By Paul Craig Roberts

July 21, 2016 "Information Clearing House" -  James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence for three decades, long ago explained to me that intelligence services create stories inside stories, each with its carefully constructed trail of evidence, in order to create false trails as diversions. Such painstaking work can serve a variety of purposes. It can be used to embarrass or discredit an innocent person or organization that has an unhelpful position on an important issue and is in the way of an agenda. It can be used as a red herring to draw attention away from a failing explanation of an event by producing an alternative false explanation. I forget what Angleton called them, but the strategy is to have within a false story other stories that are there but withheld because of “national security” or “politically sensitive issues” or some such. Then if the official story gets into trouble, the backup story can be released in order to deflect attention into a new false story or to support the original story. Angleton said that intelligence services protect their necessary misdeeds by burying the misdeed in competing explanations.

Watching the expert craftsmanship of the “Saudis did 9/11” story, I have been wondering if the Saudi story is what Angleton described as a story within a story.

The official 9/11 story has taken too many hits to remain standing. The collapse of Building 7, which, if memory serves, was not mentioned at all in the 9/11 Commission Report, has been proven to have been a controlled demolition. Building 7 collapsed at free fall acceleration, which can only be achieved with controlled demolition.

Over 100 firemen, policemen, and building maintenance personnel who were inside the two towers prior to their collapse report hearing and experiencing multiple explosions. According to William Rodriguez, a maintenance employee in the north tower, there were explosions in the sub-basements of the tower prior to the time airplanes are said to have hit the towers.

An international team of scientists found in the dust of the towers both reacted and unreacted residues of explosives and substances capable of instantly producing the extreme temperatures that cut steel.

A large number of pilots, both commercial and military, have questioned the ability of alleged hijackers with substandard flight skills to conduct the maneuvers required by the flight paths.

2,500 architects and engineers have called for an independent investigation of the failure of the towers that were certified to be capable of withstanding a hit by airplanes.

The revelation that the 9/11 attack was financed by the Saudi government has the effect of bolstering the sagging official story while simultaneously satisfying the growing recognition that something is wrong with the official story.

Commentators and media are treating the story of Saudi financing of 9/11 as a major revelation that damns the Bush regime, but the revelation not only leaves in place but also strengthens the official story that Osama bin Laden carried out the attack with precisely the hijackers identified in the original story. The Bush regime is damned merely for protecting its Saudi friends and withholding evidence of Saudi financing.

The evidence of Saudi financing is what restores the credibility of the original story. Nothing changes in the story of the collapse of the three WTC buildings, the attack on the Pentagon, and the crashed airliner in Pennsylvania. American anger is now directed at the Saudis for financing the successful attacks.

To hype the Saudi story is to support the official story. A number of commentators who are usually suspicious of government are practically jumping up and down for joy that now they have something to pin on Bush. They haven’t noticed that what they are pinning on him supports the official 9/11 story.

Moreover, they have not explained why the Saudi government would finance an attack on the country that protects it. Saudi Arabia is a long-time partner. They accept pieces of paper for their oil and then use the paper to finance the US Treasury’s debt and to purchase US weapons systems, purchases that lead to larger weapons sales, thus spreading R&D costs over larger volume.

What do the Saudis have to gain from embarrassing the US by demonstrating the total failure of US national security? Really, if a few hijackers can outfox the NSA, the CIA, and the national security state, we clearly aren’t getting out money’s worth and are giving up our civil liberties for nothing.

Saudi financing does not explain who had access to wire the buildings for demolition, or to schedule on 9/11 a simulated attack that the actual attack modeled, thus causing confusion among some authorities about what was real and what was not.

Saudi financing does not explain the dancing Israelis who were apprehended filming the attacks on the towers and who later said on Israeli TV that they were sent to New York to film the attack. How did the Israelis know? Did Prince Bandar tell them? Bush didn’t tell us about the Saudis, and the Israelis didn’t tell us about the attack. Which is worse?

This Saudi revelation is too convenient for the official story. How do we know that it was not devised as a story inside the story to be used when the story got into trouble? The Saudis would be a logical choice to be put in such a position as the original neoconservative plan for overthrowing Middle Eastern governments included overthrowing Saudi Arabia. Now we have an excuse.

I have doubts that the alleged hijackers played any role other than cover for bringing down buildings by controlled demolition. Possibly the hijackers and the Saudis who financed them, if the evidence is real and not concocted, were not aware of their role and thought they were participating in a different deception.

Are we being deceived again with a story inside a story? Will it succeed along the lines that Angleton explained? Or will it possibly backfire? If the US government will hide some of the truth from us for 13 years, why not all of the truth? What else in the official story is false?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.