is a Maine citizen. His name is Alan Parrot. Alan Parrot comes to my office with two falcons on his shoulders, beautiful birds. And I said, “Now I’m on the Migratory Bird Commission overseeing all the refugees.”

So I figured that’s why he wanted to see me. I had no idea what he was going to talk about. I thought it was about the birds.

And he says to me, “Congressman, I want you to help me go to Tehran because I can take America to where bin Laden is.”

I said, “How do you know that?”

“My falconers are seeing Bin Laden’s birds flying in Iran. I will tag his birds and I will take America to exactly where bin Laden is.”

Alan Parrot wanted me to be involved in a [documentary] movie called Feathered Cocaine, which was produced. But what they did to my family . . . they ruined my daughter’s life and my son died several years later. I said, “I’m not going to get involved in a movie.”

I kept out of it. I got a call [about the movie] from two people. Michael Scheuer. Michael Scheuer was career CIA.

JC: Alec station.

CW: Michael was the director of the bin Laden Task Force.

Michael called me at my home and said, “Congressman, will you remember me?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Congressman, what this man is telling me, I think is true, because, as the CIA’s [bin Laden] Task Force director, I was supposed to have been given every piece of information, and he’s given me stuff that I never saw.”

[Michael continued] “We want you involved as we do this movie.”

I said, “Michael, I’m not getting involved, but thank you.”

Three months later, General McInerney calls me. Tom McInerney. At my home. Same question. “Congress said we’re working with the falconer. We’d like you to be involved.”

I said, “General, I respect you. I’m not going to have my family destroyed by scumbags. Scumbags.”

Now look, I always respected the agency and I still do. I have friends that work in the agency. There are some good people there, but there are scumbags there that have made millions, millions off the backs and lives of American young people and people around the world. And those people, I . . .

JC: But this is the point, though. This is the fundamental institutional point. People talk about the CIA, for example, as if it is a monolithic institution rather than a series of firewalls around these various groups that are working sometimes right next to each other, but in complete secrecy in terms of what they’re doing. They don’t even know what their neighbor is doing. This is the point. It is these little firewall enclaves.

And if, for example, they want an excuse to go into Iran, they can create the terrorist bogeyman excuse to go into Iran. That is the point. And I think we run the risk of losing sight if we keep following this Osama bin Laden thread as if that was the important part of this. No, 9/11 was a much bigger operation than that.

CW: Let me . . . let me . . . let me finish. And I don’t disagree with you. But let me go back to why I feel the way I feel, because it doesn’t end there. . . . The 9/11 Commission was a total fraud and a total cover-up. [Philip] Zelikow was picked because he was [Condoleezza] Rice’s friend. So Rice put Zelikow in to run the Commission, and the Democrats put Jamie Gorelick on the Commission. They ran the Commission.

Jamie Gorelick was the lawyer in the Pentagon who, when she worked for Bill Clinton, wrote the firewall memo that said you can’t transfer military intelligence to civilian law enforcement. They [she and Zelikow] ran the Commission. Some of the Commissioners are friends of mine. And they told me. They knew they were being denied the facts and details about the 9/11 Commission.

What I did, because I did a lot of work in the Middle East. I did work for all the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries, and I traveled to Israel. There’s no country that can say they don’t know Curt Weldon. And they respected me, all of them.

Members of two royal families, one in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia, verified to me in person that they knew that bin Laden was in Iran. They knew that bin Laden and—all of it! I met with a guy who had been a NOC for our agency for fifty years. He’s not a US citizen. He lives abroad.

In fact, he lives in the Middle East. He’s close to eighty now, still very alert. I’ve been with him probably twenty-five times. When he first approached me through one of the people he handled, I said, “I don’t want to work for any agency, so don’t even ask me.”

He said, “No, you have a lot of contacts and people respect you around the world. You’ve been to 104 countries and they all respect you because you weren’t putting your hand out for money or trying to cause problems.”

I said, “If it helps the country, I’ll talk to you.”

So we’ve become friends. He said to me in a meeting in Bahrain on one of my trips six years ago . . . he calls me “my dear.” He said, “My dear, you were correct.” He said bin Laden was in Iran after 9/11.

I said, “Why would you say that?”

He said, “Because I was in the room acting on behalf of US interests to give the US plausible deniability when the deal was cut to place bin Laden in Baluchistan. I was in the room.”

Five years ago, we killed Soleimani. I texted my friend. “Was that the guy?” Within five seconds, he texts back: “Yes.” The deal was not cut with the Iranian government. It was not cut with Ahmadinejad. It was cut with the head of the IRG, Soleimani. And that’s why we killed Soleimani. Because Soleimani was the guy that brokered the deal to allow bin Laden to be placed in Iran without the knowledge of the Iranian government.

The Birdman went up to the UN many times, and he actually got George Stephanopoulos to ask the question of Ahmadinejad. George Stephanopoulos used to work on the House floor as a lackey for Dick Gephardt. I knew George Stephanopoulos when he was a lackey on the House floor. He got George Stephanopoulos, the TV guy, to ask the question of Ahmadinejad, jokingly.

“Mr. Leader, you know, there are people over here saying that you’re harboring bin Laden. And Ahmadinejad said, “No way would we ever harbor that man in our country.”

He went back to Tehran. He did his research and he found out [bin Laden] was in Iran and he was placed there by the IRG. That’s when they kicked him over to Pakistan.

Now, the full dimension of what you’re talking about, the bigger picture, I don’t know that.

I can tell you this. The book that I published about Iran in 2005 was because I feared our intelligence agency was going to use Iran for another attack. I wrote this book with Peter Pry. It says right on the front cover, Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America—and How the CIA Has Ignored It.

This book was endorsed by Jim Woolsey, former CIA Director, with a three-page letter. This book was endorsed by Jack Caravelli, Al Gore’s CIA advisor. They both endorsed the book in 2005.

One year later, the deep state took me out of office because I was going to become the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. They knew they couldn’t control me. They knew that all 60 members of the committee would do whatever I wanted.

In addition to my book being published, there’s a huge Iranian diaspora in the US—a million Iranians, primarily living in Southern California. When I wrote my book, they invited me out to speak. They gave me an award out there from the engineer society, and I spoke. I did live TV interviews with the TV networks broadcasting into Iran. I did five shows. I offered to debate the ayatollah personally in Tehran. I offered to go there on the show. Iranians took my book and on their own published my book in Farsi. There it is: Countdown to Terror in Farsi.

It became a very popular book in Iran because it says the Iranian people are not the enemy of America. The Iranian people are not our enemies.

JC: Well, this is the point. I mean, yeah, what you talk about in Countdown to Terror is of course going to appeal to the elements in Iranian society that are against the theocratic regime, of course. In the same way, Ahmed Chalabi appealed to a certain segment of Iraq, but it’s a neocon wet dream to get the US military into another part of the globe. That’s what that kind of intel is about. And in Countdown to Terror, there’s no differentiation between the Iranian government and the IRG. You weren’t making those kinds of distinctions.

CW: We didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t have, I didn’t have . . .

JC: Well, exactly. So in a sense, you were being played by information that was being precluded from you.

CW: Everybody in Congress is being played. I mean, that’s nothing new.

JC: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s the whole point of these intelligence operations.

JC: Duh. I mean, you know, give me a break. I was there twenty years. I know the game they played. I couldn’t trust the CIA. I told you that at beginning of the interview. I could not trust the CIA. I formed my own team. I had my own intel coming to me because I couldn’t trust the CIA. Because they lied all the time.

Did you see the WikiLeaks report [sic] with the former head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo? Did you see it?

JC: Yeah.

MIKE POMPEO: What’s the cadet motto at West Point? “I will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do?” I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.

 

SOURCE: Ex-CIA director Pompeo: ‘We lied, we cheated, we stole’

CW: That’s our director of the CIA. It’s gotta stop. And until that stops, it’s gonna continue.

Peter Pry died of fast-moving stomach cancer about nine months apart from John Quirk, who had been threatened by a former international CIA leader who’s a scumbag making a ton of money based in New York. I’m sick of them and I don’t care. All they can do now is kill me. And you know what I’ve said on ten podcasts? I’ll surround CIA headquarters with 600 fire trucks. Let those jackasses explain to the American people why 600 fire trucks are surrounding CIA headquarters, because it’s out of control.

I did that when I wanted to give interoperable communications for firefighters. I surrounded the Capitol building with 300 fire trucks and I put ladders up against the Capitol itself. The firefighters know they’re no longer stupid and they’re tired of being played.

JC: Excellent to hear, because we do need more people who know about what’s really going on here. But the question is: What do they know? Who killed those firefighters on 9/11?

CW: I don’t know that. I don’t know. In the end, I don’t know who actually—I have . . . I mean the dark secrets and where this will end up. I think it involved another country, obviously. And you have to think of who would have the ultimate incentive to want to create the most outrage in America to justify sending tens of hundreds of thousands of American kids to war primarily in the Middle East. Any rocket scientists who could figure that out? Maybe every ordinary person could figure that out.

I don’t want to go there until I have factual proof. I don’t have factual proof today. What I can talk about, I have factual proof of. And I will take a polygraph. Everything that I know about, and I have not just myself, the Able Danger team, five of them are now talking publicly. They’d have to kill five people.

One was Air Force intelligence. One was Naval intelligence—a Naval Academy grad. One was Lt. Col. Shaffer, Army intelligence. They’re all now willing to tell the truth because they care about this country.

JC: Congressman Weldon, did Building 7 kill itself?

CW: No, it was brought down through controlled demolition. I mean, anyone . . . first of all, Donald . . . there’s a tape of Donald Trump being interviewed on September the 11th by a New York station. You can see him standing there with the microphone in his face and the reporter says, “Mr. Trump, you’re one of our premier developers. Did you see Building 7?” “Building 7, that wasn’t hit by a plane,” Donald Trump says. “That was controlled demolition.”

On 9/11, Donald Trump said Building 7 was controlled demolition.

The key thing that people have to listen to . . . because I went back in January. I kept quiet for eighteen years, for obvious reasons. They took my family apart. What do you do? I couldn’t trust them. It was both parties.

I grew up next to Joe Biden. He grew up in Claymont, Delaware. I grew up in Marcus Hook. I’ve known Biden for forty years. When my son died, Joe Biden drove from Washington and spent three hours standing in line at the funeral because his daughter Ashley was my son’s classmate at Archmere Academy.

But Joe wasn’t in control. Obama wasn’t in control. Bush 43 was not in control. And the Clintons were scumbags. They started the whole thing.

JC: Is Donald Trump in control?

CW: At least he’s willing to stand up and take . . . when he took away the security clearances for the fifty-one that I know, that’s when I said, “I’ll talk.” No one else had that kind of guts. No one. No one had the guts to stand up and take away the clearances of John Brennan and [James] Clapper and [John] Bolton and all the rest of them.

I never met Trump. I don’t know the man. I never met him. All I know is, I don’t know who else is going to take on this system. I can complain all I want and go around screaming and yelling “Give me money, give me money.” That’s not going to solve the problem. You have to have a leader that has guts. I’ve never met Trump, but he had the guts to say, “I’m taking away the security clearance.” I said, “Well, then I’ll talk.”

And so in April, I did the first podcast with Tucker. I’ve done ten. We’ve got 20 million views. And I’m not going to stop. Now my goal is, I have an agenda for the firefighters. It’s not the 9/11 agenda.

The reason I went to 9/11 is I came out with a “Fire EMS 290” plan because they’re hurting right now. They’re my people. There are two million of them in 55,000 stations, 30,000 departments, paid and volunteer. They’re not being listened to. That’s my goal.

And what I said to the 9/11 groups that are out there, I said, “You know, you have a good message, but nobody’s paying attention to you. You’ve got to relate to the people, [to the firefighters], who everyone in every town respects in every poll in America.

I was the keynote speaker at the California Fire Chiefs Annual Conference a year ago. And I told the 700 fire chiefs from California this. I said, “Stop sucking up to the politicians.” I said, “The popularity of both political parties is no higher than 45%.” I said, “Police are around 50%, and I support the police. The military is around 50%, and I support the military.”

“In every poll, in every state, firefighters and EMS are 98% supported. Tell the story through the eyes of the firefighter.”

And I would say this is very important. If you really want your viewers to get the ultimate story, there’s a film that came out that I wasn’t aware of until last year that you need to get to do them for free.

It’s an hour and a half long, and it wasn’t done by Hollywood. You can’t trust Hollywood. They’re bunch of losers. This film was done by firefighters. It’s Calling Out Bravo 7: The 2020 Edition. I will provide it through you or directly if [Corbett listeners] contact me. I’ve sent out tens of thousands of Bravo 7 DVDs. Bravo 7 specifically goes through Building 7 and explains what happened.

Two things I want to Building 7. The NIST report. They’re the almighty agency.

Now look, I’m a big supporter of technology. I was a head of fire and EMS at my insurance company. My first term in Congress, I go to Washington, I’m assigned to the Longworth building, two doors from Speaker Wright’s office suite. Seven o’clock at night, his office catches on fire.

I would do what any firefighter would do. I would have my staff call the alarm in. I’d go up, kick the door open, get down on my hands and knees, crawl in to make sure the staff was out. The building, to make a long story short, the extinguishers weren’t charged. There was no hose in the hose station. There was no sprinklers, no alarm system, no automatic recall of elevators. No alarm system!

JC: Let me guess, the building completely collapsed in on its own footprint, right?

CW: Yeah, well that could be, but NIST, this agency that claims they’re the ultimate, allowed 535 members of Congress to work in six buildings that would be in violation of every building and fire code in the world.

The life safety code is the NFP standard for buildings like that, seven stories high. This building was in total violation where every member of Congress worked, where blind people went, where handicapped people went. So NIST is a bunch of garbage. They have no credibility.

I wrote the next day, the Speaker’s Chief of Staff called me.

I was a freshman Republican. And he said, “The Speaker will do whatever you want, Congressman.”

I said, “I want a special commission to retrofit these buildings.”

Go back and check the records of the Congress. The next day, offered the privilege resolution. It passed the House with the Speaker’s support. A four-member commission was named. I was on it. We retrofitted every building on Capitol Hill with sprinklers, detectors, alarms.

That wasn’t done because of NIST. It was done in spite of NIST. NIST has no credibility. And for anyone to say NIST is the answer for Building 7 is garbage.

The second point I want to make about this whole issue is the film I talked to you about, Bravo 7. In there, you’ll hear one audio segment that they tried to hide from the people. The New York Times went to court and were able to get it released under a FOIA. It’s the audio communication of Battalion Chief Orio Palmer. As he takes his group of firefighters, fully equipped with 40 pounds of gear each, they go into one of the elevators in the building, the tower. They go up to the 40th floor. He gets the elevator working. Right after the plane hits, they get off the elevator at the 40th floor and then you hear him talk in the film.

And you hear Battalion Chief Palmer say, “We’re on the 40th floor, and we’re going up. Everything’s okay. We’re on the 50th floor. It’s okay. We’re going up.”

BATTALION CHIEF ORIO PALMER: We got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines . . . Radio that. 78th floor, numerous ten forty-five code ones [civilians dead].

 

SOURCE: 9/11: FDNY Radio, WTC 2 Collapse

CW: They get up, they climb up to the 78th floor. They come out of the stair tower and you hear him as plain as day say, “We’re on the 78th floor, the floor of impact. We’ve got two fires and we can handle them.” And the building collapses one minute later. Anyone who believes the story of our government has accepted the biggest conspiracy theory in the history of mankind.

JC: Well, Congressman Weldon, the most infuriating part of all of that is that I heard those clips when they were first released nearly two decades ago, and it is gobstopping to me that there are Americans out there who haven’t heard that yet. That is insane.

CW: And that’s why my message when I met with the 9/11 groups was, I said, “Look, my goal is the firefighters. That’s my life.” . . . If you listen to the tape by the former CIA director, they have whole courses on how to lie, on how to manipulate. They train their agency people.

And the media won’t let me come on. I used to be on the media all the time. I was on CNN, I was on . . . I mean, that’s why Tucker Carlson took me, because he knew me. And Tucker was appalled when I finally got to interact.

I’ll tell you who interviewed me. Dennis Kucinich, a big supporter of mine, a Democrat, asked me to meet with Seymour Hersh six years ago, five years ago.

So I said, “I don’t want any more stories, Dennis.”

He said, “Well, you meet with him.”

I met with Seymour Hersh in a hotel in Washington, just him and me. And I showed him what I have and talked with him about everything.

And he said to me, “You have one hell of a story, Congressman. But, you know, I can’t take what you’re saying.”

I said, “I’m not asking. You have no permission to publish anything.”

We met four months later. And he said to me, “Congressman, I verified every fact and detail you gave me. Everything you said is true. Brennan and Clapper wanted you out. They went to Mueller, asked Mueller to do a favor, disrupt your election. Three weeks before the election, Mueller sent Slamberg raid your daughter’s house. He was the same lawyer that cut the plea bargain for Sandy Berger when he stole the documents out of the National Archives, remember? When he stole the five documents and destroyed them, committing eleven felonies. Slamberg cut it down to one misdemeanor. That’s the guy that sent agents to my daughter’s house. They never talked to my daughter, ever. Never talked to her. It was all about an image.

JC: No charges, right? Ultimately no charges.

CW: Charges?! They never talked to her! They never questioned her! Nothing.

But it’s worse! Let me tell you a story that you’re really going to love. You’re going to love this story. The same day they raided my daughter’s house, they raided a lawyer in my county, a Democrat named John Gallagher. So agents went to his office in Philadelphia. They shut down Market Street. They had helicopters overhead. They had dogs. You know, was a typical raid from Washington.

The idiots never bothered to check. John Gallagher’s law office was raided because he was a friend of mine. He had been working for FBI counterintelligence against Russia for two years. So the counterintelligence agents handling John went to his office on that morning and said, “Mr. Gallagher, we don’t know what’s going on, but there’s people coming up from Washington. Don’t say anything [to them], because you’re working for us on sensitive matters.”

So, you had two sets of agents in the same office at the same time. I have all this on tape. The counterintel people are saying, “John, don’t answer anything. The FBI from Washington sent by the scumbags don’t know why they’re being sent.”

The first question they ask is, “Well, Mr. Gallagher, isn’t it true that you’re related to Congress and Curt Weldon?” John starts laughing at them. He said, “You’re from the FBI. You come all the way from DC and the first question you ask me is, am I related to Curt Weldon because his wife’s maiden name is Gallagher? And you have bothered to check that?”

I know who told them that information. I know the person. And I know the person who told the FBI that lied.

It gets better. John said, “What do you hear?” They apologized to John. And by the way, the agency gave John contracts after that to keep him quiet. But John said, “What do you really want?” They wanted two files. One file was about some Moldovan company that John’s clients had—because John represented a lot of Russians in Philadelphia and Ukrainians.

Here’s what they really wanted. The Philadelphia population northeast is heavily made up of Ukrainians and Russians, just the way it is. Like Chicago is all Ukrainians. So a lot of them drive taxi cabs in Philly. They use John for their legal practice. So John had lawyers that spoke Russian and Ukrainian that he represented.

We had a twenty-year-old boy in the Russian Far East named Alexander Koshin. He was in a car that was hit broadside by a drunken State Department employee named Douglas Kent. Drunk, in a personal car, which is against protocol, he caused the twenty-year-old boy to be quadriplegic. The family of the twenty-year-old boy lived in Philly. They called Mr. Gallagher and said, “Will you help us? We don’t want any money. We just want to get our son rehabbed.”

John took the case pro bono. He got the Bar Association involved. John did all the research. I have the file in my archives. John has the original file. Douglas Kent, when he hit that kid, wasn’t just a senior State Department employee in Vladivostok. He was our top CIA operative in the Russian Far East. And when Douglas Kent was hired by the CIA, Douglas Kent was the Vice Chairman of the American Nazi Party. And in the file John has a photograph of Douglas Kent in a Nazi uniform. And I have that photo in my file also. That’s what the CIA wanted. The fact that they hired the former chairman of the American Nazi Party to work as an operative for them overseas. It’s all there. It’s all on record.

JC: Congressman Weldon, this conversation has taken a lot of turns, and I would still like to talk to you about the Cox Committee. I’d like to talk to you about North Korea and nuclear proliferation, etc. But I think we’ll leave those topics for another time.

Let’s turn our attention back to the Turning the Tide conference. When is it taking place? Where? What are you going to be speaking about? What do you hope to accomplish with this?

CW: Okay. Again, my involvement with the 9/11 folks came about because I kept quiet since 2006, when they ended my career. I didn’t speak out. I decided to speak out actually last fall when Trump won and he took away the clearances.

I called all the 9/11 groups together on a phone conversation and I said, “Look, I want to help you. My goal was to help the firefighters. I have an agenda called “Fire EMS 290,” which has eight task forces to help them. And I have the funding for that lined up. I said, “I understand your concern and I want to help you with this, but you can’t allow the media and the agency to portray you as being, you know, conspiracy theorists or wackos or . . .”

That’s what they’ve done. You’ve got to get a base of people that are the bedrock of the communities in America. That’s the firefighters. Remember I said 343 firefighters were slaughtered on 9/11. I’m a firefighter. I’m wearing the shirt of the firefighter. I was there at both times. They’re not going to bullshit me. If you let the firefighters know that they have been used and abused by bureaucracy, they will rise up.

It’s just like what happened out in California with the wildland fires. You know, it was a total nightmare. They cut the budget of the fire department by 20%. What did the Mayor of LA do? She fired the fire chief. It was a female. Firefighters now understand. And so my goal has been to rally the firefighters. I have said to them, “We have to get Trump to support this agenda.”

One of the task forces separate from this is the 9/11 Commission, which I proposed. They produced this document, at my suggestion, and I’ve given out hundreds of these in Washington. This document calls for President Trump to name a new—not a new, there’s never been a 9/11 Commission. That was a 9/11 piece of crap—a Presidential 9/11 Commission made up of people with integrity. I don’t want some has-beens who work for the agencies. I want people, I want firefighters, I want engineers.

I want people like you who ask tough questions. I want people who know about the systems that control airplanes remotely that I know we have. I want people who know about thermite and know about explosives. I want those people involved in doing the investigation. The facts are all there. But until we get a Presidential Commission, we’re not going to get the answers. For this conference, I did my best to get bipartisan support.

I’ve met with Ron Johnson now five times. Ron’s going to show up and speak. He’s a Senate Oversight Chairman, a very strong man of integrity. He supports the firefighters nationwide. Dennis Kucinich is going to come. I met with Dennis just recently. He will be speaking. I’ll be introducing him on the 11th. Tony Shaffer, Lt. Col. Shaffer, is coming. We’ve got people from intelligence, from the agency. I understand that one of the former CIA operatives is coming. We’ve got family members. So we’re broadening the base of the message that you’ve been talking about for how many years . . . twenty years? How many years you’ve been doing this?

JC: Almost twenty. Sorry, it’s almost twenty.

CW: I’ve lost your . . . almost twenty. Well, we need you to keep that up, but we need to give you the base, and I can tell you it’s resonating. After I did Tucker’s show, I mean, I got overwhelmed. I couldn’t even respond to people. I feel bad.

Ask people to get a copy of the film for free, either through you or through me. Calling Out Bravo 7, produced by firefighters. That will open everyone’s eyes, and they will see the lies.

They will see this country right now is not being run by elected officials. It’s being run by anonymous people who think like Pompeo said: “We lied, we cheated, and we stole.” That’s not what we voted for. If I said that when running for office, I wouldn’t get elected. Here’s the CIA director laughing about it: “Yeah, that’s what we did when I was CIA Director.” That’s not America.

JC: And he was CIA Director under which president again? Right, President Trump.

CW: Well, he was [Secretary of State and CIA Director] under Trump. But look, I say this to you: It’s the people around Trump. He doesn’t know. And this is the promise I told Trump’s people in 2016. He doesn’t know the deep state. If he wins—which I thought he would back then because Hillary’s a scumbag—if he wins, they will dismantle his ability to understand the deep state.

What did they do? They took out Mike Flynn. I know Mike Flynn. By taking out Mike Flynn, Trump had no one that could give him any idea of how the deep state operates. So he was like a baby in the woods for four years. A baby in the woods being manipulated by a bunch of people who think they’re in control, laughing at him, working with people like [Chuck] Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who are both scumbags. I worked with them. Nancy Pelosi made tons of hundreds of millions of dollars off her job.

And Trump, for the first four years, didn’t know what he didn’t know, and he got taken. Now he at least understood, but there are still people around Trump who he doesn’t really fully know and doesn’t fully vet. And I’ve tried to help him with that as well. I had a meeting with the Department of Justice recently.

JC: Yeah, well, it gives Trump an easy out for anything that goes wrong and any other shenanigans that go on under him. I have zero trust or faith in the presidency at all, period.

But I do hope that at the very least we can raise awareness amongst the public who can bring the real pressure that can actually make a difference here. We are trying to rewrite the history books, and that is not going to be done by a President. That is going to be done by people getting to the heart of the matter.

CW: You’re absolutely right. And here’s what Sy Hersh said to me when I met four months after we met the first time. (Sy Hersh wrote the Pentagon Papers. He’s a very respected investigative reporter by everybody.) He said to me, “No producer, no publisher will tell your story.”

Listen to me again. Sy Hersh, the most respected investigative reporter in the country, says to me, “No reporter, no publisher will tell your story. Even though I verified everything, they will not tell your story.”

That’s the problem. I can’t manipulate the media to tell the story. All I can do is my part, as you’re doing.

And that’s why I’ve now done podcasts and will continue until they try to end it. And even members of Congress are afraid. I can tell you members are afraid. I talk to them. They know what’s going on, but they’re afraid. When you’re afraid . . .

JC: Well, Congressman Weldon, you know and I know that people have been assassinated for less than this. So I know that it is not nothing that you are out there saying this sort of stuff and bringing attention to it and talking at something like this Turning the Tide conference. I am cautiously excited to see what comes of this because, as you say, once we start connecting with the people, the people who do not know this basic information . . .

CW: . . . yeah.

JC: . . . have not heard the recordings, for example, of the firefighters in the building, et cetera. Once this information is more widely spread, I think we both know it will have an effect. So, let’s continue working towards that. And I hope that we get the chance to talk in more detail about this at another time, too.

CW: It will happen. And let me say this to you. I hope so too. And I have set aside . . . I have the largest oral history in the history of the House. It was done by the past president of the National Association of Oral Historians. So, we have a hundred hours of digitized interviews. All digitized, annotated, indexed, never been released. I have multiple copies of the hard drive. Each of my kids have one. Others have them. So they can’t destroy it. It’s recorded. These are with agents. They were the operatives. They were Democrat and Republican members. And I would say to my friends listening who are the scumbags, “I’ve documented everything about you on interviews. Your names, what role you played, what ties you had, and what lies you told to this country and to the people.”

So, they can take me out. They can’t destroy all of that documentation. And my best friends today are people in . . . I’m with three federal judges in Washington.

Judge Sullivan was the chief counsel for the Pentagon. I’m in his office. I don’t pay any rent. They invited me to come there ten years ago. That’s why I have all my meetings. They know, they know in the deep state that I’m just not some guy out there on my own. They know I’m telling the truth. I don’t have any money coming in. These scumbags who leave the agency and make all this money make me sick to my stomach. They don’t care about the country.

They don’t care about, they’re not doing what they’re doing for the good of mankind. They’re not doing what they’re doing to help people. They’re doing it because they want to get more money for themselves. They’re scumbags. We’ve got to expose the scumbags.

JC: Exactly right. Well, let’s continue operating in that spirit and going forward in that direction. But I think we’ll leave this conversation here for today. I hope we get the chance to talk again in the future. Congressman Curt Weldon, thank you for your time today.

CW: Thank you. Thank you.