25 Years After 9/11 (09/11)

0:00This is an I Heart podcast guaranteed human. Can't find am 640 you're listening to the John Cobalt podcast on the I Heart radio Can't find am 640 more stimulating talk radio. It's the John Cobalt show. Welcome. How are you? We are on from three to six every day. So it's time. Get with it. We're also on a podcast. John Cobalt show undemand and that's released after six o'clock and that's for all the material you missed during the program. You can listen to it later tomorrow all weekend long. We're live streaming right now on YouTube and X so you can watch us on video and you go to youtube.com slash at John Cobalt show and subscribe and become a member got two runs of the moist line in the five o'clock hour. And we're going to spend much of the show today on the 25th commemoration of the 9-11 attacks.

1:00We were live on the air KFI that day obviously I know Bill handle played a montage because he was on sure when the planes hit the buildings in New York and then the Pentagon and then the plane crash in Pennsylvania. We came on Ken and I about noon. Because back then between nine and three we had two syndicated programs, Rush Lomba, from nine to noon many will remember that and then from noon to three was Dr. Lourd. Rush was on a plane that day so Bill stayed on and filled in nationally on Russia show. So he was on for six hours and then we showed up at noon and took it till about six o'clock and you know after the towers after the Pentagon hit just the rest of the day was trying to get a handle on all the chaos going on and everybody was scared out of their minds. And I, well I'll start at the beginning. It's six in the morning and my wife and I are living

2:04in a rental house on the west side because we were doing rebuilding on our regular house. And so we were a bit cramped. We had three little kids like ages, what were they six four and we had a six month old and the phone rings at six in the morning and my wife answered it and was talking and then she gets me on the phone and she said get on the phone, get on the phone. Now I am not a morning person at all. I am in a bad mood for a bad an hour and a half. Every morning? Yeah. Yeah. I have to be not spoken to for the first hour or so. And she's waking me up kind of in frenzy. I was like, oh, why? Why? I get David on the phone and I don't really understand what he's saying. David Hall. David Hall. Yeah. And he goes turn on the TV, two planes just hit the World Trade Center. Now I'm thinking this is like some kind of a dream.

3:08So I said, oh, you got to be kidding. Like he would call six in the morning to tell a joke like that, right? Yeah. That was really stupid. He goes, no, really turn on the TV and I could see very quickly. And it was the first day of school for one of the boys at preschool. And after we watched, I saw it just after the plane. And took one of my sons to school. I remember taking a little bit of video since it was this first day. And in replaying the video later, you can hear all the parents in the background. It's all they were talking about. Go home. And at the time I had this little half a room that was in office and had a TV. And I was just sitting there looking at the computer. All they had desktop computers. And I'm looking at this television. Peter Jennings was on ABC. And they had a steady camera on where the World Trade Center was. And I forget if this was the

4:14first or the second one. But it suddenly disappears from the television screen in front of my eyes. And it was replaced by this huge massive cloud of dust. It's like, hey, where'd that go? Because I don't think he was Peter Jennings was watching the video screen. He was talking to somebody. So they didn't acknowledge it for, I don't know how many seconds. And I'm looking, I said, did I imagine that? That looks like the tower went down. Well, how come they're not saying anything about it? Well, maybe they couldn't tell because they're looking and seeing a big pile of smoke, you know, if you're on network television, you don't want to blurt something out like the tower went down where you when you don't know for sure. And then finally is the smoke subsided a little bit. Yeah, the tower was gone. And I think that's not possible. Those things can't, those things can't collapse like that. And I know there was briefly talk here about sending

5:14Ken and I to New York. And my first reactions, no, I don't want to go there. I don't want a building falling on me. I'm not one of these cow, but we did a lot of on the scene reports. But now we're talking about terrorists and planes crashing into buildings and buildings falling and all that toxic air and dust. I mean, a lot of people that went there and ended up dying prematurely to, you know, to this day, a lot of them have got all kinds of weird cancers and breathing diseases and it's like, geez, I don't want to do that. Well, there was no way to fly to New York for the first few days anyway. And eventually they sent Laura Engle from the news department. And she was on the function, Marl. She did a great summary of her experience. I think it was in the 12 o'clock area. I want to listen to that on the podcast. But she did the reporting on several awards for it. And it, but the I thought, and I was reading some stories. There was a plot by these same guys to blow up LAX. And I forget if it was thwarted or

6:23they changed their minds, but it was going to be a millennium attack on December 31st, 1999. And this, these character, Alcata characters, we're going to celebrate by blowing up LAX, just I guess as midnight struck. So I'm figuring, well, we got to be next on the list, right? They had two planes in New York, one in Washington. The fourth one was going to go to Washington before the passengers took over and crashed flight 93 into the ground at Pennsylvania. So everybody's looking in the sky. And that for weeks, I remember playing tennis or the friend of mine a couple of weeks later and a low flying plane would go by and we'd stop at jerk and look up. Because everybody was spooked. You saw a plane or heard a plane, especially it was flying low. It's like, oh, is this it? Are we getting it? Are we getting a attack? It just seemed like how are we not getting attacked with all that Los Angeles represents to the world. But obviously it didn't happen.

7:24And I, it became the focus of all of KFI's coverage for weeks and months on end. We've got some clips to play. I'll play a couple when we get back. We got a few clips to play. And this is taken from the John and Ken show on that day. And also I want to I want to talk about this was another mini controversy here at the station. When a new story came out that Bush was warned that this would happen a month beforehand and did not react to it. And I was looking up those old stories and some more recent stories today and it's true. The CIA had multiple reports that something bad was coming and specifically there was one about planes flying into buildings and the Bush people and the Clinton people before him just simply didn't take it seriously. Just blew it off. And I was within the first week or two when this story came out. I realized that

8:29Bush was was kind of basking in all the adulation. You know, standing on the pilot debris in New York City with the bullhorn. And all those performative theatrics that emotionally manipulate people always really irritated me. I'll tell you about that story because I popped off on the air and was not well received. You're listening to John Cobalt on demand from KFI AM640. John Cobalt show KFI AM640 live everywhere on the I heart radio app on the 25th anniversary of the 911 attacks. And I was talking what it was like, you know, that day from here because Ken and I were on the air that afternoon handle was on all morning. And we're going to play some clips down a second and just recounting when when there was talk about sending us to New York. I had three little kids at the time. Like I said, you know, there were six four and six months. It's like, I couldn't conceive. Your wife would never have let you go. No, that was that was the discussion. I didn't even

9:35want to have. I mean, I because as much as I like covering, I mean, we certainly do a lot of crazy stuff going and standing in the middle of that when you got, you know, three little kids at home. You didn't know if this place was going to get bombed itself. I just but here is, here's Ken and I and this is us going through the timeline of the attack. This is some time in the early afternoon plane. The first plane hit the World Trade Center at 845 Eastern. The second plane at 903. And then the first tower collapse was at around 10 o'clock. Second tower collapsed at around 1030. And so they people had anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half to get out of the building on the floors below where the planes impacted on the towers. You know, one of the planes looked like it hit at about the 60th floor. So you can assume that

10:38people below the 60th floor, if they weren't killed by the plane crash and the fire on the smoke, some of them would have been able to get out. And then the other tower was hit way high up. And you know, it's impossible to count how many people got out and how many people are lying dead in the rubble. I saw the most, I mean, a couple of pieces of amazing video in all the little clips that have been watching this morning. You've probably heard about or maybe seen the people clinging to the building, hanging out of the building. Yeah, I saw that too. It was jumping right before the building. How many hours up do you think they looked? I don't know. That was a look to hide a survive from what I could see. But this second piece of video that really got me was a camera was positioned on the sidewalk on one of the downtown streets. And it was just recording video of, you know, people running around some chaos. And then the

11:40World Trade Center collapses at the far end of the block. And all this smoke and ash and dirt come barreling down. No, like a, like a car or a car or a car. Yeah. And people were running away, running away and the cameraman takes his hand and he wipes, he wipes the lens, the lens. And everything is getting browner and browner. And eventually everything goes to black. There was so much debris and smoke that the whole car or the whole block just turned black. And you couldn't see a thing. I look like night. And that was from our first segment, shortly after 12 noon, our first reactions to what was happening. That's six hours after the planes hit a back on September 11th. Now in this cut, this is Ken talking about me calling him to tell him the news. You know, the word that I heard a thousand times this morning is surreal. My new stand lady said like a movie. I don't get it. But the first reference you have,

12:43I mean, you were calling me up. You got me on it because I thought I decided the third time the phone rang. This is either a wacky person or it's somebody I know with a problem. And sure enough, you would left a message about. And here's how I reacted to your message. Your message was two planes collided in the World Trade Center. And I thought that two planes collided mid-air and they'd be fell into the trade. I just woke up. I was battling and I thought, well, it's horrible. And I turned on TV. And then when I realized, I immediately saw the footage of that second plane hit in the 18 minutes later running deliberately into the tower, I was, this is massively, massively big. And it makes Oklahoma city. I hate to say it. Look small now. Oh, it's a blip compared to what they said. The World Trade Center bombing of 93 look small now. The amazing thing is, and I saw immediately within the hour to ABC News had on the head of the Intelligence Committee, the state, the US Senate, who said we had no, this was not even on the board that this was a possibility. This kind of attack with these planes. So simple and attack too.

13:44You so much in the news lately has been about this complex missile shield that we want to put up to protect us from nuclear missiles from far off places. They're right here. Pakistan and North Korea. And look what kills maybe tens of thousands of people on airplane flying into a building. A commercial US airplane. Yeah. A guy hijacks a plane. You can assume we took over the controls and then flew it into the World Trade Center. Another guy does the same. Another guy does it into the Pentagon. A fourth crashes in Pennsylvania. We don't know why that one may have gone wrong. That's my theory. I mean, that one was supposedly heading for Camp David. The one that crashed in pencil. That's what I heard. Yeah. And this is around the anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which is that peace agreement that Jimmy Carter brokered back in 1978 between Egypt and Israel. That's a kind of an interior helmet. KFI news. In the afternoon of 9-11 and it's interesting that Ken was was talking about how the CIA

14:48official went on TV right away and said we didn't see this coming. He's lying right there because I have several stories here about multiple memos going from the CIA, the director at the time George Tenet. He was famously famously described as having his hair on fire because he knew this was happening or going to happen very soon. And he was trying to convince George Bush and the rest of the jokers in the White House that no, this is real. We're getting too much intelligence. It's something bad is going to happen. And it was specifically about airplanes flying into into tall buildings. So you notice how the CIA guy jumps and immediately puts out this information. Immediately. It's like what they did with the Hunter Biden laptop. Oh, you know, all the intelligence agents came out and said this is likely Russian propaganda. No, it really was Hunter Biden's laptop. Well, they were doing it there as well. And they were the ones who knew better, who knew what this was.

15:53And I just flat out will never, ever believe anything anybody says in a time of crisis like this because they have their little playbook and they know their purpose is to manipulate people's emotions. They don't want people to panic. They don't want people to think for themselves. They don't want people to question them. So you could go right on TV and you, you, you tell the nation, hey, this is what it is. Hey, we are totally taken by some, well, no, they were it. I'll talk more about that specifically when we come back. Get by AM 640 more stimulating talk radio. John cobel show. Moist line is at 520 and 550 in the 5 o'clock hour, obviously. And so we'll play two rounds of it then. If you want to call now for next week, 877, Moist 86, 877, Moist 86. We're talking about the 25th

17:00anniversary of 911 and our experiences here at KFI on that day. And we were playing some clips from John and Ken show of September 11th around for six hours that day. As and try and as we all lay in weight, figuring that, well, eventually they're going to come after Los Angeles. Now, I mentioned in the last segment, the last cut we played from 2001. And Ken said he saw an ABC that day that some major domo from the CIA had gone on TV and said, this came out of the blue. We had no idea. And that's a textbook example of gaslighting the public, lying to the public, changing the narrative. They got all these cute phrases now because the CIA did know and had known for months that something like this could happen. So it

18:01didn't come out of the blue. They just couldn't get the Bush administration or Bush himself, who is one of the biggest dud presidents of my lifetime. I mean, he's up there with Biden and Carter. That's that's the unholy Trinity of three just and and and really in Biden in Bush's case, just stupid guys. Can I interview George Bush once when he was running for president the first time? It would have been in 2000. He had just lost three out of four primaries to John McCain. And we interviewed him. And I remember thinking as the interview was happening, it's like, wow, there's not much going on with this guy. I mean, he's really light in the head. I was really, honestly, what I thought, I mean, I was nice to him, respectful and all that, but the the inner John is going, whoa, this is a guy with low candle power turned out to be right. The only saving grace was he was running against Al Gore, who was a certified mental patient. And that may have been the worst choice of my lifetime, I think, between Bush, the dope and and Gore, who is just mentally ill.

19:06Close second would be Bush and John Kerry four years later. See, the Republicans version of DEI is is a nepotism. He's a presidential candidate because his dad had been president 10 years earlier, but on his own, he wouldn't touch him at all. You know, if he was named Murray, Moscow, it's no way that guy is getting anywhere near the White House unless you want to take it on a tour. But this idea that the CIA was blindsided. No, I found this from November 13th of 2015. Of course, at the time, it didn't get a whole lot of news. And it was written by Chris Whipple, who had a book out. And he had done interviews because now 14 years had gone by and people were willing to talk honestly. It's kind of like how five years later, so officials are talking honestly about the whole, all the COVID nonsense. And he interviewed cofer Black, who was in a one,

20:11the chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center. Cofer Black said in May of 2001, it was very evident that we were going to be struck. We were going to be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die. There were going to be there were real plots being manifested. So that's four months before 9, 11, the head of CIA counterterrorism knew for sure we were going to get whacked hard. The head of the CIA, George Tenet. In 2015, he gave his first interview in eight years to Chris Whipple and he said, the world felt it like was like on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July of 2001, the threat continues to rise. Terrace were disappearing. In other words, they were hiding in preparation for an attack. Camps were closing. Threat reporting were on the rise. The crisis came to ahead on July 10, 2001 and a meeting that took place and Tenet wrote about it as well in a later book.

21:18In the spring of 2001, George Tenet and cofer Black pitched a plan called the blue sky paper. They presented this to Bush's national security team. You know, everybody was only on the job for a few months and it called for a covert CIA military campaign to go after Al Qaeda to get into Afghanistan to to launch a paramilitary operation. But the Bush White House says we're not quite ready to consider this. We don't want the clock to start ticking. You know what that means? Know what that was code for? They did not want a paper trail to show that they had been warned. They had been warned as early as May. They got a formal paper in July and they said, no, no, we're not going to do anything because as soon as we do something that creates a trail that we were warned, they wanted to sell the idea that it came out of the blue and they were as blind cited as anyone else. Why that is a better public relations tactic to take other than, hey,

22:27we tried to stop it and we failed. I guess they couldn't have that happen. So it's like, oh, we didn't know. Again, they constantly lie. Don't believe them, even if they're your party. Don't believe them. Cofer Black again, Chief of CIA counter, terrorism back then says the Bush team just didn't get the new threat. They were stuck eight years in the past. They were used to terrorist being European lefties. They didn't really get the threat of this Al-Qaeda Islamic situation. So on the morning of July 10th, the head of the agency's Al-Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Cofer Black's office and says, Chief, this is it. The roof has fallen in. The information we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple source and it was sort of a last straw. This is July 10th. It is two full months before the attack happened and everybody in the CIA in Washington knew something bad was going to happen. Tenet picked up a phone called the National

23:31Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Condi, I have to come and see you. It's one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, I have to come and see you. We're coming right now. We have to get there and Richard Blee started by saying to Condoleezza Rice, there will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al-Qaeda's attention is the destruction of the United States. And Condi said, what do you think we need to do? And Black slammed this fist on the table and said, we need to go on a wartime footing now. So what happened? Well, Cofer Black said, yeah, what happened? To me, it remains incomprehensible still. How could you warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It's like the twilight zone. And this was the Bush administration. This was George Bush. You could actually burst into their office, scream in their face, pound on the desk, show all the materials you had. And it's like, I don't know. You really think so.

24:35And that's why the towers went down. The Bush people had done something. I don't think it would have been too complicated to keep guys like those terrorists out in a country. First thing you should do is look at who got into the country where they were collected. I mean, they were, some of them were at a flight school down in Venice and Florida. It was a whole collection of them practicing. It wouldn't have been that hard. Because I remember there was a, yeah, here it is. There was actually a headline on a briefing. First week of August on Bush's intelligence memorandum saying, Al Qaeda or Bin Laden plans to fly planes into buildings. Bush was down in Crawford, Texas. Remember that's where he used to go down to his ranch, he used to chop wood. He chopped a lot of wood. I don't really know what the thrill of that is.

25:40Right is horse. And he supposedly read it. Had the same reaction the condolese arise did. No reaction. Now some of this came out in the first few days. And I said something similar to what I'm saying now. They knew about it advance. Bush screwed up. Everybody's turning him into a superhero because he was standing on a pile of debris with a bullhorn where the hell was the in August in July and June when he was getting multiple warnings from the CIA. Apparently people, listeners really upset. I got a call from somebody in management. Don't you think it's too soon? I said, no, it's not too soon. It's true. What is everybody eight years old? You can't handle the truth. He's like, sound like Jack Nicholson. You can't handle the truth because it's too soon. Don't you want to know? Don't you want to know that not only Al Qaeda did this, but there's a good chance we could

26:42have stopped them at the people that we put in charge had done their job. And then there's a whole other chapter about how Clinton was told repeatedly stuff like this was going to happen. In fact, they had Bin Laden's head practically in the gun sites. And he got a call saying, hey, we got him in our sites, we can shoot him. And Clinton's response was to call some lawyers. And they decided not to do it because it would violate something or other. It's like, okay, call the lawyers instead of shooting what became the biggest mass murderer of our time. So, and when I see Clinton and I see Bush, this is what I think about. This is what they should be judged on because that's 3,000 people who got killed and thousands of people who are still getting sick. Oh, and then the coup de Gras was when in the weeks after 9, 11, Christine Todd Whitman

27:46who was the EPA director of the time went out and said that the era was fine in New York City. That sounds familiar. Yeah. Yeah. Almost exactly what Karen Bass said after the lineage fire. She went out and told everybody the era is fine. And how could you possibly say something like that? How could they possibly do any of this crap that they did? They're incompetent. They're not too bright. They were just in over their heads. But people worship politicians, people worship their stupid parties and they don't look at them coldly and harshly and they don't look at the truth. They don't want to hear the truth. We're idiots that we can't handle the truth. Yeah. Well, some people are. Well, it's too soon. Yeah, but you know the air is toxic. I know. That's why do you want to fly over there? I don't blame you. Yeah. I got more coming up. Play another clip when we return. You're listening to John Cobalt on demand from KFI AM640. KFI AM640 live everywhere on the I Heart Radio app. John Cobalt show. After Debra's four

28:48o'clock news, we're going to play you a little bit of one of the 9 11 widows who was on stage. You know, they were reading the names of all the people who were killed during the 9 11 attack at the World Trade Center and she read her husband's name and then she went off against Saudi Arabia which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers and against all the American presidents who were arrayed in front of her. Bush, Obama, Biden, J.D. Vance was there in place of Trump who's at the Pentagon ceremony and she was right. Saudi Arabia, that royal family had a lot to do with this attack and it's been covered up by these idiots, these bobbleheads that she addressed and good for her. She said the truth out loud. Everybody else just goes along. We're playing clips from that

29:48first broadcast we did after the World Trade Center was attacked along with the Pentagon and the fourth playing that crashed in Pennsylvania. So we were on that afternoon from noon until six and here's a clip and it's about a guy who videotape the rubble of the World Trade Centers after writing his motorcycle from Brooklyn. Listen to this. ABC News is showing some incredible video they have gotten hold of a man who was who found out about it from his girlfriend from the explosion got on his motorcycle from Brooklyn and got passed all the security clearances in downtown Manhattan. This is footage Sean of what was left to look at that. That's the Trade Center tower. He actually walked right into the rubble with his video camera and took all this footage not more than an hour or two ago. There's nothing there. It's just the pile of rubble. It's unbelievable. It's a South Tower. No sign of life. He goes there's nothing emergency crews could do. Firemen were standing around. You know, there's nothing there. He said there's no one to rescue. There's nothing there. It's eerie. It's 110 stories of rubble. You know what? You would think it'd be a bigger pile.

30:52It doesn't look like you can see. Look at the side facade there. Right. It's so hard to see from the camera. That is unbelievable. If you ever walked in New York City under the World Trade Center, it is so massive because to support 100 and stand stories, the base of it has to be so wide that when you look up, you can't really see the top of the building. You know, you can only see the top of the building by standing a distance away. When you're walking alongside of the building, it goes up endless. Your neck can't straight. You look straight up and you can't see the top of the building. No. And it's such an enormous, enormous, wasn't enormous structure. And two of them when I'm looking at these and it's just a huge pile of rubble. And that's from our broadcast that afternoon, just a few hours after the plane's hit. When we come back, we're going to play a clip from a widow from 9-11. The 9-11 families, her name is Terry Strata, widow of Tom Strata, who was killed.

31:58People like what she had to say because she told the truth. Sadie Arabia, the royal family had a lot to do with this and Bush, Obama, Biden, everybody's covered it up. And she was addressing JD Vance there. Somebody do something and get the truth out of them. Somebody hold him accountable. We'll talk when we come back. Deborah Mark is live in the KFI-20 Friday Newsroom. You've been listening to the John Kobel show podcast. You can always hear the show live on KFI AM640 from three to six PM every Monday through Friday. And of course, anytime on demand on the I heart radio F KFI AM640. More stimulating talk.