FBI scrubs contracts to hide how much it paid 9/11 Review Commission members

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org 

The award notice and signature page of the FBI’s personal services contract with 9/11 Review Commission member Ed Meese.

The three men who served as members of the 9/11 Review Commission were on the FBI’s payroll, but the bureau is refusing to say how much they were paid.

Florida Bulldog obtained copies from the FBI of its personal services contracts with the commissioners and staff during ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

Scrubbed from the contracts, however, are all details about financial compensation terms – hourly rates of pay, contract maximums – for both the commissioners’ services and travel for as long as two years. The FBI did not make public invoices submitted by the commissioners or its own paymaster records.

Congress authorized the 9/11 Review Commission to conduct an “external review” of the FBI’s post-9/11 performance and to assess new evidence. The contracts, however, make clear that the Review Commission was instead under the FBI’s direction and control.

“The contractor [each commissioner and staffer signee] agrees that the performance of services … shall be subject to the supervision, inspection and acceptance of the FBI,” the contracts say.

The 9/11 Review Commission members were Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese, former ambassador and congressman Timothy Roemer and Georgetown professor Bruce Hoffman. In an apparent oversight, the FBI released only two pages of Meese’s contract, and in place of the rest of Meese’s contract enclosed a second copy of Hoffman’s contract.

Meese, Roemer and Hoffman signed their contracts with the FBI on Jan. 22, 2014. The contracts required them to submit their report to the FBI by Dec. 15, 2014 for “appropriate classification and legal review.”

Top Secret clearance

The three commissioners and staff were required to have Top Secret security clearance and what the FBI calls “Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)’’ access. SCI clearance has been called “above Top Secret,” according to Wikipedia.

The 9/11 Review Commission staffers whose contracts were released are: Executive director John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA; L. Christine Healey, a senior counsel and team leader for the 9/11 Commission; Caryn A. Wagner, a former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security; Jamison Pirko, an ex-staff assistant at the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism; and William E. Richardson.

According to the Review Commission’s final report, the commissioners traveled to eight FBI field offices and six FBI legal attaché posts in Ottawa, Beijing, Manila, Singapore, London and Madrid. Travel invoices submitted by commissioners and staff have not been made public.

9/11 suicide hijack pilots Mohamed Atta, right, and Ziad Jarrah. The two men apparently visited the home of Saudis living in the Sarasota area.

As described in the contract, the Review Commission’s duties included assessing “any evidence now known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission related to any factors that contributed in any manner to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

One matter the Review Commission took a limited look at was the FBI’s investigation more than a decade earlier of Saudis living in Sarasota with apparent ties to the 9/11 hijackers.

Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, lived in the gated community of Prestancia 13 miles north of Venice Municipal Airport, where Mohamed Atta and two other 9/11 hijack pilots trained. The al-Hijjis came under FBI scrutiny after neighbors alerted authorities that they’d suddenly moved out of their upscale home about two weeks before 9/11 – leaving behind their cars, clothes, furniture, food in the refrigerator and other personal belongings.

The home at 4224 Escondito Circle was owned by Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to the late Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a nephew of former King Fahd and eldest son of Saudi Arabia’s current monarch, King Salman. The prince died in July 2001 at age 46.

According to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and others, the FBI did not disclose its Sarasota investigation to either Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington or to the subsequent 9/11 Commission. Graham co-chaired the Joint Inquiry. In its public statements, the FBI has disputed that – saying both 9/11 panels were informed of its Sarasota investigation.

Florida Bulldog, working with Irish author Anthony Summers, first reported the existence of the FBI’s Sarasota investigation in September 2011. Among other things, the story reported that investigators had found evidence in Prestancia’s gatehouse security records that showed Atta and other terrorist figures had visited the al-Hijjis’ home.

What 9/11 Review Commission didn’t do

The 9/11 Review Commission’s final report, made public in March 2015, did not seek to determine whether the FBI did or did not notify Congress and the 9/11 Commission about Sarasota. Likewise, it did not speak with witnesses in the case or examine evidence other than an April 2002 FBI report.

The report, released to Florida Bulldog in 2013 amid other FOIA litigation, said that agents found “many connections” between the Sarasota hijackers and “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001” – flatly contradicting FBI public statements that its once-secret Sarasota inquiry had found no connection to the 9/11 plot.

The Review Commission’s inquiry was confined to recounting the efforts of unidentified FBI officials to discredit the April 2002 report. They called it “poorly written and wholly unsubstantiated” and said the unnamed agent who wrote it could not justify doing so.

The FBI has declined to explain its findings or make available the agent who wrote the report to request, unsuccessfully, that a more urgent investigation of the Sarasota Saudis be opened.

Florida Bulldog sued the FBI and the Justice Department in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) seeking records generated by the 9/11 Review Commission. Last month, the FBI released about 200 pages of material – including the personal services contracts and several highly redacted reports.

Meanwhile, the Bulldog’s 2012 FOIA lawsuit seeking the FBI’s files on its Sarasota investigation remains pending before Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Court Judge William J. Zloch.

In 2014, Zloch decided that the FBI had done an inadequate search of its records before declaring that it could find no records responsive to the Bulldog’s request. In response to Zloch’s order, the FBI produced 80,000 pages of records from its Tampa field office for his inspection and possible public release. The judge’s inspection is ongoing.