US Releases
Saudi Documents: 9/11 Coverup Exposed
By Bill Van
Auken
July 15,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
- The
public release Friday afternoon of a section of the
Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, which had
been kept secret for 13 years, has provided fresh
evidence of a deliberate coverup of the role played,
not only by the Saudi government, but US
intelligence agencies themselves, in facilitating
the attacks and then covering up their real roots.
The 28-page
segment from the report issued by the “Joint Inquiry
into Intelligence Community Activities before and
after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001”
provides abundant and damning evidence of extensive
Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers—15 out of 19 of
whom were Saudi nationals—in the period leading up
to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.
The Obama
White House, the CIA, the Saudi monarchy and the
corporate media have all tried to portray the
documents—released on a Friday afternoon to assure
minimal exposure—as somehow exonerating the Saudi
regime of any culpability in the 9/11 attacks.
“This
information does not change the assessment of the US
government that there’s no evidence that the Saudi
government or senior Saudi individuals funded
al-Qaeda,” Josh Earnest, the White House press
secretary said Friday, boasting that the main
significance of their release was its proof of the
Obama administration’s commitment to “transparency.”
In reality,
the 28 pages have been kept under lock and key since
2002, with only members of Congress allowed to read
them, in a Capitol Hill basement vault, while
prohibited from taking notes, bringing members of
their staff or breathing a word of their content.
The Obama
administration, like the Bush administration before
it, maintained this secrecy for several reasons.
First, it was concerned that the documents would
jeopardize its relations with Saudi Arabia, which,
after Israel, is Washington’s closest ally in the
Middle East, a partner in bloody operations from
Afghanistan to Syria to Yemen, and the world’s
biggest buyer of American arms.
Even more
importantly, it was concerned that the 28 pages
would further expose the abject criminality of the
US government’s role in facilitating the attacks of
9/11 and then lying about their source and
exploiting them to justify savage wars of
aggression, first against Afghanistan and then
against Iraq. These wars have claimed over a million
lives. The false narrative created around the
September 11 attacks remains the ideological pillar
of the US campaign of global militarism conducted in
the name of a “war on terror.”
Media
reports on the 28 pages invariably refer to the
absence of a “smoking gun,” which presumably would
be tantamount to an order signed by the Saudi king
to attack New York and Washington. The evidence is
described as “inconclusive.” One can only imagine
what would have been the response if, in place of
the word “Saudi,” the documents referred to Iraqi,
Syrian or Iranian actions. The same evidence would
have been proclaimed an airtight case for war.
Among those
who were involved in preparing the report, John
Lehman, the former secretary of the navy, directly
contradicted the official response to the release of
the previously censored section. “There was an awful
lot of participation by Saudi individuals in
supporting the hijackers, and some of those people
worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our
report should never have been read as an exoneration
of Saudi Arabia.”
Similarly,
former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who chaired the
committee that carried out the investigation,
suggested that the information released Friday was
only the beginning. “I think of this almost as the
28 pages are sort of the cork in the wine bottle.
And once it’s out, hopefully the rest of the wine
itself will start to pour out,” he said.
What
clearly emerges from the newly-released document,
which is titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative
Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security
Matters,” is that there were multiple indications of
funding and support for the 9/11 hijackers and Al
Qaeda in general, but that investigations were
either shut down or never initiated because of the
close ties between Washington and the Saudi
monarchy, and between US and Saudi intelligence.
“While in
the United States, some of the September 11
hijackers were in contact with, and received support
or assistance from, individuals who may be connected
to the Saudi government,” the document begins. It
cites FBI sources as indicating that some of these
individuals were “Saudi intelligence officers.”
It goes on
to indicate that FBI and CIA investigations of these
links were initiated solely in response to the
Congressional inquiry itself. “[I]t was only after
September 11 that the US government began to
aggressively investigate this issue,” the report
states. “Prior to September 11th, the FBI apparently
did not focus investigative sources on [redacted]
Saudi nationals in the United States due to Saudi
Arabia’s status as an American ‘ally.’”
The report
focuses in part on the role of one Omar al-Bayoumi,
who was described to the FBI as a Saudi intelligence
officer, and, according to FBI files, “provided
substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid
al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in
San Diego in February 2000.”
The inquiry
report deals with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar only from
after they arrived in California, and says nothing
about the circumstances under which they were
allowed to enter the country in the first place.
Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an
Al Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, and placed on a “watch list” for FBI
monitoring if they came to the United States.
Nonetheless, the two men were allowed to enter the
United States on January 15, 2000, landing at Los
Angeles International Airport, eventually going to
San Diego. From then on, they were permitted to
operate freely, attending flight training school in
preparation for their role as pilots of hijacked
planes on September 11, 2001.
Al-Bayoumi,
the report establishes, “received support from a
Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of
Defense,” drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The
report states that the company also had ties to Al
Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
According
to the report, al-Bayoumi had previously worked for
the Saudi Civil Aviation Association and, in the
period leading up to 9/11, was “in frequent contact
with the Emir at the Saudi Defense Ministry
responsible for air traffic control.” Phone records
showed him calling Saudi government agencies 100
times between January and May of 2000.
FBI
documents also established that the $465 in
“allowances” that al-Bayoumi received through the
Saudi military contractor, jumped to over $3,700
shortly after the arrival of al-Hazmi and
al-Mihdhar. During this period, al-Bayoumi initially
allowed the two future hijackers to stay in his
apartment before finding them their own place—with
an informant of the San Diego FBI—cosigning their
lease and advancing them a deposit and the first
month’s rent.
The report
states that FBI investigations following 9/11
indicated that al-Bayoumi had “some ties to
terrorist elements.” His wife, meanwhile, was
receiving a $1,200 a month stipend from Princess
Haifa Bint Sultan, the wife of Prince Bandar, then
the Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of
Saudi intelligence.
Also named
in the document as a likely Saudi intelligence agent
is one Osama Bassnan, who lived across the street
from the two hijackers in San Diego and was in
telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a
day during this period. He apparently placed the two
in contact with a Saudi commercial airline pilot for
discussions on “learning to fly Boeing jet
aircraft,” according to an FBI report. Bassnan’s
wife also received a monthly stipend from Princess
Haifa, the Saudi ambassador’s wife, to the tune of
$2,000 a month. As well, the FBI found one $15,000
check written by Bandar himself in 1998 to Bassnan.
The report states that FBI information indicated
that Bassnan was “an extremist and supporter of
Usama Bin Ladin,” who spoke of the Al Qaeda leader
“as if he were god.”
Appearing
before the Congressional inquiry in October 2002,
FBI Executive Assistant Director for
Counterterrorism Pasquale D’Amuro reacted with
undisguised cynicism and contempt when asked about
the payments from the Saudi ambassador’s wife to the
wives of the two reputed intelligence agents
involved with the 9/11 hijackers.
“She gives
money to a lot of different groups and people from
around the world,” he said. “We’ve been able to
uncover a number of these... but maybe if we can
discover that she gives to 20 different radical
groups, well, gee, maybe there’s a pattern here.”
Spoken like a man who believes he is above the law
in defense of a figure that he clearly sees as
untouchable.
Among other
material in the report was the recounting of an FBI
interrogation of Saleh al-Hussayen, a prominent
Saudi interior ministry official, who stayed in the
same Virginia hotel as three of the hijackers the
night before the 9/11 attacks. While he claimed not
to know the hijackers, the FBI agents “believed he
was being deceptive.”
According
to the report, al-Hussayen “feigned a seizure” and
was released to a hospital, which he left several
days later, catching a flight back to Saudi Arabia
without any further questioning. During the same
period, nearly 1,200 people, with no links to the
attacks, were being rounded up and held
incommunicado on little more evidence than that they
were Arab or Muslim.
Also in the
report was the fact that a phone book belonging to
Abu Zubaydah, the Al Qaeda operative who is still
held at Guantanamo after extensive torture at the
hands of the CIA, was found to contain the unlisted
numbers of companies that managed and provide
security for Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar’s
residence in Colorado, as well as that of a
bodyguard at the Saudi embassy who, the report
states “some have alleged may be a [words
redacted].”
Redactions
of this sort recur throughout the document in
relation to individual Saudis, suggesting their
membership in some sort of secret service whose name
must remain unmentioned. This is only part of what
the secret material still conceals. Members of the
inquiry’s staff reportedly protested angrily over
the failure to clearly present the evidence of Saudi
involvement, leading to the firing of at least one
staffer.
If the
government is determined to continue to shield such
Saudi connections, it is undoubtedly because they
would expose the involvement of the US intelligence
agencies themselves in the events of 9/11.
If such
whitewashes are required, it is because elements
within the US government were aware that Al Qaeda
was preparing an operation on US soil, turned a
blind eye to it and even facilitated it because they
knew it could be used as a pretext to carry out
longstanding plans for aggressive war in the Middle
East.
The release
of even the limited material on the Saudi-US-9/11
connection is a devastating exposure of the
criminals in the US government, from George W. Bush
on down, and the lies they employed to engineer wars
that have devastated the lives of millions.
These new
facts demand a thorough, impartial and international
investigation, as well as the indictment and arrest
of top level officials, both American and Saudi.
Only a powerful intervention of the international
working class, on the basis of a socialist program,
will see these war criminals brought to justice.
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