www.drudge.com

* One of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, Ali Muhammed who was a very close associate of Bin Laden, was an American citizen who was an operative for the FBI, the CIA, and the Army: San Francisco Chronicle. Indeed, while he was acting as an FBI informant, he smuggled Bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, helped plan the attacks on US embassies in Africa, and apparently played a pivotal role in planning 9/11.

According to a 1995 Boston Globe report, his entry into the country was made possible by "clandestine CIA sponsorship." According to West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center, the terrorist was:

Given a visa waiver under a "little known visa waiver program that allows the CIA and other security agencies to bring valuable agents into the country, bypassing the usual immigration formalities." While perhaps "little known," this authority was granted to the Director of National Intelligence by the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 and codified in 50 U.S.C. 403h, which states that if "the admission of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence is in the interest of national security or essential to the furtherance of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be admitted to the United States for permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations.

* 11 of the hijackers received visas to the U.S. through a consular office where, according to the former head of that office, the CIA routinely insisted that visas be granted to terrorists, even when their visa applications should have been rejected under standard operating procedure