After September 11, 2001: High-Ranking State Department Official Allegedly Arranges Release of Four 9/11 Suspects

An unnamed high-ranking official at the State Department arranges the release of four foreign operatives that have been taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the 9/11 attacks, according to FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. Edmonds will later leave the FBI, becoming a whistleblower, and say she knows this based on telephone conversations she translated. Edmonds will say that the target of an FBI investigation into a nuclear smuggling ring calls the official, indicates names of people who have been taken into custody since 9/11, and says, “We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.” The official says he will “take care of it,” and the four suspects on the list are released from interrogation and extradited. [Sunday Times (London), 1/6/2008] The names of the four suspects are not known, but one of the lead 9/11 hijackers, Marwan Alshehhi, and the sister of another, Mohamed Atta, will later be associated with the target of an FBI investigation connected to nuclear sciences, so this could possibly be a reference to this person (see July 1999). The high-ranking State Department official who is not named in the Sunday Times article is said to be Marc Grossman by both Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, writing in the American Conservative. [Raw Story, 1/20/2008; American Conservative, 1/28/2008]