Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country?

A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it.

The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’

At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia. Carlson argues that Saudi agents were working undercover to get inside al-Qaeda and, in the process, gave the hijackers crucial support. Carlson says the CIA knew about, or even directed, the effort – then covered it up after the September 11 attacks.

The most important revelations are being made in a courtroom in the Southern District of New York, where the Saudi government is being sued by victims’ families. Among the plaintiffs is Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the North Tower. She was left to bring up three children on her own and now leads 9/11 Families United, a coalition of victims’ relatives and survivors. She tells me: “We know that the government failed us, but we also know that the kingdom, Saudi Arabia, sponsored the attacks.”

A federal judge has recently denied a Saudi motion to dismiss the case, finding enough evidence of the country’s involvement to move forward to trial. In court, the families’ lawyers described how Saudi Arabia built up a network of extremists around the world throughout the 1990s. Combing through thousands of documents from the Saudi government, the lawyers say they have identified more than 50 Saudi agents placed in the US to support and direct Sunni jihadists. Strada lists the places: Falls Church, -Virginia; Paterson, New Jersey; Scottsdale, Arizona; Twin Cities, Minnesota; Vero Beach, Florida. Saudi Arabia “had people in every single city. It’s horrifying.” One Saudi family in Sarasota, Florida – who were “obviously supporting the hijackers” – disappeared two weeks before 9/11. They left their house with food in the refrigerator and cars in the driveway. Strada says the Saudis knew what was going to happen on 9/11 because “the Saudis orchestrated it.” 

Central to the story is a Saudi civil servant named Omar al-Bayoumi. Bayoumi moved to California in 1994 to become a “student,” though he rarely attended class. He befriended two of the al-Qaeda operatives who eventually carried out the 9/11 attacks, offering them extraordinary support. Much of this has been known since 2002: Bayoumi invited the two men to stay with him in his apartment in San Diego in 2000, then found them their own place across the street; he co-signed their lease and loaned them money for the deposit and first month’s rent; he got them bank accounts and driver’s licenses. The official report from the 9/11 Commission accepted that Bayoumi did all this unwittingly.

But the lawsuit has turned up new and damning information. The most consequential material comes from the Metropolitan Police in London – the file had been hidden from public view until now. The Met had this evidence because Bayoumi moved to the English city of Birmingham a year before 9/11, signing up to study at a university there (where he once again failed to attend class). Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, British counterterrorism officers arrested Bayoumi and searched the garage at his home. They found his address book, some videos and numerous documents and notes. This was Bayoumi’s personal archive and, the families’ lawyers say, the key to what happened on 9/11.

One video shows Bayoumi on a visit to the US Capitol in 1999. It’s not your typical tourist film. He concentrates on entrances, exits and structural features such as interior columns. He points out security personnel and patrols by the Capitol police. He speaks of a “plan.” An expert witness for the families said the video had all the “hallmarks” of reconnaissance for a terror-ist attack. Bayoumi refers to “demons” in the White House. One of the families’ lawyers described the video to me as a show of “seething contempt” for the symbols of US power.

Most revealing was a small yellow notepad found in Bayoumi’s garage. One page had a sketch of a passenger plane; another had an equation and calculations. Ten years passed before an FBI expert examined the calculations, and another ten before the notebook was given to the court in Manhattan. A pilot testifying for the families said the formula would have been used to work out the minimum altitude an aircraft would have to be flown at to see a target on the horizon. Lawyers for the Saudi government said this was a homework project by Bayoumi’s son. But Bayoumi had admitted in a deposition that the handwriting was his, explaining: “Perhaps this was an equation that we studied before in high school.” Asked why he would want to calculate the height of a plane from Earth, all he could say was: “It’s an equation like any other equation.”

Bayoumi told the British police officers interrogating him it was “pure coincidence” that he repeatedly “just happened to meet” the al-Qaeda men – as he did in Los Angeles, in San Diego and in Saudi Arabia. One of the cops told him: “You are a very unlucky person, or you are involved.” The British police expected the US authorities to ask for extradition and bring Bayoumi back to the US for questioning. They were incredulous when the US told them to let Bayoumi go. One of the officers told London’s Sunday Times: “I am still shocked to this day… I would have taken Bayoumi to the cleaners on those pieces of evidence.”

The 9/11 families’ lawyers believe the Saudis successfully lobbied the US government to get Bayoumi released. With 15 of the 19 hijackers identified as Saudis, the royal family was panicking and – as one of the lawyers told me – began “an audacious manipulation” of its relationship with the US. The lawyers are still trying to obtain the cable traffic they think would prove this. But they claim that the kingdom was telling the US its help would be needed for the new War on Terror – to prevent a future 9/11 – and for the invasion of Iraq. The result was a joint effort to conceal the “direct line of culpability leading back to Riyadh.”

In The 9/11 Files, Carlson says the Bush White House was all too happy to let the Saudis off the hook. Bush himself had ignored intelligence briefings warning that al-Qaeda planned to attack the US. 

Carlson, you may think, has gone down a few rabbit holes since he left Fox News, moving his studio to what looks like a log cabin on the American frontier (it’s actually a garage in Maine). But Carlson does not claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” an attack orchestrated by the US government, nor does he argue that the Saudis directly planned the attack. Instead, we get a story of failure and cover-up by the CIA. 

Carlson says the official account of 9/11 is a “lie.” According to that version of events, the US government “just didn’t have the intelligence it needed” to prevent the attack. In fact, the CIA was closely tracking two of the al-Qaeda men as they arrived in the US – the same two housed by Bayoumi in San Diego. The CIA kept this information from the FBI, Carlson says, because the agency was using the Saudis for a surveillance operation targeting al-Qaeda. “The CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources.” 

In the documentary, a former FBI agent, Mark Rossini, tells us this was the CIA’s “delusional” grand plan. Rossini was one of the FBI’s representatives in the CIA’s bin Laden unit. In effect, he says, the CIA protected these terrorists from the rest of law enforcement, especially the FBI. “You have the CIA following two men all over the planet, then landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI… You had a duty to protect Americans, and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion.” 

The CIA is not allowed to spy within the United States. But, Carlson tells us, the agency used Bayoumi as a “workaround” – he was on the payroll of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Carlson says. He quotes declassified government documents showing that Bayoumi got large sums of money from the Saudi embassy. The money was apparently funneled from accounts belonging to the wife of the ambassador. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9/11 hijackers, Carlson says, the CIA gave itself cover if things went wrong – which of course they did, -spectacularly. The 9/11 Commission’s report doesn’t even mention this alleged recruitment scheme. Carlson says the CIA stopped the -officer supposedly running the operation from speaking to investigators. As he puts it, the Commission allowed the CIA to get away with saying it made an “honest mistake” in failing to tell anyone that two al-Qaeda terrorists had arrived on American soil. 

Terry Strada isn’t buying it. If this was a CIA operation that spun out of control, why didn’t the agency loudly blame the Saudis after 9/11? “They did the opposite. They bent over backwards to protect the Saudis,” she says. The cover-up was not about a spying operation gone sideways, she says, but about the much bigger story that 9/11 was a plot hatched by one of America’s closest allies. The Saudi royal family have always denied that their government had anything to do with 9/11; there may now be new inquiries in the US Congress and elsewhere. The new evidence prompts many questions; the Saudi government should be afraid of the answers.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.