Is Joe Trento considered credible?

[noise]

He is the author of Unsafe at any Altitude. I went back to check on some of his claims and they are hard to believe.

1) Eric Gill (Dulles security worker) claims he saw Nawaf al-Hazmi and Marwan al-Shehhi on 9/10. They were wearing dirty United Airline ramp uniforms and evidently had employee ID's. Gill claims he got into an argument with al-Hazmi.

2) An unnamed CIA source told Trento that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were GID agents.

3) Trento mentions Seymour Hersh's claim that handguns were put on the planes by ramp workers. Hersh says his source was the INS.

If true, just these three points suggest the 9/11 Commission report is bullshit.

[wildbilln864]

1. Don't know, noise. nt

:hi:

[mojowork_n]

2. I did a quick check of Sourcewatch,

but it's pretty sketchy. More like a bibliography, or links page:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Operation_Mockingbird

He's the author of "The Secret History of the CIA" (2001). Operation Mockingbird was a documented nightmare.

...You might want to post this somewhere like www.911blogger.com, and see what you get.

[paulthompson]

3. Yes

I think Trento is one of the best journalists out there. He's been on top of important things most other journalists have completely ingored, such as BCCI, the Safari Club, the A. Q. Khan network, and so on.

As far as the Eric Gill thing goes, that was strongly corroborated recently in the newly declassified FBI timeline that both Gill and Trento knew nothing about. That says the FBI has surveillance video footage from the night before 9/11 of two hijackers casing Dulles Airport. That fits what Gill has to say.

Were Alhazmi and Almihdhar Saudi spies, or did they at least have some kind of Saudi protection? Perhaps. But if true, I don't think that's the whole story with them by a long shot. For one thing, if the CIA thought they were Saudi spies infiltrating al-Qaeda and living in the US, they would not have simply let them be. The CIA had officially decreed several years earlier than the GID was not to be trusted on matters relating to al-Qaeda because the GID had pro-al-Qaeda sympathies. The Saudi and US intelligence agencies are well known for not telling each other things. Recall for instance the Khobar Tower bombings a few years before where the Saudis beheaded the suspects before US intelligence could get a chance to interrogate them. So the CIA would have been intensely interested in these guys and closely watching them, even if they thought they were GID.

So I'm not fully with Trento on that. But as far as a track record goes, I think his is much better than most.

[catnhatnh]

4. Paul

Thank you for your comprehensive timeline work.Have you ever fleshed out a full theory of what you think happened??

[noise]

5. It is baffling that the Gill story is not more widely known and discussed

I agree that Trento's conclusion isn't convincing. Another reason the notion of trust makes no sense is because of the Cole attack. No way in the world CIA would trust the GID after that.

Like Peter Lance in relation to Ali Mohamed it seems Trento discovered remarkable information but decided to soft-pedal the significance of those findings for whatever reason.

[Diane_nyc]

6. Thanks for posting this. nt