HOUSE OVERSIGHT 015020 once, but repeatedly, almost predictably. We shall see that, among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protected and then continued their activities were the following: 1. Ali Mohamed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report as the leader of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing; 2. Mohammed Jamal Khalife, Osama bin Laden's close friend and, while in the Philippines, financier of both Ramzi Yousef (principal architect of the first World Trade Center [WTC] attack) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; 3. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks"; 4. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9/11. It might sound from these citations that the 9/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my chapter is to show that 1. one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the "al-Qaeda connection," if you will); 2. one major intention of the 9/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection; 3. those on the 9/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell), and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists' protectors. In the course of writing this chapter [Scott continues], I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9/11 Commission's false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, ignoring not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reali