08/24/2025: Evidence, The Future of Warfare, Lourdes

0:08This video of a Saudi national filming the U.S. Capitol, its security posts and nearby landmarks, was taken in the summer of 1999 and turned over to the FBI after 9-11. But it was never shared with the bureau's own field agents or top intelligence officials. A lot of people will see this video for the first time and think, how is it remotely possible that it's just coming to light now? Could it really have been sitting in an evidence locker room all of these years? Palmer Luckey may not look like your typical defense industry executive. But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Andrel, whose line of autonomous weapons is powered by artificial intelligence.

0:56It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all.

1:10Do you believe in miracles? Well, 60 Minutes traveled to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France, where 72 medical miracles have been recognized by the Catholic Church over the last 163 years. And tonight, you'll hear a miracle story, and from the renowned doctors and researchers who investigated it.

1:37I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:56Evidence has emerged that could change our understanding of the 9-11 terrorist attacks nearly 24 years ago. The evidence was turned over to the FBI in the weeks after 9-11, but as we first reported in April, it was never shared with the Bureau's own field agents or top intelligence officials. Why, after all these years, did this crucial information just surface? The evidence came to light as part of a long-running lawsuit against the Saudi government by the families of the nearly 3 ,000 people killed in the attacks. And it includes a chilling video of a Saudi national filming the U.S. Capitol.

2:36A voice on the video says in Arabic, I am transmitting these scenes to you from the heart of the American capital, Washington. This video, recorded in the summer of 1999, was unsealed in federal court last year as part of the 9-11 family's lawsuit accusing Saudi Arabia of providing crucial support to the hijackers. Exhibit A in their case, the man who made the video, Omar al-Bayoumi, who asked a bystander to film him in front of the Capitol. The FBI says Bayoumi was living in the United States on a student visa and being paid by a Saudi aviation company in California, despite not showing up for classes or work.

3:21Investigators say, in fact, Bayoumi was an operative of the Saudi intelligence service and had close ties to two of the hijackers.

3:32The video was filmed over several days. Bayoumi recorded entrances and exits of the Capitol, security posts, a model of the building, and nearby landmarks. Bayoumi points out the Washington Monument and says, I will get over there and report to you in detail what is there. He also notes the airport is not far away. What I see Bayoumi doing is going out and making a detailed video record of the Capitol from all its sides and then conducting that 360-degree panoramic view. Richard Lambert is a retired FBI supervisor who led the initial 9-11 investigation in San Diego, where Bayoumi and the two hijackers lived prior to the attacks.

4:20He's now a consultant on the case filed by the 9-11 families. If you've ever flown into Washington, D.C., one of the first things you see on the horizon is the Washington Monument. So if you know where your other targets are, it helps guide you to your intended target. Federal investigators believe the hijackers on Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, planned to hit the U.S. Capitol as their likely target. In the video, Bayoumi references a, quote, plan. You said that in the plan. What plan? What do you think he's talking about? I think he's talking to the al-Qaeda planners who tasked him to take the pre-operational surveillance video of the intended target.

5:08So this video is taken in late June and early July of 1999. What does that timing tell you? Well, that means it was taken within 90 days of the time when senior al-Qaeda planners reached the decision that the Capitol would be a target of the 9-11 attacks. That's when Osama bin Laden decided to approve the so-called planes operation, proposed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11. During a raid on Bayoumi's U.K. apartment about 10 days after the attacks, British police discovered the Capitol video, along with about 80 other tapes and a trove of documents now being used as evidence in the family's lawsuit.

5:52This internal FBI report, dated October 11, 2001, shows that copies of all recovered exhibits were sent to FBI New York via Federal Express, but the Capitol video never made it to the San Diego field office. I had not seen that video. Retired FBI Special Agent Danny Gonzalez, one of the lead 9-11 investigators in San Diego, says he never knew about the video during the 15 years he worked on the case. He is also a consultant for the 9-11 family's lawsuit. Not only did I not know, all of the case agents in San Diego didn't know, and the case agents in New York didn't know. And we're talking about the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that not only have FBI, but we have other state, local, and federal agencies.

6:41They did not know either. How is that possible? I don't have that answer, and that angers me. When I saw that video, I knew exactly what it was. Did you need this information to do your job? Absolutely. He believes he could have used the Capitol video to build a case against Bayoumi. I would have taken it to the United States Attorney's Office, who was requesting from us, the FBI, anything that we had they wanted to look at. Meaning what? That they would have filed charges, that they would have indicted? What would your hope in that be? It was a terror investigation, but it was also a mass murder.

7:16In your view, this video was so significant that it should have gone all the way to the top to the White House. I think it should have because it's the Capitol building. Gina Bennett was a senior counterterrorism analyst at the CIA for 20 years. In the aftermath of 9-11, we were briefing the president and the National Security Council. We didn't expect that this was a one and done. We expected al-Qaeda to continue to try. So resources were going entirely to trying to undermine any additional plotting. The Saudi government says this is a tourist video, that there's nothing to see here. You don't buy that.

7:54No, I don't. Who does a tourist video that is reporting back on, this is where that building is and here's where the security guards are? Now retired, she was the first person in the U.S. government to warn of the dangers of a global jihadist movement led by Osama bin Laden. Bennett has no involvement with the 9-11 family's lawsuit and says she, too, was unaware of the video's existence until we asked her to evaluate it. As we discovered, she was not the only one at the CIA in the dark. George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, says he wasn't aware of the video. Same for Michael Morell, the president's daily intelligence briefer at the time.

8:33Does it surprise you that they didn't know about this? It does surprise me, again, because we're talking about the U.S. Capitol. And in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, Bayoumi was a suspect. A lot of people will see this video for the first time and think, How is it remotely possible that it's just coming to light now? Could it really have been sitting in an evidence locker room all of these years? It seems like a pretty epic failure. I think it's a matter of did they lose the evidence or had they filed it away in a way that it would not have seemed relevant. That I can see. As it turns out, there was more evidence.

9:15Specifically, this airplane sketch and math formula that was also seized from Bayoumi's U.K. apartment and turned over to the FBI in 2001. It was stashed away for more than a decade until Danny Gonzalez in 2012 got a phone call out of the blue from an FBI evidence technician in Washington. What did they tell you? They told me that they had these boxes with the name of Omar al-Bayoumi written on it. And they were sitting in a warehouse in Washington, D.C., and they were going to relocate these boxes or destroy these boxes. And they wanted to know if I wanted them, and I said absolutely. But as one of the lead investigators into these attacks, did you have any idea that this sketch had even existed before you got that phone call?

10:01No, I didn't. He had aviation and aerospace experts analyze the equation for the FBI. Their conclusion? A pilot could use it to calculate the rate of descent to hit a target on the horizon. In 2004, the 9-11 Commission produced what was at the time considered the definitive account of the attacks. Its executive director, Philip Zelikow, told us he was also unaware of it during his investigation. So were former senior U.S. intelligence officials we spoke to. As for Bayoumi, who was never charged with the crime and moved back to Saudi Arabia after 9-11, he was asked about the sketch as part of the lawsuit in a 2021 deposition.

10:46He confirmed the sketch was his, but said he remembered little else about it, including his handwritten notes that say, height of the plane from the earth in mile and distance from the plane to horizon. When pressed about it, he came up with a far-fetched explanation. And perhaps this was an equation that we studied before in high school, and I was trying to remember whether I'm going to be able to figure out and solve it or not. And what is an equation for? I don't know. Just matter. Just equation. There's no proof that Bayoumi shared the equation with any of the hijackers. What we do know is that he met the first two to arrive in the U.S.

11:28nearly two years before 9-11. in. Bayoumi claims he met them in a chance encounter at a restaurant here on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. He then helped them move to San Diego, finding them a place to live in his own apartment complex, co-signing the lease and helping them open a bank account. He even threw a party, which he also videotaped, capturing one of the hijackers on camera. He then introduced them to others who helped them obtain government IDs and enroll in English classes and flight schools. Bayoumi and the Saudi government say his actions were innocent, the result of a remarkable series of coincidences.

12:10Isn't it all possible in your mind that Bayoumi wasn't actually involved in all of this is pure coincidence, as the Saudis claim? No, no. I don't believe that for a second. Why not? Could have been a guy who just wanted to help his brothers adjust to a life in a new country. Who else did he help besides those two hijackers? I don't know of any, and I couldn't find any. Omar al-Bayoumi is living as a free man in Saudi Arabia. What do you think about that? Awful. Awful. He should be here under the court system. The 9-11 Commission concluded that Bayoumi was, quote, an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.

12:50does that still hold? I think the 9-11 Commission is just not fully informed. It's not their fault, but it's not fully informed. So all the evidence you've seen, the material support, the Capitol video, the sketch, your conclusion is what? My conclusion is that Bayoumi was an al-Qaeda facilitator. He had sympathies with al-Qaeda, I mean, ideologically, and that he provided substantial support to these two individuals, these two hijackers, without which they may very well have been caught. Bennett says Bayoumi was indispensable to the success of the hijackers' plot because they spoke no English, had little formal education, and no prior exposure to life in the West.

13:38I don't see al-Qaeda, as meticulous as it was with its planning, just throwing two operatives that are so instrumental to the success of this operation into a massive city without a soft landing, without a network there to catch them. She says the new evidence raises a lot of important questions. Like what? Who else? Were there other networks? Are any of those individuals still active here or elsewhere in the world? Is there any other evidence that's sitting in a box somewhere or locked up? And work from that new information to learn, to learn what you got wrong, to learn how to not get it wrong again.

14:28Following our report, Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, sent a letter to the director of the FBI, wanting to know why the Bureau failed to turn over what they call critical evidence to the 9-11 Commission and the CIA in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. The FBI has yet to respond. It replied to our request for comment on our report by saying only that it would not discuss ongoing litigation. As for the Saudi government, it has filed a motion in federal court to dismiss the 9-11 family's lawsuit, saying neither the Kingdom nor Omar El-Bayoumi had anything to do with the attacks.

15:09The judge overseeing the case is expected to rule on the motion soon.

15:20Over the last decade, a new breed of tech billionaires has positioned themselves not merely as entrepreneurs, but as visionary saviors who believe technology can transform the world. Tonight, we will introduce you to one of them. His name is Palmer Luckey, and he's the founder of Andrel, a California defense products company. Luckey says for too long the U.S. military has relied on overpriced and outdated technology. He argues a Tesla has better AI than any US aircraft, and a Roomba vacuum has better autonomy than most of the Pentagon's weapons systems. So Andrel is making a line of autonomous weapons that operate using artificial intelligence, no human required.

16:08Some international groups have called those types of weapons killer robots. But as Sharon Alfonsi first reported earlier this year, Palmer Luckey says it is the future of warfare. I've always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. Do we want to be the world's gun store? I think so. I think we have to. Says the guy who sells weapons. See, I agree it sounds self-fulfilling, but you have to remember, I also got into this industry because I believe that. Palmer Luckey isn't your typical defense industry executive. His daily uniform, flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt, is more suited for Margaritaville than the military.

16:50But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Andrel, whose line of American-made autonomous weapons looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, and whose slick marketing videos wouldn't be out of place in one. There's the Roadrunner, a twin turbo-jet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify, and strike. If it doesn't find a target, it can land and try again. Andrew also makes headsets, which allow soldiers to see 360 degrees in combat. And there's this. It's an electromagnetic warfare system that can be programmed to jam enemy systems, knocking out drone swarms. It's not some futuristic fantasy.

17:40Andrew's systems are already being used by the U.S. military and in the war in Ukraine. We shouldn't be sending our people to stand in other countries, putting our men and women, our sons and daughters, at risk for the sovereignty of other nations. So you'd rather have an American-made product in their hands than our soldiers over there? Absolutely, every time. And I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now, there's so many weapon systems that require manning. If I can have one guy commanding and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one, and it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk.

18:20To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote control. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select and engage targets.

18:38No operator needed. It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground in making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons. Lucky showed us how those so-called smart weapons can be synchronized on Andrew's AI platform. It's called Lattice.

19:11Lattice collects data from various sensors and sources, including satellites, drones, radar, and cameras, allowing, he says, the AI to analyze, move assets, and execute missions faster than a human. If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, hey, do this, if that, then this, it would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. It's the AI on board all these weapons that makes it possible to make it so easy. There are lots of people who go, oh, AI, I don't know, I don't trust it, it's going to go rogue. I would say that it is something to be aware of, but in the grand scheme of things, things to be afraid of, there's things that I'm much more terrified of.

19:57And I'm a lot more worried about evil people with mediocre advances in technology than AI deciding that it's going to wipe us all out. Lucky says all Angel's weapons have a kill switch that allow a human operator to intervene if needed. But the Secretary General of the United Nations has called lethal autonomous weapons, quote, politically unacceptable and morally repugnant. When people say to you, look, it's evil, how do you respond to that? I usually don't bother because if I am going to argue with them, I usually poke it. I'm like, okay, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or slingshots?

20:36How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if NATO just, they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin, begging him to not invade Ukraine? Our entire society exists because of a credible backstop of violence threatened by the United States and our allies all over the world. And thank goodness for it. It might sound flip, but part of Palmer Luckey's philosophy is that autonomous weapons ultimately promote peace by scaring adversaries away. My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on.

21:16Nobody wants to bite them. In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrents? Or do they have to be deployed and used? They have to believe that you can use them. By the end of this year, Andrew says it will have secured more than$6 billion in government contracts worldwide. When you first came into this space and you're a tech guy in a Hawaiian shirt and you're walking into the Pentagon, maybe in flip flops, I don't know. Were you welcomed with open arms? There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms and everyone else thought that I was nuts. Nuts because there hasn't been a new company in the defense industry in a significant way since the end of the Cold War.

21:59For decades, five defense contractors called the Primes have dominated the industry. Typically, the Primes present an idea to the Pentagon. If the Pentagon buys it, the government pays for the company to develop it, even if it's late or goes over budget. Lucky started Andrel to flip that procurement structure on its head. The idea behind Andrel was to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company. What's the difference? Contractors, in general, are paid to do work, whether or not it succeeds. A product company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money, you're putting in your own time.

22:39My vision was to build a company that would show up, not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out. It will work for enough things that you can save our country hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It may not surprise you that Palmer Luckey's father was a car salesman. His mother took on the role of homeschooling him and his three sisters. Luckey says he was fascinated by electronics and spent a lot of time tinkering in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. By age 19, his tinkering turned into Oculus, the virtual reality company.

23:17And at 21, Palmer Luckey fulfilled every young founder's dream when he sold Oculus to Facebook for$2 billion. The wonder kid graced the covers of magazines, but two years later, he was fired from Facebook. Why did you get fired? Well, you know, everyone's got a different story. But it boils down to I gave$9 ,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. to be a Trump supporter in 2016. This was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so I think that a lot of people thought back then that you could just fire a Trump supporter.

23:58Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Lucky was fired for his political views. What do you think now when you see those tech leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, lined up behind President Trump now at his inauguration? I am inclined to let every single one of them get away with it. Look. What do you mean get away with it? Coming around to a point of view that is more aligned with the American people broadly, I think is good for the country. I think it is not good for you to have techno-corpo elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are. In 2017, Leckie says he left Silicon Valley with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and a chip on his shoulder.

24:38I was fired at the height of my career. You know, my gears were ground, and I really wanted to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder, and that I still had it in me to do big things. He says he thought about starting companies to combat obesity or fix the prison system, but ultimately decided to break into the defense industry. Have you run into any people who don't take you seriously because you were never in the military? I don't think so. I think I owe that to the James Bond franchise. Everyone in the military has seen James Bond movies, and they all like you, right? I'm the wacky gadget man.

25:18I'm the guy who types on the computer and pushes up my glasses and then gives them a strange thing to help them accomplish their mission. And this is his laboratory, Andrew's 640 ,000-square-foot headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. It's a mix of high-tech carpentry and robotic engineering. A sign on the floor pokes fun at the boss's shoe choice. But Lucky wanted to show us something off campus. We hopped in his 1985 Humvee. The billionaire told us he also owns a decommissioned Blackhawk helicopter, a 48-crew submarine, and a Navy speedboat. In Dana Point, we took a ride 15 minutes off the coast to see the largest weapon in Andrew's arsenal, this submarine.