Yesterday Atrios linked to a “tinfoil hat” story about a dentist who claims he met three 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and suspected they were plotting some sort of attack.
Now, NBC News is running this story:
More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden’s followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack. The FBI questioned him for weeks, but then let him go home, and never followed up.
. . .
Khan told NBC News that for the next few weeks he was trained by al-Qaida to hijack passenger planes, and then sent to the United States. But when he told the FBI, headquarters was skeptical and, after several weeks, senior FBI officials ordered him released to the custody of British intelligence. Khan said, “I told them before the 9/11, about more than year, be� hijacking in America or on America airline.”
. . .
NBC News has learned that Khan passed not one but two FBI polygraphs. A former FBI official says Newark agents believed Khan and tried to aggressively follow every lead in the case, but word came from headquarters saying, “return him to London and forget about it” — which, critics say, is exactly what the FBI did.
I’m in no better position than anyone else in assessing the credibility of either of these claims. They might be true; they might be made up. But I suspect that there’s still many details concerning the plotting and execution of the 9/11 attacks that the public still doesn’t know about. And which some in the government hope to keep that way.