In a rare interview with the National Geographic Channel, Bush reflects on what was going through his mind at the most dramatic moment of his presidency when he was informed that a second passenger jet had hit New York’s World Trade Center.

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom and the incident, which was caught on TV film, and has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently blank face.

“My first reaction was anger. Who the hell would do that to America? Then I immediately focused on the children, and the contrast between the attack and the innocence of children,” Bush says in an excerpt of the interview shown to television writers on Thursday.

Bush said he could see the news media at the back of the classroom getting the news on their own cellphones “and it was like watching a silent movie.”

Bush said he quickly realized that a lot of people beyond the classroom would be watching for his reaction.

“So I made the decision not to jump up immediately and leave the classroom. I didn’t want to rattle the kids. I wanted to project a sense of calm,” he said of his decision to remain seated and silent.

“I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing a leader has to do is to project calm,” he added.

The National Geographic Channel will broadcast the hour-long interview on August 28 as part of a week of programs on the cable network called “Remembering 9/11” that mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

The interview was recorded over two days in May, without any questions being submitted in advance, the channel said.

National Geographic said Bush gives “intimate details” of his thoughts and feelings in a way never seen before. Most of the interview is about the first minutes and hours of the day that Islamic militants hijacked four planes and crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Executive producer and director Peter Schnall said Bush, who has adopted a low public profile since leaving office in January 2009, brought no notes to the interview.

“What you hear is the personal story of a man who also happened to be our president. Listening to him describe how he grappled with a sense of anger and frustration coupled with his personal mandate to lead our country through this devastating attack was incredibly powerful,” Schnall said.

U.S. television networks are planning a slew of specials to mark the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 attacks. Those on National Geographic also include a documentary on the continuing U.S. war on terror, and stories of ordinary people on Sept, 11 2001 called “Where Were You?”

The post Bush Claims Slow Reaction on 9/11 Was Deliberate Decision appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

To uncover who is truly in control, all you have to do is follow the money.  

Since the mid-eighties, British and American politicians have been operating under suspicion of being compromised by al-Yamamah, the $80 billion Anglo-Saudi black operations slush fund. It is the product of the 20-year oil-for-arms barter deal, wherein BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace), Britain’s largest defense contractor, reportedly paid bribes to sell combat fighter planes, helicopters, tanks and ammunitions to Saudi Arabia. In return for the arms, the Saudi’s agreed to supply hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day to the British. It was the largest arms deal in UK history that was arranged in a way that circumvented any potential objections by the U.S. Congress.

BAE (the world’s second largest defense company) was said to have paid millions into accounts controlled by Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a highly influential former ambassador to Washington, DC. Prince Bandar’s close ties to the Bush family prompted the nickname “Bandar Bush”. Bandar’s children reportedly attended school with Cheney’s grandchildren. The power Bandar wielded was extraordinary. For decades he was a close friend to five U.S. Presidents and numerous CIA directors, as well as heads of state and monarchs of other countries. In the Bush years, Bandar became virtually part of the administration, able to enter the White House unannounced. Ever a master manipulator, Bandar skillfully controlled the mainstream media, with the Washington Post being his paper of choice when it came to royal leaks.

Bandar had his hand in some of the biggest scandals in modern history. During the Reagan presidency, Bandar secured the purchase of AWACs surveillance aircraft, despite opposition from AIPAC (after the U.S. rejected an arms order, Bandar covertly arranged the delivery of intermediate-range nuclear-warhead-capable missiles from China). He was exposed for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, having arranged $32 million in Saudi financing for the Nicaraguan Contras. Bandar’s wife was reportedly sending money to one of the 9/11 hijackers. President George W. Bush told Prince Bandar about the invasion of Iraq before he told Secretary of State Colin Powell about it (incidentally, another one of Prince Bandar’s close connections).

Planning wars is just one of many perks that come with having friends in high places. Those connections came in handy when Bandar was accused of siphoning off $100 million per year for 10 years, in a $2 billion contract between Saudi Arabia and BAE.

The al-Yamamah “slush fund” was first reported by a whistleblower in 2001, but British Ministry of Defense covered up those allegations. In 2004, another whistleblower disclosed further details of the bribery scandal to the Guardian, prompting an investigation by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.

In 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a secret visit to Riyadh to expedite one of BAE’s deals with the Saudi princes. Blair agreed to sell to the Saudis 24 jets ahead of schedule, by letting them get their hands on the jets that were already allotted for the British armed forces.

In 2006, when investigators were about to gain access to the Swiss bank accounts linked to Saudi royal family, Tony Blair blocked a corruption investigation against them. Blair said that the probe would have led nowhere except to the “complete wreckage” of a vital strategic relationship. Translation: “We don’t want to upset our rich Saudi benefactors.” The Saudis were apparently threatening to back out of a lucrative deal and to halt their participation in anti-terrorism efforts. Bandar had arrogantly warned a U.K. official that “British lives on British streets were at risk” if the investigation was allowed to continue.

The British High Court ruled that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government may have interfered with the rule of law in December 2006, when it ordered the British government’s Serious Fraud Office to shut down its bribery investigation. Blair claimed that his decision to scrap the probe was made purely in the interest of national security. The court blasted him in a scathing rebuke that stated in part, “No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice…It is the failure of Government… to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court.” Blair also ensured that the report by the National Audit Office (NAO) on BAE’s dealings in Saudi Arabia was not published. It remains the only NAO report never to have been made public. British Ministry of Defense stated, “The report remains sensitive. Disclosure would harm both international relations and the UK’s commercial interests.”

In 2007, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the world’s anti-bribery watchdog, rebuked the government for terminating SFO investigation and launched its own inquiry. During the same year, the U.S. Department of Justice was forced to investigate, since the U.K. government was criticized in the press for halting the inquiry. The DOJ had the jurisdiction, since Prince Bandar received some of the funds in question in Washington, DC.

Prince Bandar has retained former FBI Director Louis Freeh to represent him in connection with the DOJ probe. In a videotaped interview, Freeh admitted on behalf of Bandar that approximately $2 billion was sent from the al-Yamamah account in the United Kingdom to bank accounts of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC. Prince Bandar, who was serving at the time as Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. exercised control and had signatory authority over those bank accounts. Freeh admits that these monies were sent to purchase arms through the offices of BAE, which was done in a way that would circumvent “objection” by the U.S. Congress.

Interestingly enough, former FBI Director Louis Freeh is linked to another aspect of 9/11, as a former boss of John Patrick O’Neill, a top American anti-terrorism expert. In 1995, O’Neill investigated the roots of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing after he assisted in the capture of Ramzi Yousef. He also investigated the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen.

After years of investigating terrorism, O’Neill was convinced that “All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama Bin Laden’s organization can be found in Saudi Arabia.” In spite of praising O’Neill and his efforts, not everyone shared his enthusiasm for pursuing and exposing the Saudi links to terror. O’Neill voiced his frustrations with Saudis’ lack of cooperation to Freeh.

As a Director of the FBI, Freeh was involved in controversial investigations of the events at the Ruby Ridge and Waco. The FBI under Freeh was accused of such severe cover-ups that U.S. Marshals had to be dispatched to relieve them of the evidence. Businessweek called for Freeh to resign, stating in part that he “has overseen a bureau that has bungled investigations of high-profile criminal cases and repeatedly misled probers and judges in legal proceedings — never more shamelessly than in the matter of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee. At the same time, Freeh’s FBI has tried to run roughshod over the civil liberties of ordinary citizens, demanding access to encryption codes and elbowing its way onto every PC in the country through its Carnivore project.”

The New York Times wrote that “Freeh will probably go down as either the F.B.I. director who slept as terrorists prepared to attack the World Trade Center or as the man who hounded Bill Clinton for seven years.” Interestingly enough, just like Freeh, Bandar has been working to undermine President Bill Clinton for quite some time.

John P. O’Neill certainly wasn’t sleeping on his watch or worrying about sexual proclivities of mischievous Presidents. He had gained a tremendous knowledge of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, but was repeatedly excluded from terrorism investigations. He became the target of a smear campaign and was subjected to petty internal inquiries. This is not uncommon within federal government, as a tactic that is routinely used to silence those who come across any information that has the potential of embarrassing the government. Freeh was reportedly involved in those attempts to force O’Neill out of the Bureau.

After leaving the FBI, O’Neill became the head of security at the World Trade Center, where he perished in the September 11, 2001 attacks, while attempting to save others.

In a book “The Age of Sacred Terror”, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon state that Louis Freeh deliberately withheld information about Bin Laden and the precursors for the attack of 9/11 from the White House.

Richard A. Clarke, a former top counter-terrorism advisor for the White House, criticized Freeh and his actions in his book, “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.” Clarke also expressed serious concerns about Freeh’s representation of Bandar, stating, “Someone who characterizes himself as a U.S. patriot and national security advocate ought not to be on the side of someone blackmailing people not to investigate crimes by threatening to withdraw a nation’s cooperation against terrorists.”

Prior to his tenure as the FBI Director, Freeh was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. He also forged an alliance with “Bandar Bush”. Freeh traveled to Saudi Arabia many times, meeting with Bandar and the highest levels of Saudi government in a relationship that started during Freeh’s investigation of the 1996 Khobar bombing. The secrecy surrounding it has been such that Dale Watson, the FBI’s Chief of Counter-Terrorism, once said, “It’s a killing offense around here to talk about it.”

What was Freeh doing during that time? He started courting Bandar, spending time in his heavily guarded mansion in McLean, Virginia. Bandar also visited Freeh at his FBI office, where the privileged Saudi visitor was the only one ever allowed to smoke cigars. Louis Freeh was bending over backwards to express his respect of the Arab culture and Sharia. He was “cultivating personal relationships” with Bandar, as well as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and other prominent Saudi officials. Freeh said, “The statutory authorities and the resources and all the other factors are significant, but my experience is that none of them are as important as those relationships.”

Could those relationships be the reason behind Freeh’s failure to pursue Saudi links to terror? His shameless hobnobbing with the Saudis has proven to be important (and lucrative) indeed, since Louis Freeh left the FBI and went on to represent Prince Bandar. The New Yorker reported that “Bandar, like Freeh, is skilled at cultivating people to get things done. Unlike other ambassadors, who exist on the ceremonial fringe, Bandar has real power.”

Prince Bandar said, “If you tell me… that we misused or got corrupted with $50 billion, I’ll tell you, “Yes.” … But, more important, more important — who are you to tell me this? … What I’m trying to tell you is, so what? We did not invent corruption, nor did those dissidents, who are so genius, discover it. This happened since Adam and Eve. … I mean, this is human nature.”

In 2008, when BAE refused to cooperate with the bribery investigation, the DOJ detained its former CEO Mike Turner and other top executives at the airport for questioning. The Times (Rupert Murdoch’s company, which boasts significant Saudi ownership) complained that “such humiliating behaviour by the DOJ was unusual because most companies co-operate with regulators.” Most companies may cooperate with regulators, but BAE was clearly not one of them.

On February 5, 2010, BAE pled guilty to foreign bribery charges, conspiring to defraud the United States, to make false statements about its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) compliance program, to violate the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). According to the statement of criminal information filed by the DOJ, BAE’s gains from these violations exceeded $200 million dollars. BAE was ordered to pay $447 million dollars in fines to U.S authorities – one of the largest criminal fines in the history of DOJ.

The DOJ filing reflected that BAE began serving as the prime contractor to the U.K. government in the mid-1980s, after the U.K. and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) entered into a formal agreement. BAE started to provide millions to Prince Bandar (whose name the DOJ conspicuously omitted from its charging papers, referring to “Bandar Bush” as “KSA official”), who was in a position of influence regarding sales of fighter jets, other defense materials and related support services. Over a billion dollars was reportedly sent to two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington, DC controlled by Prince Bandar. BAE also transferred over a billion dollars to a bank account in Switzerland controlled by an intermediary, being aware that these payments would also go to Prince Bandar. It is claimed that Bandar received over $1 billion dollars over the course of 10 years, with the knowledge and authorization of British Ministry of Defense officials.

Following BAE’s criminal conviction by the DOJ, the U.S. State Department also filed charges against the company for committing over 2,591 separate violations, which were settled in May of 2011 for a civil fine of $79 million dollars. In an Internet notice posted on March 1, 2010, the State Department advised export license applicants to remove BAE products from their applications, if possible. That portion of the notice was withdrawn the very next day. In a comment to “Defense News” about such blatant back-peddling, a Washington trade lawyer commented, “What State has done sends a terrible message. It makes it seem like State does not have a handle on what it wants to do – or that it’s being manipulated by outside interests.”

The State Department noted that BAE’s willful refusal to cooperate resulted in “the incomplete nature of the investigation” and therefore the government was unable “to assess fully the potential harm to U.S. national security.” Nonetheless, the settlement rescinded the statutory debarment, allowing BAE to get right back to business. BAE is apparently “too big to bar.” Although the company was sanctioned with a criminal fine of over $400 million for its foreign corrupt practices, none of BAE’s executives were prosecuted. A felony conviction could have interfered with BAE’s ability to compete for U.S. contracts, but it didn’t. No one seemed too concerned that BAE paid millions in bribes, to include payments made to the likes of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. In the 365 days that followed, BAE was awarded roughly $58 billion in US government contracts.

Similarly, nothing got in the way of BAE’s takeover of the US-based Armor Holdings. U.S. regulators approved the deal, in spite of the company’s history of multibillion dollar bribery and corruption. The Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch’s company, which boasts significant Saudi ownership) reported that the purchase would bolster BAE’s expansion in the U.S. and the increase of its involvement in military ground vehicles. Bribery and corruption continued. On July 13, 2011, Armor Holdings settled charges of bribery with the Department of Justice and the SEC. The charges arise out of bribes paid to obtain contracts to supply body armor for U.N. peacekeepers (SEC v. Armor Holdings, Inc., Case No. 1:11-CV-01271).  Armor Holdings agreed to pay a total of $5,690,744 to the SEC and $10,290,000 to the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve the charges. Of course, none of the company’s executives were prosecuted.

In 2005, BAE purchased United Defense Industries, maker of combat vehicles, artillery, naval guns, missile launchers and precision munitions.

The implication of these dealings is that a company under control of Saudi money and influence, with a documented history of bribery and corruption, owns an enormous slice of the American defense industry, striving to be the Pentagon’s biggest supplier. The threat surpasses the “Fast and Furious” faux pas on an unimaginable scale, because Saudi Arabia (with its undeniable links to terror) now controls massive military enterprises inside the U.S.

A report, prepared by a bipartisan panel of terrorism experts for the Council on Foreign Relations, sharply criticized the Bush administration for its lackadaisical approach towards Saudi Arabia’s involvement in terror funding, which remains a “lethal threat” to the United States. CFR report concludes that “it is worth stating clearly and unambiguously what official U.S. government spokespersons have not: “For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for al-Qaeda… It would be wrong to say that no progress has been made… But it would be equally wrong to overstate the progress that has been made—a mistake that is too often made by U.S. government spokespersons. In recent years, for instance, Saudi Arabia has taken two or three important steps to improve its capability to cooperate on these matters with the United States, for which it should be commended. A hundred more steps and Saudi Arabia may be where it needs to be.”

The report profoundly summarized why the U.S. is neither being taken seriously by the rest of the world in our “war on terror”, nor does our own government take it seriously enough to abandon its unholy alliances: “The Task Force appreciates the necessary delicacies of diplomacy and notes that previous administrations also used phrases that obfuscated more than they illuminated when making public statements on this subject. Nevertheless, when U.S. spokespersons are willing to say only that “Saudi Arabia is being cooperative” when they know very well all the ways in which it is not, both our allies and our adversaries can be forgiven for believing that the United States does not place a high priority on this issue.”

No one can deny the fact that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden himself was Saudi-born. During a 2002 raid on a Saudi-based charity, Benevolence International Foundation, FBI agents discovered a handwritten list of 20 alleged Al Qaeda financiers. Bin Laden referred to this informal financial network of prominent Saudi and Gulf individuals as “the Golden Chain.” FBI agents said that two Saudis with direct links to Al Qaeda, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, acted as conduits for financial aid for the 9/11 hijackers and other Saudi militants. They received “seemingly unlimited funding” from Saudi Arabia. Bassnan and his family reportedly obtained significant support from Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Prince Bandar.

In the days following 9/11, with the blessing of George W. Bush, at least six private jets and nearly two dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the Bin Ladens out of the U.S. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the Bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country. At least one private plane flew to pick up Saudi nationals while private flights were still grounded. The White House denied the very existence of that flight for years, until they finally revealed some of its details in response to a request from the 9/11 Commission. Former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 3, 2003 and stated in part: “It is true that members of the Bin Laden family were among those who left. We knew that at the time. I can’t say much more in open session, but it was a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House.” 

In 2002, the Congress noted that Saudi links to 9/11 are not being adequately explored.

In 2003, Los Angeles Times reported that the classified pages were kept out of a congressional report about 9/11. They demonstrated that the Saudi government not only provided significant money and aid to the suicide hijackers, but also allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups through suspect charities and other fronts. A U.S. official who has read the document said that it describes “very direct, very specific links” between Saudi officials, two of the San Diego-based hijackers and other potential co-conspirators “that cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental.”

In his book, “Intelligence Matters”, former Florida Senator Robert Graham also highlighted connections between a Saudi government spy and the planners of the terrorist attacks, criticizing the deletion of 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission Report that dealt with Saudi Arabia.

“The Commission: The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation”, written by Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, discusses revelations contained in a classified portion of a House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee report. It discusses the Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks. The pages pertaining to the Saudi connections never saw the light of day because the White House invoked executive privilege.

While the officials refuse to declassify this information, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld exposed them in her book, “Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It”. She was subsequently sued by Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz for “libel” and relentlessly harassed by his affiliates. Ehrenfeld, Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy, refused to be intimidated. She championed the SPEECH Act (the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage) to guard American authors and publishers from enforcement of frivolous foreign libel judgments that undermine the First Amendment and American due process standards. This bill was signed into law on August 10, 2010.

Frustrated by the government’s failure to hold anyone personally accountable in the BAE bribery scandal, the city of Harper Woods, Michigan has filed a lawsuit against BAE Systems over allegations that the company funneled bribes to Prince Bandar. Harper Woods was intimately involved in a $100 billion international arms deal, because its $40 million employee pension fund includes about $135,000 invested in BAE Systems. William Bradford Reynolds, who served as the Chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Reagan administration, signed on to represent Bandar in this lawsuit. During this litigation, a U.S. court froze Prince Bandar’s assets in the U.S., reportedly worth over $150 million dollars.

Bandar was clearly furious about these developments. When George W. Bush visited Saudi Arabia, he asked, “Where’s my pal Bandar?” In response, he was told that Bandar is unavailable. During Cheney’s visit to Saudi Arabia, old pal Bandar was similarly a no-show.

In 2009, the U.S. District court dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, holding that English law controls and therefore the city of Harper Woods has no standing to pursue the action. This was a predictable outcome, given the political control of the U.S. government over the judiciary. For the last quarter of a century, motivated by greed, many of our elected officials chose to hold the interests of Saudi Arabian oligarchs above those of the American people.

As of 2011, Bandar is back as a force in world politics. He was present in recent meetings between Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates (former director of the CIA) and King Abdullah, as well as during a separate visit by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. United States’ recently sold $60 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, including 84 new F-15 fighter jets (in addition to upgrading 70 of their existing F-15s), 190 helicopters as well as a wide array of missiles and bombs. The deal was announced while Congress was in recess, to ensure that it would move forward without interruptions by any possible opponents.

This was the largest purchase of American arms in Saudi Arabia’s history. Gates also urged King Abdullah to buy an upgraded version of Patriot air defense missiles and the Theater High-Altitude Area Defense System, which is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles of longer range. Gates told reporters, “I think the relationship is in a good place.” This “relationship” seems to be blooming indeed, since the U.S. continues to sell arms to the country with direct ties to terrorism.

You may have noticed that the mainstream media avoids discussing the issues of Saudi influence and links to 9/11. There’s a good explanation for that. It so happens that the second largest shareholder of News Corp. is Saudi billionaire, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. His slice of the pie is topped only by the holdings of Rupert Murdoch himself.

Al-Waleed involved himself in a variety of Western enterprises and powerhouses, including but not limited to Sony (now planning to launch more Arabic TV shows), Michael Jackson, Rupert Murdoch’s scandalous media empire, AOL/Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Compaq, Disneyland, eBay, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, McDonald’s, Motorola, PepsiCo, Priceline, Procter & Gamble and General Motors.

Not to be outdone, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, a company that owns MSNBC and is already firmly entrenched in Saudi Arabia, also approached Al-Waleed and solicited him to invest in GE.

In case you were wondering, the acronym “MSM” nowadays stands for “Mainly Saudi Media”.

Al-Waleed was quoted asserting that Arab countries can influence U.S. decision-making “if they unite through economic interests, not political…We have to be logical and understand that the U.S. administration is subject to U.S. public opinion…And to bring the decision-maker on your side, you not only have to be active inside the U.S. Congress or the administration, but also inside U.S. society.” Al-Waleed donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the building of a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, also known as the “Ground Zero Mosque“. The majority of the American public didn’t take too kindly to that idea.

To bolster their public image, the Saudis hired a PR firm and scores of high-powered Washington lobbyists. Saudi Arabia’s shabby public image in the U.S. has long been exacerbated by reports of a barbaric judicial system that believes in chopping off heads and limbs, complete absence of religious freedom, nonexistent human rights and ongoing abuses against women. According to the Department of Justice records, Saudi Arabia has spent over $20 million dollars on public relations, advertising and lobbying. Relentless PR efforts to clean up the Saudi image initially failed (especially when Al-Waleed claimed that the U.S. Foreign policy is to blame for the attacks of 9/11), but later started to pay off. The positive image of Saudi Arabia is being pushed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Starting in 2002, series of ads appeared on American TV, in major newspapers and magazines, were broadcast on radio stations and popped up all over the Internet. All of them featured slogans, representing Saudis as America’s allies in the “war on terror”. In August 2004, following the final release of the 9/11 Commission Report, the Saudi government paid for a series of new radio ads, repeatedly reiterating that no link had been established between Saudi Arabia and the terror attacks of 9/11.

One of the PR firms hired by Saudi Arabia, Qorvis Communications, who received millions for their activities, lobbied on Saudi Arabia’s behalf with US Congressional staffers 62 times in the first half of 2004. Saudi Arabia also arranged series of meetings with the editorial boards of major US newspapers, including The New York Times and USA Today, and secured appearances on numerous cable news programs.

A feature film “Unknown” prominently features a character of a benevolent and magnanimous Saudi prince who bankrolled an expensive research project to create a genetically modified strain of corn that could eliminate world hunger. The film “Unknown” is based on the novel “Out of My Head” by Didier van Cauwelaert. There is no such a character in the original version of the story. One has to wonder if this feature film is just another extension of Saudi Arabia’s multimillion dollar PR campaign.

Anything that challenges the dominance of Saudi Arabia, as it holds the rest of the world over an oil barrel, or exposes the complicity of First World country governments is assaulted with all the might of the brute force that deems itself too powerful to be held accountable. It’s quite a spectacular feat for a primitive oligarchy of Saudi Arabia to achieve such a level of control over the world’s supposed super-powers through oil and money, usurping ownership of Western arms, politics and mainstream media. Money does make the world go ‘round – and with this much money being thrown around, our world seems to be spinning out of control.

The post Saudi States of America: BAE, Iran-Contra, 9/11 and Beyond appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The post Publicly, Separately, Under Oath, Accountable appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

No more than “50-75 ‘al-Qaeda types’ in Afghanistan”, according to the CIA, have been responsible for draining the US government by no less than US $10 billion a month, or $120 billion a year.

At the same time, outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been adamant that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is “premature”. The Pentagon wants the White House to “hold off on ending the Afghanistan troop surge until the fall of 2012.”

That of course shadows the fact that even if there were a full draw down, the final result would be the same number of US troops before the Obama administration-ordered AfPak surge.

And even if there is some sort of draw down, it will mostly impact troops in supporting roles – which can be easily replaced by “private contractors” (euphemism for mercenaries). There are already over 100,000 “private contractors” in Afghanistan.

It’s raining trillions

A recent, detailed study by the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University revealed that the war on terror has cost the US economy, so far, from $3.7 trillion (the most conservative estimate) to $4.4 trillion (the moderate estimate). Then there are interest payments on these costs – another $1 trillion.

That makes the total cost of the war on terror to be, at least, a staggering $5.4 trillion. And that does not include, as the report mentions, “additional macroeconomic consequences of war spending”, or a promised (and undelivered) $5.3 billion reconstruction aid for Afghanistan.

Who’s profiting from this bonanza? That’s easy – US military contractors and a global banking/financial elite.

The notion that the US government would spend $10 billion a month just to chase a few “al-Qaeda types” in the Hindu Kush is nonsense.

The Pentagon itself has dismissed the notion – insisting that just capturing and killing Osama bin Laden does not change the equation; the Taliban are still a threat.

In numerous occasions Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself has characterised his struggle as a “nationalist movement”. Apart from the historical record showing that Washington always fears and fights nationalist movements, Omar’s comment also shows that the Taliban strategy has nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s aim of establishing a Caliphate via global jihad.

So al-Qaeda is not the major enemy – not anymore, nor has it been for quite some time now. This is a war between a superpower and a fierce, nationalist, predominantly Pashtun movement – of which the Taliban are a major strand; regardless of their medieval ways, they are fighting a foreign occupation and doing what they can to undermine a puppet regime (Hamid Karzai’s).

Look at my bankruptcy model

In the famous November 1, 2004 video that played a crucial part in assuring the reelection of George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden – or a clone of Osama bin Laden – once again expanded on how the “mujahedeen bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”

That’s the exact same strategy al-Qaeda has deployed against the US; according to Bin Laden at the time, “all that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note, other than some benefits to their private companies.”

The record since 9/11 shows that’s exactly what’s happening. The war on terror has totally depleted the US treasury – to the point that the White House and Congress are now immersed in a titanic battle over a $4 trillion debt ceiling.

What is never mentioned is that these trillions of dollars were ruthlessly subtracted from the wellbeing of average Americans – smashing the carefully constructed myth of the American dream.

So what’s the endgame for these trillions of dollars?

The Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine implies a global network of military bases – with particular importance to those surrounding, bordering and keeping in check key competitors Russia and China.

This superpower projection – of which Afghanistan was, and remains, a key node, in the intersection of South and Central Asia – led, and may still lead, to other wars in Iraq, Iran and Syria.

The network of US military bases in the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and South/Central Asia is a key reason for remaining in Afghanistan forever.

But it’s not the only reason.

Surge, bribe and stay

It all comes back, once again, to Pipelineistan – and one of its outstanding chimeras; the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan (TAP) gas pipeline, also known once as the Trans-Afghan Pipeline, which might one day become TAPI if India decides to be on board.

The US corporate media simply refuses to cover what is one of the most important stories of the early 21st century.

Washington has badly wanted TAP since the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration was negotiating with the Taliban; the talks broke down because of transit fees, even before 9/11, when the Bush administration decided to change the rhetoric from “a carpet of gold” to “a carpet of bombs”.

TAP is a classic Pipelineistan gambit; the US supporting the flow of gas from Central Asia to global markets, bypassing both Iran and Russia. If it ever gets built, it will cost over $10 billion.

It needs a totally pacified Afghanistan – still another chimera – and a Pakistani government totally implicated in Afghanistan’s security, still a no-no as long as Islamabad’s policy is to have Afghanistan as its “strategic depth”, a vassal state, in a long-term confrontation mindset against India.

It’s no surprise the Pentagon and the Pakistani Army enjoy such a close working relationship. Both Washington and Islamabad regard Pashtun nationalism as an existential threat.

The 2,500-kilometer-long, porous, disputed border with Afghanistan is at the core of Pakistan’s interference in its neighbour’s affairs.

Washington is getting desperate because it knows the Pakistani military will always support the Taliban as much as they support hardcore Islamist groups fighting India. Washington also knows Pakistan’s Afghan policy implies containing India’s influence in Afghanistan at all costs.

Just ask General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief – and a Pentagon darling to boot; he always says his army is India-centric, and, therefore, entitled to “strategic depth” in Afghanistan.

It’s mind-boggling that 10 years and $5.4 trillion dollars later, the situation is exactly the same. Washington still badly wants “its” pipeline – which will in fact be a winning game mostly for commodity traders, global finance majors and Western energy giants.

From the standpoint of these elites, the ideal endgame scenario is global Robocop NATO – helped by hundreds of thousands of mercenaries – “protecting” TAP (or TAPI) while taking a 24/7 peek on what’s going on in neighbours Russia and China.

Sharp wits in India have described Washington’s tortuous moves in Afghanistan as “surge, bribe and run”. It’s rather “surge, bribe and stay”. This whole saga might have been accomplished without a superpower bankrupting itself, and without immense, atrocious, sustained loss of life, but hey – nobody’s perfect.

The post Why the US Won't Leave Afghanistan appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

This article mentions Prince Bandar, but doesn’t mention the allegation that his wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal, was connected to some of the money sent to the two hijackers in San Diego. It also mentions Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed without mentioning the allegation that he ordered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire transfer $100k to Mohammad Atta. It should be noted that a “Memorandum For The Record” from the 9/11 Commission was recently discovered that said, “there is absolutely no evidence Atta received a wire a transfer from the Pakistani ISI,” but there are major redactions prior to that statement, and after it. Also, there is no mention of Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed or Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. I have never seen a statement from any official explain why the allegations of the $100k wire transfer are wrong or unsubstantiated. – Jon Gold

For 10 years now, a major question about 9/11 has remained unresolved. It was, as 9/11-commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, “Had the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?” There was information that pointed to the answer, but the commissioners apparently deemed it too disquieting to share in full with the public.

The idea that al-Qaeda had not acted alone was there from the start. “The terrorists do not function in a vacuum,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters the week after 9/11. “I know a lot, and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.” Pressed to elaborate, Rumsfeld was silent for a long moment. Then, saying it was a sensitive matter, he changed the subject.

Three years later, the commission would consider whether any of three foreign countries in particular might have had a role in the attacks. Two were avowed foes of the United States: Iraq and Iran. The third had long been billed as a close friend: Saudi Arabia.

In its report, the commission stated that it had seen no “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al-Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Iran, the commission found, had long had contacts with al-Qaeda and had allowed its operatives—including a number of the future hijackers—to travel freely through its airports. Though there was no evidence that Iran “was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack,” the commissioners called on the government to investigate further.

This year, in late May, attorneys for bereaved 9/11 family members said there was revealing new testimony from three Iranian defectors. Former senior commission counsel Dietrich Snell was quoted as saying in an affidavit that there was now “convincing evidence the government of Iran provided material support to al-Qaeda in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attack.” That evidence, however, has yet to surface.

As for Saudi Arabia, America’s purported friend, you would have thought from the reaction of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that the commission had found nothing dubious in his country’s role. “The clear statements by this independent, bipartisan commission,” he declared, “have debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia.” Yet no finding in the report categorically exonerated Saudi Arabia.

The commission’s decision as to what to say on the subject had been made amid discord and tension. Late one night in 2004, as last-minute changes to the report were being made, investigators who had worked on the Saudi angle received alarming news. Their team leader, Dietrich Snell, was at the office, closeted with executive director Philip Zelikow, making major changes to their material and removing key elements.

The investigators, Michael Jacobson and Rajesh De, hurried to the office to confront Snell. With lawyerly caution, he said he thought there was insufficient substance to their case against the Saudis. They considered the possibility of resigning, then settled for a compromise. Much of the telling information they had collected would survive in the report, but only in tiny print, hidden in the endnotes.

The commissioners did say in the body of the report that the long official friendship of the United States and Saudi Arabia could not be unconditional. The relationship had to be about more than oil, had to include—and this in bold type—“a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred.”

It had been far from clear, and for the longest time, that the Saudis were thus committed. More than seven years before 9/11, the first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Khilewi, had defected to the United States, bringing with him thousands of pages of documents that, he said, showed the regime’s corruption, abuse of human rights, and support for terrorism. At the same time, he addressed a letter to then crown prince Abdullah, calling for “a move towards democracy.” The Saudi royals, Khilewi said, responded by threatening his life. The U.S. government, for its part, offered him little protection. F.B.I. officials, moreover, declined to accept the documents the defecting diplomat had brought with him.

In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing,” when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”

The reference to a Saudi citizen having funded Yousef closely fit the part played by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa. He was active in the Philippines, fronted as a charity organizer at the relevant time, and founded a charity that gave money to Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief al-Qaeda planner of 9/11, during the initial plotting to destroy U.S. airliners.

When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine and a welcome home from “a high-ranking official.” A Philippine newspaper would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne.

In June 1996, according to published reports, while in Paris for the biennial international weapons bazaar, a group including a Saudi prince and Saudi financiers gathered at the Royal Monceau hotel, near the Saudi Embassy. The subject was bin Laden and what to do about him. After two recent bombings of American targets in Saudi Arabia, one of them just that month, the fear was that the Saudi elite itself would soon be targeted. At the meeting at the Monceau, French intelligence reportedly learned, it was decided that bin Laden was to be kept at bay by payment of huge sums in protection money.

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
Special Relationships

After 9/11, Prince Turki would deny that any such deal was done with bin Laden. Other Saudi royals, however, may have been involved in payoff arrangements. A former Clinton administration official has claimed—and U.S. intelligence sources concurred—that at least two Saudi princes had been paying, on behalf of the kingdom, what amounted to protection money since 1995. The former official added, “The deal was, they would turn a blind eye to what he was doing elsewhere. ‘You don’t conduct operations here, and we won’t disrupt them elsewhere.’ ”

American and British official sources, speaking later with Simon Henderson, Baker Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, named the two princes in question. They were, Henderson told the authors, Prince Naif, the interior minister, and Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged payments, according to Henderson’s sources, had amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It had been “Saudi official money—not their own.”

Before 9/11, American officials visiting Riyadh usually discovered that it was futile to ask the Saudis for help in fighting terrorism. George Tenet, who became C.I.A. director during Bill Clinton’s second term, vividly recalled an audience he was granted by Prince Naif, the crown prince’s brother. Naif, who oversaw domestic intelligence, began the exchange with “an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi ‘special’ relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep security-related information from their U.S. allies.”

There came a moment when Tenet had had enough. Breaching royal etiquette, he placed his hand on the prince’s knee and said, “Your Royal Highness, what do you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qaeda murderers?” Naif’s reaction, Tenet thought, was what looked “like a prolonged state of shock.”

On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, F.B.I. director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. “You’ve got to be kidding,” retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. “They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”

Several years later, in two long conversations with Jean-Charles Brisard, author of a study on terrorist financing for a French intelligence agency, O’Neill was still venting his frustration. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” he said, “are in Saudi Arabia.” The answers and the clues, however, remained out of reach, in part, O’Neill told Brisard, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil meant that Saudi Arabia had “much more leverage on us than we have on the kingdom.” And, he added, because “high-ranking personalities and families in the Saudi kingdom” had close ties to bin Laden.

These conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.

At his residence outside Washington on the morning of September 11, Prince Bandar rushed out an embassy statement. The kingdom, it read, “condemned the regrettable and inhuman bombings and acts which took place today. . . . Saudi Arabia strongly condemns such acts, which contravene all religious values and human civilized concepts; and extends sincere condolences.”

Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel, relations between Riyadh and Washington had recently become unprecedentedly shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America’s apparent complacency over the plight of the Palestinians. That spring he had pointedly declined an invitation to the White House. Three weeks before 9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, he had snapped. Bandar, the crown prince’s nephew, was told to deliver an uncompromising message to President Bush.

“I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias whereby the blood of an Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child. . . . A time comes when peoples and nations part. . . . Starting today, you go your way and we will go our way. From now on, we will protect our national interests, regardless of where America’s interests lie in the region.” There was more, much more, and it rocked the Bush administration. The president responded with a placatory letter that seemed to go far toward the Saudi position of endorsing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Then came the shattering events of Tuesday the 11th. In Riyadh within 24 hours—himself now in turn placatory—Abdullah pulled the lever that gave his nation its only real power, the economic sword it could draw or sheathe at will. He ordered that nine million barrels of oil be dispatched to the United States over the next two weeks. The certainty of supply had the effect, it is said, of averting what had otherwise been a possibility at that time—an oil shortage that would have pushed prices through the roof and caused, on top of the economic effects of the 9/11 calamity, a major financial crisis.

Into the mix, on Wednesday the 12th, came troubling news. In a phone call that night, a C.I.A. official told Ambassador Bandar that 15 of the hijackers had been Saudis. As Bandar recalled it, he felt the world collapsing around him. “That was a disaster,” Crown Prince Abdullah’s foreign-affairs adviser Adel al-Jubeir has said, “because bin Laden, at that moment, had made in the minds of Americans Saudi Arabia into an enemy.”

Royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and return home. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, decamped within hours of the attacks to the Four Seasons. They felt “extremely concerned for their personal safety,” they explained to the local F.B.I. field office, and bodyguards apparently deemed the Four Seasons more secure.

In Washington, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden family. One of Osama’s brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called the Saudi Embassy wanting to know where he could best go to be safe. He was installed in a room at the Watergate Hotel and told to stay there until advised that transportation was available. Across the country, more than 20 bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.

In Lexington, Kentucky, the mecca of Thoroughbred racing in America, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd’s, had been attending the annual yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed quickly began to round up members of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his son and a couple of friends, who were in Florida, to charter a plane and get themselves to Lexington to connect with the plane he was taking home. They managed it, one of them told the security man hired for the flight, because “his father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr.”

Late on the night of the 13th, Prince Bandar’s assistant called the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the assistant said, in getting bin Laden “family members” out of the country. Watson said Saudi officials should call the White House or the State Department. The request found its way to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the flights. He has said he has “no recollection” of having cleared it with anyone more senior in the administration.

An F.B.I. memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the investigation. Asked on CNN the same year whether he could say unequivocally that no one on the evacuation flights had been involved in 9/11, Saudi Embassy information officer Nail al-Jubeir responded by saying he was sure of only two things, that “there is the existence of God, and then we will die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don’t know.”
Saudis in Denial

In spite of the fact that it had almost immediately become known that 15 of those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush did not hold Saudi Arabia’s official representative in Washington at arm’s length. As early as the evening of September 13, he kept a scheduled appointment to receive Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men had known each other for years. They reportedly greeted each other with a friendly embrace, smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, and conversed with Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

There is a photograph of the meeting, which has been published in the past. This year, however, when the authors asked the George W. Bush presidential library for a copy, the library responded in an e-mail that the former president’s office was “not inclined to release the image from the balcony at this time.”

It would soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush administration wanted rapprochement. The president would invite Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, press him to come when he hesitated, and—when he accepted—welcome him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were there, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell and First Lady Laura Bush.

It seems that 9/11 barely came up during the discussions. Speaking with the press afterward, the president cut off one reporter when he began to raise the subject.

Official Saudi Arabia was tortoise-slow in acknowledging even the fact that almost all of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Two days after Bandar was given that information, his spokesman said the terrorists had probably used stolen identities.

“There is no proof or evidence,” claimed Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, minister of Islamic affairs, “that Saudis carried out these attacks.” Prince Sultan doubted whether only bin Laden and his followers were responsible, and hinted that “another power with advanced technical expertise” must have been behind 9/11. As of December 2001, Prince Naif was saying he still did not believe 15 hijackers had been Saudis.

Not until February 2002 did Naif acknowledge the truth. “The names we have got confirmed [it],” he then conceded. “Their families have been notified. . . . I believe they were taken advantage of in the name of religion, and regarding certain issues pertaining to the Arab nation, especially the issue of Palestine.”

Even after that admission, Sultan and Naif were not done. They began pointing to a familiar enemy. “It is enough to see a number of [U.S.] congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes,” Sultan said, “to explain the allegations against us.” In late 2002, Naif blamed the “Zionists,” saying, “We put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them I think [the Zionists] are behind these events.”

As the months passed, leading Saudis would suggest publicly that their nation had been entirely open with the United States on the security front all along—even claim that they had alerted Washington in advance to possible calamity.

A year after 9/11, Prince Turki expounded at length on the relationship the G.I.D. had had with the C.I.A. From about 1996, he wrote, “at the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al-Qaeda with the C.I.A. And in 1997 the Saudi minister of defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in general and on bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) in particular.”

There was a core of truth to this. The G.I.D. and U.S. services had had a long, if uneasy, understanding on sharing intelligence. Other Saudi claims were far more startling.

Bandar had hinted right after 9/11 that both the U.S. and Saudi intelligence services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were publicly admitting. In 2007, however, by which time he had risen to become national-security adviser to former crown prince—now king—Abdullah, Bandar produced a bombshell. “Saudi security,” he asserted, “had been actively following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision. . . . If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened.”

Though there was no official U.S. reaction to that claim, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit, later dismissed it in his book Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq as a “fabrication.”

Prince Turki had long since come out with an allegation similar to Bandar’s, but far more specific. He said that in late 1999 and early 2000—just before the first two future 9/11 hijackers reached the United States—his staff had informed the C.I.A. that both men were terrorists. “What we told them,” he said, “was these people were on our watch list from previous activities of al-Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle arms into the Kingdom in 1997.”

C.I.A. spokesman Bill Harlow dismissed Turki’s claim as being supported by “not a shred of evidence.” Harlow said information on the two hijackers-to-be had been passed on only a month after the attacks. What the 9/11 commission thought of Turki’s assertion has not been made public. The National Archives told the authors that it was not permissible even to say whether commission files contain a record of an interview with the former head of the G.I.D. Information on the intelligence background to 9/11 apparently remains highly sensitive.
The Hijackers’ Helpers

Saudi Arabia long remained a black hole for American official investigators probing 9/11. They were not, for example, allowed access to the families of those believed to have carried out the attacks. “We’re getting zero cooperation,” former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro said a month after the attacks.

Within the United States, however, the probe proceeded intensively and over several years. And some of the most significant information gleaned, it turned out, concerned the same two terrorists to whom Prince Turki had alluded. They are said to have been handpicked by Osama bin Laden to be first to enter the United States, and they would eventually be part of the group that seized American Airlines flight 77, the plane used in the strike against the Pentagon.

They were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both Saudis, both experienced jihadis—holy warriors—though still in their mid-20s. They entered the country through Los Angeles International Airport as early as January 15, 2000, with scant knowledge of the English language and zero experience of life in the West. The 9/11-commission report declared it “unlikely” that the pair “would have come to the United States without arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in advance of their arrival.”

The investigation identified individuals who helped or may have helped Mihdhar and Hazmi following their arrival in California—whether by happenstance or because of foreknowledge.

An imam named Fahad al-Thumairy, an accredited diplomat appointed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs to liaise with the huge nearby mosque, served at the time at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. According to one witness, Thumairy had at the relevant time arranged for two men—whom the witness first identified from photographs as having been the two terrorists—to be given a tour of the area by car.

A fellow Saudi, a San Diego resident named Omar al-Bayoumi, said by individuals interviewed to have had frequent contact with Thumairy, acknowledged that he met Mihdhar and Hazmi during a visit to Los Angeles on February 1, two weeks after their arrival.

According to a person interviewed by the F.B.I., Bayoumi said before the trip that he was going to “pick up visitors.” What is agreed by all is that he made the journey by car, accompanied by an American Muslim named Caysan bin Don. On the way, bin Don said, Bayoumi mentioned that he was accustomed to going to the consulate to obtain religious materials. They did stop at the consulate, where, according to bin Don, a man in a Western business suit, with a full beard, greeted Bayoumi and took him off to talk in an office. Bayoumi emerged some time later, carrying a box of Korans. He would describe the encounter differently, saying he was “uncertain” with whom he had met and “didn’t really know people in [the Saudi ministry of] Islamic Affairs.”

Both men agreed, however, that they proceeded to a restaurant and while there—this is the crucial moment in their story—met and talked with future hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, who had just arrived in the country. Bayoumi and bin Don were to tell the F.B.I. the encounter occurred merely by chance.

Bayoumi urged Mihdhar and Hazmi to come south to San Diego, assisted them in finding accommodations, and stayed in touch. On the day the two terrorists moved into the apartment they first used, next door to Bayoumi’s, there were four calls between his phone and that of the local imam, New Mexico-born Anwar Aulaqi—later to be characterized in the congressional report on 9/11 as having served as “spiritual adviser” to Mihdhar and Hazmi.

Bayoumi’s income, which was paid by Ercan, a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Administration—though, according to a fellow employee, he did no known work—reportedly increased hugely following the future hijackers’ arrival. Another Saudi living in San Diego, Osama Basnan, was also of interest to 9/11 investigators probing the money flow.

A three-page section of Congress’s Joint Inquiry report (the product of joint hearings on the 9/11 attacks by the House and Senate intelligence committees), containing more lines withheld than released, tells us only that Basnan was a close associate of Bayoumi in San Diego. According to former U.S. senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the inquiry, and to press reports, regular checks flowed in 2000 from Basnan to Bayoumi’s wife. The payments, ostensibly made to help cover medical treatment, had originated with the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

There are separate reasons to question the activity of Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan. Thumairy, who had a reputation as a fundamentalist, was later refused re-entry into the United States—well after 9/11—on the ground that he “might be connected with terrorist activity.” Bayoumi had first attracted the interest of the F.B.I. years earlier, and the bureau later learned he had “connections to terrorist elements.” He left the country two months before the attacks.

As for Basnan, his name had come up in a counterterrorism inquiry a decade earlier. He had reportedly hosted a party for Omar Abdel Rahman—today notorious as the “Blind Sheikh,” serving life for his part in plotting to blow up the World Trade Center and other New York City landmarks in 1993—when he visited the United States, and had once claimed he did more for Islam than Bayoumi ever did. A partially censored commission document suggests that—after Mihdhar, Hazmi, and fellow future 9/11 terrorists arrived in the United States to learn to fly—a Basnan associate was in e-mail and phone contact with accused key 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. A year after 9/11, Basnan was arrested for visa fraud and deported.

Available information suggests that two of the trio were employed by or had links to the Saudi regime—Thumairy through his accreditation by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Bayoumi through his employment by the company linked to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. At least five people told the F.B.I. they considered Bayoumi to be some sort of government agent. The C.I.A., Bob Graham has said, thought Basnan was also an agent. Graham also cited an agency memo that referred to “incontrovertible evidence” of support for the terrorists within the Saudi government.
Problematic Interviews

In 2003 and 2004, but only following a high-level request from the White House, 9/11-commission staff were able to make two visits to Saudi Arabia to interview Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan.

The questioners, a recently released commission memo notes, believed Thumairy “was deceptive during both interviews. . . . His answers were either inconsistent or at times in direct conflict with information we have from other sources.” Most significantly, he denied knowing Bayoumi, let alone Mihdhar and Hazmi. Shown a photograph of Bayoumi, he did not budge. He knew no one of that name, he said. Then, prompted by a whispered interjection from one of the Saudi officials present, he said he had heard of Bayoumi—but only from 9/11 news coverage.

At a second interview, told by commission staff that witnesses had spoken of seeing him with Bayoumi, Thumairy said perhaps they had taken someone else for him. Told that telephone records showed numerous calls between his phones and Bayoumi’s phones, just before the arrival of Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States, Thumairy was stumped. Perhaps, he ventured, his phone number had been assigned to somebody else after he had it? Perhaps the calls had been made by someone else using Bayoumi’s phone? Everything Thumairy came up with, his questioners noted, was “implausible.”

Bayoumi, interviewed earlier, made a more favorable impression. He stuck to his story about having met Mihdhar and Hazmi by chance. He said that he had rarely seen them after they came to San Diego, that they had been his neighbors for only a few days. Bayoumi said he had then decided he did not want to have much to do with them. Philip Zelikow, who was present during the interview, did not think Bayoumi had been a Saudi agent.

The commission report, however, was to note that Bayoumi’s passport contained a distinguishing mark that may be acquired by “especially devout Muslims”—or be associated with “adherence to al-Qaeda.” Investigators had also turned up something else. Bayoumi’s salary had been approved by a Saudi official whose son’s photograph was later found on a computer disk in Pakistan that also contained photographs of three of the hijackers. The son, Saud al-Rashid, was produced for an interview in Saudi Arabia. He admitted having been in Afghanistan and having “cleansed” his passport of the evidence that he had traveled there. He said, though, that he had known nothing of the 9/11 plot. Commission staff who questioned Rashid thought he had been “deceptive.”

Finally, there was Basnan. The commission’s interview with him, Dietrich Snell wrote afterward, established only “the witness’ utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject.” His demeanor “engendered a combination of confrontation, evasiveness, and speechmaking … his repudiation of statements made by him on prior occasions,” and the “inherent incredibility of many of his assertions when viewed in light of the totality of the available evidence.”

Two men did not face questioning by commission investigators. One of them, a Saudi religious official named Saleh al-Hussayen, certainly should have, although his name does not appear in the commission report. Hussayen, who was involved in the administration of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, had been in the States for some three weeks before 9/11. For four days before the attacks, he had stayed at a hotel in Virginia.

Then, on September 10, he had made an unexplained move. With his wife, he checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia—the hotel at which 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi were spending their last night alive.

Commission memos state that F.B.I. agents arrived at Hussayen’s room at the Marriott after midnight on the 11th. The Saudi official began “muttering and drooping his head,” sweating and drooling. Then he fell out of his chair and appeared to lose consciousness for a few moments. Paramedics summoned to the room were puzzled. Could the patient be “faking”?, they asked the agents. Doctors who examined Hussayen at a local hospital, moreover, found nothing wrong with him. An F.B.I. agent said later that the interview had been cut short because—the agent suggested—Hussayen “feigned a seizure.”

Asked by an F.B.I. agent why they had moved to the Marriott, Hussayen’s wife said it was because they had wanted a room with a kitchenette. There was no sign, however, that the kitchenette in the room had been used. Asked whether she thought her husband could have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in any way, she replied, “I don’t know.” Agents never did obtain an adequate interview with Saleh al-Hussayen. Instead of continuing with his tour of the United States, he flew back to Saudi Arabia—and went on to head the administration of the two holy mosques. It remains unknown whether he had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of 9/11, or whether his presence at the Marriott that night was, as Bayoumi claimed of his meeting with the two terrorists, just a matter of chance.

As Hussayen left Virginia for home, other F.B.I. agents in the state were interviewing former San Diego-area imam Anwar Aulaqi. He did not deny having had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi in California and later—with Hazmi—in Virginia. He could not deny that he had transferred from San Diego to the East Coast in a time frame that paralleled theirs. He made nothing of it, however, and U.S. authorities apparently pursued the matter no further.

Aulaqi had reportedly preached in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol shortly before 9/11. Not long afterward, he lunched at the Pentagon—in an area undamaged by the strike in which his acquaintances Mihdhar and Hazmi had played such a leading role. The reason for the lunch? An outreach effort to ease tensions between Muslim Americans and non-Muslims.

Though American-born, Aulaqi is the son of a former minister of agriculture in Yemen. He remained on and off in the United States after 9/11, apparently unimpeded, before departing first for Britain and eventually for Yemen. Suspicion that he may have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot is fueled by the fact that the phone number of his Virginia mosque turned up among items found in an apartment used by accused conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh, who now languishes in Guantánamo.

Only seven years later, starting in 2009, did Aulaqi begin to gain world notoriety. His name has been associated with: the multiple shootings by a U.S. Army major at Fort Hood, the almost successful attempt to explode a bomb on an airliner en route to Detroit, the major car-bomb scare in Times Square, and the last-minute discovery of concealed explosives aboard cargo planes destined for the United States.

When Aulaqi’s name began to feature in the Western press, Yemen’s foreign minister cautioned that, pending real evidence, he should be considered not a terrorist but a preacher. President Obama took a different view. By early 2010 he had authorized the C.I.A. and the U.S. military to seek out, capture, or kill the Yemeni—assigning Aulaqi essentially the same status as that assigned at the time to Osama bin Laden. Aulaqi remains, as Zelikow noted when his name finally hit the headlines, “a 9/11 loose end.”

Taken together, the roles and activities of Thumairy, Bayoumi, Basnan, Hussayen, and Aulaqi—and the dubious accounts some of them have given of themselves—heightened suspicion that the perpetrators of 9/11 had support and sponsorship from backers never clearly identified.
Trouble on the Home Front

Congress’s Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. . . . It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.”

Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” Was it credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation? “I think,” the former senator said, “that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”

At page 396 of the Joint Inquiry’s report, in the final section of the body of the report, a yawning gap appears. All 28 pages of Part Four, entitled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” have been redacted. The pages are there, but—with the rare exception of an occasional surviving word or fragmentary, meaningless clause—they are entirely blank. The decision to censor that entire section caused a furor in 2003.

Inquiries established that, while the withholdings were technically the responsibility of the C.I.A., the agency would not have obstructed release of most of the pages. The order that they must remain secret had come from President Bush.

Bob Graham and his Republican co-chairman, former senator Richard Shelby, felt strongly that the bulk of the withheld material could and should have been made public. So did Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat in the House. Shelby said, “My judgment is that 95 percent of that information should be declassified, become uncensored, so the American people would know.”

Know what? “I can’t tell you what’s in those pages,” the Joint Inquiry’s staff director, Eleanor Hill, said. “I can tell you that the chapter deals with information that our committee found in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. files that was very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for the hijackers.” The focus of the material, leaks to the press soon established, had been Saudi Arabia.

There were, sources said, additional details about Bayoumi, who had helped Mihdhar and Hazmi in California, and about his associate Basnan. The censored portion of the report had stated that Anwar Aulaqi, the San Diego imam, had been a “central figure” in a support network for the future hijackers.

A U.S. official who had read the censored section told the Los Angeles Times that it described “very direct, very specific links” with Saudi officials, links that “cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental.” The New York Times journalist Philip Shenon has written that Senator Graham and his investigators became “convinced that a number of sympathetic Saudi officials, possibly within the sprawling Islamic Affairs Ministry, had known that al-Qaeda terrorists were entering the United States beginning in 2000 in preparation for some sort of attack. Graham believed the Saudi officials had directed spies operating in the United States to assist them.”

Most serious of all, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported that the information uncovered by the investigation had drawn “apparent connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers.” Absent release of the censored pages, one can only surmise what the connections may have been.

There may be a clue, however, in the first corroboration—arising from the authors’ interview with a former C.I.A. officer—of an allegation relating to the capture in Pakistan, while the Joint Inquiry was at work, of senior bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. Many months of interrogation followed, including, from about June or July 2002, no fewer than 83 sessions of waterboarding. Zubaydah was the first al-Qaeda prisoner on whom that controversial “enhanced technique” was used.

John Kiriakou, then a C.I.A. operative serving in Pakistan, had played a leading part in the operation that led to the capture of Zubaydah—gravely wounded—in late March that year. Back in Washington early that fall, Kiriakou informed the authors, he was told by colleagues that cables on the interrogation reported that Zubaydah had come up with the names of several Saudi princes. He “raised their names in sort of a mocking fashion, [indicating] he had the support of the Saudi government.” The C.I.A. followed up by running name traces, Kiriakou said.

Zubaydah had named three princes, but by late July all three had died—within a week of one another. First to go was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, the leading figure in the international horse-racing community who was mentioned earlier, in our account of Saudis hastening to get out of the United States after 9/11. Ahmed, a nephew of both King Fahd’s and Prince Sultan’s, died of a heart attack following abdominal surgery at the age of 43, according to the Saudis.

Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, also a nephew of King Fahd’s and Prince Sultan’s, reportedly died in a car accident. A third prince, Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, whose father was a cousin of Fahd’s and Sultan’s, was said to have died “of thirst.”

Former C.I.A. officer Kiriakou later said his colleagues had told him they believed that what Zubaydah had told them about the princes was true. “We had known for years,” he told the authors, “that Saudi royals—I should say elements of the royal family—were funding al-Qaeda.”

In 2003, during the brouhaha about the redacted chapter in the Joint Inquiry report, Crown Prince Abdullah’s spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, made a cryptic comment that has never been further explained. The Saudi regime’s own probe, he said, had uncovered “wrongdoing by some.” He noted, though, that the royal family had thousands of members, and insisted that the regime itself had no connection to the 9/11 plot.

More than 40 U.S. senators clamored for the release of the censored section of the report. They included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Sam Brownback, Olympia Snowe, and Pat Roberts.

Nothing happened.

Bob Graham, with his long experience in the field as a member and chair not only of the Joint Inquiry but also of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has continued to voice his anger over the censorship even in retirement. President Bush, he wrote in his book Intelligence Matters in 2004, had “engaged in a cover-up . . . to protect not only the agencies that failed but also America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. . . . He has done so by misclassifying information on national security data. While the information may be embarrassing or politically damaging, its revelation would not damage national security.” Richard Shelby concluded independently that virtually all the censored pages were “being kept secret for reasons other than national security.”

“It was,” Graham wrote, “as if the president’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” In Graham’s view, Bush’s role in suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office.

Within weeks of his inauguration, in 2009, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, made a point of receiving relatives of those bereaved on 9/11. The widow of one of those who died at the World Trade Center, Kristen Breitweiser, has said that she brought the new president’s attention to the infamous censored section of the Joint Inquiry report. Obama told her, she said afterward, that he was willing to get the suppressed material released. Two years later, the chapter remains classified—and the White House will not say why. “If the 28 pages were to be made public,” said one of the officials who was privy to them before President Bush ordered their removal, “I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight.”
Blame It on Iraq

The 9/11-commission report certainly blurred the truth about the Saudi role. By the time it was published, in July 2004, more than a year had passed since the invasion of Iraq, a country that—the report said—had nothing to do with 9/11.

In the 18 months before the invasion, however, the Bush administration had persistently seeded the notion that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11. While never alleging a direct Iraqi role, President Bush had linked Saddam Hussein’s name to that of Osama bin Laden. Vice President Cheney had gone further, suggesting repeatedly that there had been Iraqi involvement in the attacks.

Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq’s supposed involvement affected the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression that “most” or “some” of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were. In the wake of the invasion, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in 9/11.

None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved out. “We went back 10 years,” said Michael Scheuer, who looked into the matter at the request of director Tenet. “We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the lines of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [al-Qaeda] and Saddam.”
What About Pakistan?

In the years during which the conflict in Iraq had the world’s attention, the real evidence that linked other nations to Osama bin Laden and 9/11 faded from the public consciousness. This was in part the fault of the 9/11 commission, which failed to highlight and fully detail the evidence. It was, ironically, a former deputy homeland-security adviser to President Bush, Richard Falkenrath, who loudly expressed that uncomfortable truth. The commission’s report, Falkenrath wrote, had produced only superficial coverage of the fact that al-Qaeda was “led and financed largely by Saudis, with extensive support from Pakistani intelligence.”

Pakistan has a strong Islamic-fundamentalist movement. It was, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one of only three nations that recognized the Taliban. Osama bin Laden had operated there as early as 1979, with the blessing of Saudi intelligence, in the first phase of the struggle to oust the Soviets from neighboring Afghanistan. The contacts he made were durable.

What bin Laden himself had said about Pakistan two years before 9/11 seemed to speak volumes. “Pakistani people have great love for Islam,” he observed in 1998 after the late-summer U.S. missile attack on his camps, in which seven Pakistanis were killed. “And they always have offered sacrifices for the cause of religion.” Later, in another interview, he explained how he himself had managed to avoid the attack. “We found a sympathetic and generous people in Pakistan … receive[d] information from our beloved ones and helpers of jihad.”

Pakistan sees Afghanistan as strategically crucial, not least on account of an issue of which many members of the public in the West have minimal knowledge or none at all. Pakistan and India have fought three wars in the past half-century over Kashmir, a large, disputed territory over which each nation has claims and which each partially controls, and where there is also a homegrown insurgency. Having leverage over Afghanistan, given its geographical position, enabled Pakistan to recruit Afghan and Arab volunteers to join the Kashmir insurgency—and tie down a large part of the Indian army.

The insurgents inserted into Kashmir have been by and large mujahideen, committed to a cause they see as holy. Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who in 1989 headed the ISI—the Pakistani equivalent of the C.I.A.—himself saw the conflict as jihad. Bin Laden, for his part, made common cause with Gul and, in the years that followed, with like-minded figures in the ISI. Many ISI recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. He would still be saying, as late as 2000, “Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of Kashmir, we support it.”

So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 commission, that the Taliban “actually were the junior partners in an unholy alliance” of ISI, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence, and the Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with cash. The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive political influence within Pakistan, so much so that some came to characterize it as “the most influential body in Pakistan,” a “shadow government.”

While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, two days later Washington issued a blunt warning as it prepared to retaliate against the bin Laden organization and its hosts in Afghanistan. It was then—according to ISI director Mahmoud Ahmed, who was visiting Washington at the time—that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said the U.S. would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” should it fail to go along with American demands for assistance. (Armitage has denied having used that extreme language.)

The former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad Robert Grenier recently confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al-Qaeda did improve vastly after 9/11. The arrests of three of the best-known top al-Qaeda operatives—Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—were, it seems, made by Pakistani intelligence agents and police, in some if not all cases working in collaboration with the C.I.A.

From the time America routed al-Qaeda, however, incoming information indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or was aware of his location. ISI officials, Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 commission, were “still visiting [bin Laden] as late as December 2001”—and continued to know his location thereafter. In 2007, Kathleen McFarland, a former senior Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan as a fact. “I’m convinced,” military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010, “that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it’s impossible after all this time to not know where he is.”

Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, “We will kill bin Laden. . . . That has to be our biggest national-security priority.” In office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden, meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high priority. Looking back, though, there was a trickle of fresh information that suggested otherwise.

General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was asked on Meet the Press in 2010 whether it was now less necessary to capture bin Laden. “I think,” he replied, “capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged in counterterrorism around the world.”

For those who doubted that bin Laden was still alive, late fall 2010 brought two new bin Laden audio messages. There had been intercepts of al-Qaeda communications, U.S. officials told The New York Times, indicating that he still shaped strategy. Then, within weeks, CNN quoted a “senior NATO official” as saying bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were believed to be hiding not far from each other in northwestern Pakistan, and not “in a cave.” The same day, the New York Daily News cited a source with “access to all reporting on bin Laden” as having spoken of two “sightings considered credible” in recent years—even “a grainy photo of bin Laden inside a truck.”
The End of bin Laden

Then, at 11:35 p.m. on the night of Sunday, May 1, President Obama appeared on television screens across the globe to say: “Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”

Killed he was, and in Pakistan. It looked to many as though Pakistan had been knowingly harboring him. For the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in not just any Pakistani city, but in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy, the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also has a presence there.

Officials in Washington were scathingly critical when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta reportedly told lawmakers, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The president’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On 60 Minutes, Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government [supporting bin Laden], and that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources later revealed, thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his fellow terrorists. Unmentioned were facts about the link between Abbottabad and al-Qaeda that former president Pervez Musharraf had made public in his 2006 memoir. Pakistan’s 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libbi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libbi used no less than three safe houses—all in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not expect to find a top terrorist hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track record for being exactly that.

A week after the strike against bin Laden, the correspondent for The Guardian in Islamabad reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush struck a deal with Musharraf: should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan’s borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid. “There was an agreement,” a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.” Musharraf has denied that such a deal was made. According to The Guardian, however, an unnamed Pakistani official offered corroboration for the story. “As far as our American friends are concerned,” he said, “they have just implemented the agreement.”

We cannot yet know the full background to how the U.S. tracked down bin Laden. We do have a better sense, a decade on, as to whether powerful players in foreign nations had a hand in 9/11.

The post The Kingdom and the Towers appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

First, consider what Democrats and Republicans just jointly did with regard to the Patriot Act, the very naming of which once sent progressives into spasms of vocal protest and which long served as the symbolic shorthand for Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism:

Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the anti-terrorist Patriot Act, the controversial law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that governs the search for terrorists on American soil.

The deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner calls for a vote before May 27, when parts of the current act expire. The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government. . . .

From its inception, the law’s increased surveillance powers have been criticized by liberals and conservatives alike as infringements on free speech rights and protections against unwarranted searches and seizures.

Some Patriot Act opponents suggest that Osama bin Laden’s demise earlier this month should prompt Congress to reconsider the law, written when the terrorist leader was at the peak of his power. But the act’s supporters warn that al-Qaida splinter groups, scattered from Pakistan to the United States and beyond, may try to retaliate.

“Now more than ever, we need access to the crucial authorities in the Patriot Act,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This will be the second time that the Democratic Congress — with the support of President Obama (who once pretended to favor reforms) — has extended the Patriot Act without any changes.  And note the rationale for why it was done in secret bipartisan meetings:  to ensure “as little debate as possible” and “to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government.”  Indeed, we wouldn’t want to have any messy, unpleasant democratic debates over “the expanded power the law gives to the government.”  Here we find yet again the central myth of our political culture:  that there is too little bipartisanship when the truth is there is little in Washington but that. And here we also find — yet again — that the killing of Osama bin Laden is being exploited to justify a continuation, rather than a reduction, in the powers of the National Security and Surveillance States.

Next we have a new proposal from the Obama White House to drastically expand the scope of “National Security Letters” — the once-controversial and long-abused creation of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to obtain private records about American citizens without the need for a subpoena or any court approval — so that it now includes records of your Internet activities:

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. . .

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority. “It’ll be faster and easier to get the data,” said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. “And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.” . . .

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is “incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting,” said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. “You’re bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review,” said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

So first they conspire with the GOP to extend the Patriot Act without any reforms, then seek to expand its most controversial and invasive provisions to obtain the Internet activities of American citizens without having to bother with a subpoena or judicial approval — “they” being the Democratic White House.

Most critically, the government’s increased ability to learn more and more about the private activities of its citizens is accompanied — as always — by an ever-increasing wall of secrecy it erects around its own actions.  Thus, on the very same day that we have an extension of the Patriot Act and a proposal to increase the government’s Internet snooping powers, we have this:

The Justice Department should publicly release its legal opinion that allows the FBI to obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process, a watchdog group asserts.

The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel violated federal open-records laws by refusing to release the memo.

The suit was prompted in part by McClatchy’s reporting that highlighted the existence of the memo and the department’s refusal to release it. Earlier this year, McClatchy also requested a copy and was turned down.

The decision not to release the memo is noteworthy because the Obama administration — in particular the Office of Legal Counsel — has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush administration was. By turning down the foundation’s request for a copy, the department is ensuring that its legal arguments in support of the FBI’s controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone records will be kept secret.

What’s extraordinary about the Obama DOJ’s refusal to release this document is that it does not reveal the eavesdropping activities of the Government but only its legal rationale for why it is ostensibly permitted to engage in those activities.  The Bush DOJ’s refusal to release its legal memos authorizing its surveillance and torture policies was unquestionably one of the acts that provoked the greatest outrage among Democratic lawyers and transparency advocates (see, for instance, Dawn Johnsen’s scathing condemnation of the Bush administration for its refusal to release OLC legal reasoning: “reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

The way a republic is supposed to function is that there is transparency for those who wield public power and privacy for private citizens.  The National Security State has reversed that dynamic completely, so that the Government (comprised of the consortium of public agencies and their private-sector “partners”) knows virtually everything about what citizens do, but citizens know virtually nothing about what they do (which is why WikiLeaks specifically and whistleblowers generally, as one of the very few remaining instruments for subverting that wall of secrecy, are so threatening to them).  Fortified by always-growing secrecy weapons, everything they do is secret — including even the “laws” they secretly invent to authorize their actions  — while everything you do is open to inspection, surveillance and monitoring.  

This dynamic threatens to entrench irreversible, absolute power for reasons that aren’t difficult to understand.  Knowledge is power, as the cliché teaches.  When powerful factions can gather unlimited information about citizens, they can threaten, punish, and ultimately deter any meaningful form of dissent:  J. Edgar Hoover infamously sought to drive Martin Luther King, Jr. to suicide by threatening to reveal King’s alleged adultery discovered by illicit surveillance; as I described earlier today in my post on New York’s new Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer was destroyed in the middle of challenging Wall Street as the result of a massive federal surveillance scheme that uncovered his prostitution activities.  It is the rare person indeed with nothing to hide, and allowing the National Security State faction unfettered, unregulated intrusive power into the private affairs of citizens — as we have been inexorably doing — is to vest them with truly awesome, unlimited power.

Conversely, allowing government officials to shield their own conduct from transparency and (with the radical Bush/Obama version of the “State Secrets privilege”) even judicial review ensures that National Security State officials (public and private) can do whatever they want without any detection and (therefore) without limit or accountability.  That is what the Surveillance State, at its core, is designed to achieve: the destruction of privacy for individual citizens and an impenetrable wall of secrecy for those with unlimited surveillance power.  And as these three events just from the last 24 hours demonstrate, this system — with fully bipartisan support — is expanding more rapidly than ever.

UPDATE:  I confused the timing of the second incident I mentioned here:  the White House’s proposal to expand NSL’s to include Internet records.  That actually occurred last July.  But I also neglected to include in this list the Obama White House’s September demands that all ISP’s and manufacturers of electronic communication devices (such as Blackberries) provide “backdoors” for government surveillance, so that bolsters the points I made here.

UPDATE II:  So patently illegal is Obama’s war in Libya as of today that media reports are now coming quite close to saying so directly; see, for instance, this unusually clear CNN article today from Dana Bash.  As a result, reporters today bombarded the White House with questions about the war’s legality, and here is what happened, as reported by ABC News‘ Jake Tapper:

Talk about “secret law.”  You’re not even allowed to know the White House’s rationale (if it exists) for why this war is legal.  It simply decrees that it is, and you’ll have to comfort yourself with that.  That’s how confident they are in their power to operate behind their wall of secrecy: they don’t even bother any longer with a pretense of the most minimal transparency.

The post The Ever-Expanding Bipartisan Surveillance State appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said.  A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .

That Obama was compiling a hit list of American citizens was first revealed in January of last year when The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest mentioned in passing at the end of a long article that at least four American citizens had been approved for assassinations; several months later, the Obama administration anonymously confirmed to both the NYT and the Post that American-born, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was one of the Americans on the hit list. 

Yesterday, riding a wave of adulation and military-reverence, the Obama administration tried to end the life of this American citizen — never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — with a drone strike in Yemen, but missed and killed two other people instead:

A missile strike from an American military drone in a remote region of Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in the country, American officials said Friday.

The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. 

The other people killed “may have” been Al Qaeda operatives.  Or they “may not have” been.  Who cares?  They’re mere collateral damage on the glorious road to ending the life of this American citizen without due process (and pointing out that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expressly guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law” — and provides no exception for war — is the sort of tedious legalism that shouldn’t interfere with the excitement of drone strikes).

There are certain civil liberties debates where, even though I hold strong opinions, I can at least understand the reasoning and impulses of those who disagree; the killing of bin Laden was one such instance.  But the notion that the President has the power to order American citizens assassinated without an iota of due process — far from any battlefield, not during combat — is an idea so utterly foreign to me, so far beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, that it’s hard to convey in words or treat with civility.

How do you even engage someone in rational discussion who is willing to assume that their fellow citizen is guilty of being a Terrorist without seeing evidence for it, without having that evidence tested, without giving that citizen a chance to defend himself — all because the President declares it to be so?  “I know Awlaki, my fellow citizen, is a Terrorist and he deserves to die.  Why?  Because the President decreed that, and that’s good enough for me.  Trials are so pre-9/11.”  If someone is willing to dutifully click their heels and spout definitively authoritarian anthems like that, imagine how impervious to reason they are on these issues.

And if someone is willing to vest in the President the power to assassinate American citizens without a trial far from any battlefield — if someone believes that the President has that power:  the power of unilaterally imposing the death penalty and literally acting as judge, jury and executioner — what possible limits would they ever impose on the President’s power?  There cannot be any.  Or if someone is willing to declare a citizen to be a “traitor” and demand they be treated as such — even though the Constitution expressly assigns the power to declare treason to the Judicial Branch and requires what we call “a trial” with stringent evidence requirements before someone is guilty of treason — how can any appeals to law or the Constitution be made to a person who obviously believes in neither?

What’s most striking about this is how it relates to the controversies during the Bush years.  One of the most strident attacks from the Democrats on Bush was that he wanted to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.  One of the first signs of Bush/Cheney radicalism was what they did to Jose Padilla:  assert the power to imprison this American citizen without charges.  Yet here you have Barack Obama asserting the power not to eavesdrop on Americans or detain them without charges — but to target them for killing without charges — and that, to many of his followers, is perfectly acceptable.  It’s a “horrific shredding of the Constitution” and an act of grave lawlessness for Bush to eavesdrop on or detain Americans without any due process; but it’s an act of great nobility when Barack Obama ends their lives without any due process.

Not even Antonin Scalia was willing to approve of George Bush’s mere attempt to detain (let alone kill) an American citizen accused of Terrorism without a trial.  In a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s most liberal member, John Paul Stevens, Scalia explained that not even the War on Terror allows the due process clause to be ignored when the President acts against those he claims have joined the Enemy — and this was for a citizen found on an actual active battlefield in a war zone (Afghanistan) (emphasis added):

The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.  Blackstone stated this principle clearly:  “Of great importance to the public is the preservation of this personal liberty:  for if once it were left in the power of any, the highest, magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper … there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities. … To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom.” . . . .

Subjects accused of levying war against the King were routinely prosecuted for treason. . . . The Founders inherited the understanding that a citizen’s levying war against the Government was to be punished criminally. The Constitution provides: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”; and establishes a heightened proof requirement (two witnesses) in order to “convic[t]” of that offense. Art. III, §3, cl. 1. 

There simply is no more basic liberty than the right to be free from Presidential executions without being charged with — and then convicted of — a crime:  whether it be treason, Terrorism, or anything else.  How can someone who objected to Bush’s attempt to eavesdrop on or detain citizens without judicial oversight cheer for Obama’s attempt to kill them without judicial oversight? Can someone please reconcile those positions?

One cannot be certain that this attempted killing of Awlaki relates to the bin Laden killing, but it certainly seems likely, and in any event, highlights the dangers I wrote about this week.  From the start, it was inconceivable to me that — as some predicted — the bin Laden killing would bring about a ratcheting down of America’s war posture.  The opposite seemed far more likely to me for the reason I wrote on Monday:  

Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. . . . We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

The killing of bin Laden got the testosterone pumping, the righteousness pulsating, and faith in the American military and its Commander-in-Chief skyrocketing to all-time highs.  It made America feel good about itself in a way that no other event has since at least Obama’s inauguration; we got to forget about rampant unemployment, home foreclosures by the millions, a decade’s worth of militaristic futility and slaughter, and ever-growing Third-World levels of wealth inequality.  This was a week for flag-waving, fist-pumping, and nationalistic chanting:  even — especially — among liberals, who were able to take the lead and show the world (and themselves) that they are no wilting, delicate wimps; it’s not merely swaggering right-wing Texans, but they, too, who can put bullets in people’s heads and dump corpses into the ocean and then joke and cheer about it afterwards.  It’s inconceivable that this wave of collective pride, boosted self-esteem, vicarious strength, and renewed purpose won’t produce a desire to replicate itself.  Four days after bin Laden is killed, a missile rains down from the sky to try to execute Awlaki without due process, and that’ll be far from the last such episode (indeed, also yesterday, the U.S. launched a drone attack in Pakistan, ending the lives of 15 more people:  yawn).

Last night, in a post entitled “Reigniting the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism]” — Digby wrote about why the reaction to the killing of bin Laden is almost certain to spur greater aggression in the “War on Terror,” and specifically observed:  “They’re breathlessly going on about Al Qaeda in Yemen ‘targeting the homeland’ right now on CNN. Looks like we’re back in business.”  The killing of bin Laden isn’t going to result in a reduction of America’s military adventurism because that’s not how the country works: when we eradicate one Enemy, we just quickly and seamlessly find a new one to replace him with — look over there:  Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is the True Threat!!!! — and the blood-spilling continues unabated (without my endorsing it all, read this excellent Chris Floyd post for the non-euphemistic reality of what we’ve really been doing in the world over the last couple years under the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner).

A civil liberties lawyer observed by email to me last night that now that Obama has massive political capital and invulnerable Tough-on-Terror credentials firmly in place, there are no more political excuses for what he does (i.e., he didn’t really want to do that, but he had to in order not to be vulnerable to GOP political attacks that he’s Weak).  In the wake of the bin Laden killing, he’s able to do whatever he wants now — ratchet down the aggression or accelerate it — and his real face will be revealed by his choices (for those with doubts about what that real face is).  Yesterday’s attempt to exterminate an American citizen who has long been on his hit list — far from any battlefield, not during combat, and without even a pretense of due process — is likely to be but a first step in that direction.

The post US Tries to Assassinate US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

The post Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, “The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

“I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons,” bin Laden’s statement said.

“I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations,” bin Laden said.

Asked Sunday if he believed bin Laden’s denial, President Bush said, “No question he is the prime suspect. No question about that.”

Since Tuesday’s terrorist attacks against the United States, Bush has repeatedly threatened to strike out against terrorism and any nation that supports or harbors its disciples.

Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born exile, has lived in Afghanistan for several years. U.S. officials blame him for earlier strikes on U.S. targets, including last year’s attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

Bin Laden’s campaign stems from the 1990 decision by Saudi Arabia to allow U.S. troops into the kingdom after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait — a military presence that has become permanent.

In a 1997 CNN interview, bin Laden called the U.S. military presence an “occupation of the land of the holy places.”

Immediately after the attacks that demolished the World Trade Center’s landmark twin towers and seriously damaged the Pentagon, officials of Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban said they doubted bin Laden could have been involved in carrying out the actions.

The Taliban — the fundamentalist Islamic militia that seized power in Afghanistan in 1996 — denied his ties to terrorism and said they have taken away all his means of communication with the outside world.

The repressive Taliban regime has received almost universal condemnation, particularly for their harsh treatment of women. Only three countries, including Pakistan, recognize them as the country’s rightful government.

A high-level Pakistani delegation was set to travel to Afghanistan on Monday to urge Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, CNN learned Sunday.

The Taliban, which controls more than 90 percent of the country, has threatened any neighboring country that allows its soil to be used to help the United States stage an attack on Afghanistan.

The post September 2001: Bin Laden Says He Wasn't Behind Attacks appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.