Gibson writes: "The U.S.'s tenuous relationship with Saudi royalty may be upended after recent allegations made by Zacarias Moussaoui the so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, that Saudi Arabia bankrolled Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the months leading up to 9/11."
The 15 9/11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia. (photo: Limits to Growth)
Saudis Probably Funded 9/11 Hijackers, and the U.S. Won't Do Anything About it. Here's Why.
06 February 15
uring one scene in the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglorious Basterds,” a Mexican standoff – the director’s cinematic signature – ends with Nazis and American soldiers disguised as Nazis all pulling their triggers simultaneously in the basement of a French pub. By the end of the bloody, seconds-long shootout, only one person in the room is left standing. A similar Mexican standoff between the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United States is currently under way, and may reach its final conclusion if new developments surrounding unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks continue to build momentum.
The American/Saudi Arabian Mexican Standoff
The Mexican standoff between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia began in the 1970s, when the Saudis used their position as head of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to institute an oil embargo against the U.S. The embargo, which was done in protest of American support of the Israeli military, drove up gas prices, created record-long lines at the pump, and took a considerable amount of steam out of the booming U.S. economy. Because American politicians would never agree to stop funding Israel, a plan was hatched to become best friends with the Saudi Royal family. One of the men who put that plan into action was John Perkins, who documented his role extensively in his bestselling fast-paced autobiography, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” (the last line of Perkins’s resume simply says “U.S. Treasury Dept., Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”).
During the process of what Perkins called the “Saudi Arabian Money-Laundering Affair (SAMA),” the U.S. Treasury sent Perkins and his team of economists at the consulting firm Chas T. Main to Saudi Arabia. Perkins described his role in a 2004 interview with Democracy Now:
“We worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia — new cities, new infrastructure — which we've done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done …”
By 1975, all OPEC nations agreed to sell their oil exclusively in U.S. dollars, effectively replacing the gold standard backing up American currency with a new oil standard. This arrangement ensures a constant supply of cheap oil from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. as long as the U.S. government continues to back the Saudi royal family. The current Mexican standoff would only end in a bloody shootout if the U.S. stopped supporting the Saudi regime, or if the Saudis started trading oil in a currency other than the U.S. dollar. This is why President Obama and many other top-level American dignitaries went to Saudi Arabia to pay their respects to the late King Abdullah, despite the deceased dictator’s well-documented reign of brutality that included public beheadings, public floggings, and other medieval punishments similar to those used by the ISIS terrorists we condemn.
Potential Smoking Gun Evidence from the 20th 9/11 Hijacker
The U.S.’s tenuous relationship with Saudi royalty may be upended after recent allegations made by Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, that Saudi Arabia bankrolled Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the months leading up to 9/11. Lawyers for 9/11 victims are claiming that along with Moussaoui’s revelations about a Saudi embassy official discussing a plot to assassinate President Clinton while he was aboard Air Force One, new evidence will soon emerge in two forms: Declassification of the secret 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report that details Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the attacks, and 80,000 pages of an FBI probe into Saudi funding of 9/11 hijackers in Florida. A 2003 article in Vanity Fair speculated about the contents of the 9/11 Commission Report’s classified contents:
“According to news reports, the classified section charges that there were ties between the hijackers and two Saudis, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, who had financial relationships with members of the Saudi government. Saudi officials deny that their government was in any way linked to the attacks. The Saudis have asked that the pages be declassified so they can refute them, but President Bush has refused.”
Moussaoui’s testimony is problematic for both the U.S. and Saudi governments. Ever since Richard Nixon was president, the Saudis have maintained a close relationship with every president who’s occupied the White House. They even used that access to fly out members of the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family when the FAA grounded all commercial and private flights (including flights for both former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore). These flights were granted permission to leave, and despite the potential for the two dozen members of the bin Laden family aboard those flights to provide invaluable information about where Osama bin Laden was hiding or the depth of his network, those family members were never interviewed by the FBI.
Even though the Saudi embassy maintains that they had nothing to do with 9/11, and that Moussaoui is a “deranged criminal” whose statements lack any credibility, U.S. courts found him mentally competent to stand trial. It’s likely that as long as Moussaoui keeps talking, public pressure for justice for 9/11 victims will only build.
Saudi Royalty: the Koch Brothers of Islamic Fundamentalism
Since the cheap-oil-for-unconditional-support deal with Saudi Arabia was struck in the mid-1970s, the U.S. government has willingly looked the other way at the Saudi royal family’s funneling their wealth to radical Islamists around the world. A 2003 U.S. News and World Report cover story by David Kaplan, Monica Ekman, and Aamir Latif explores how the Saudi royal family poured over $70 billion between 1975 and 2002 into spreading fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam around the world in an effort to counter Iran’s efforts. To put that in perspective, $70 billion is roughly 87 percent of the combined net worth of David and Charles Koch. Of that $70 billion, Kaplan writes:
“More than two thirds of that amount went to “Islamic activities” – building mosques, religious schools, and Wahhabi religious centers, says the CSP’s Alex Alexiev, a former CIA consultant on ethnic and religious conflict. The Saudi funding program, Alexiev says, is “the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted” – dwarfing the Soviets’ propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War. The Saudi weekly Ain al-Yaqeen last year reported the cost as “astronomical” and boasted of the results: some 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges, and nearly 2,000 schools in non-Islamic countries.”
To understand how the Saudi royal family has funded the growth of the global jihad movement over the last few decades, the Koch Brothers are a great example. The Kochs have long used their vast network of charities and nonprofits with innocuous-sounding names like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Policy Network to push through their agenda of cutting social safety net programs in exchange for lower taxes and fewer regulations for big business. Just like the Kochs, the Saudis make funding available for Islamic extremists through various quasi-official nonprofits and charities. Kaplan writes:
“Key to this evangelical tour de force were charities closely tied to Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite and top clerics. With names like the Muslim World League and its affiliate, the International Islamic Relief Organization, the funds spent billions more to spread Wahhabism. The IIRO, for example, took credit for funding 575 mosques in Indonesia alone … U.S. officials now say that key charities became the pipelines of cash that helped transform ragtag bands of insurgents and jihadists into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions.”
The High Cost of Keeping Saudi Arabia Happy
Saudi Arabia’s long history as the sugar daddy of Islamic militants around the world didn’t complicate their relationship with the U.S. in the past. In the 1980s, Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had just left his position at the head of the CIA to move into the White House, collaborated with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., to sell arms to Saudi Arabia at the same time Saudi charities were spending billions on spreading radical Islam. Bandar’s past history of selling arms to militants with the help of the U.S. may have continued in Syria, when a chemical weapons attack on a civilian population brought the cries for American military involvement to a fever pitch.
An August 2013 report from Mint Press News assembles several witness accounts that suggest Prince Bandar and other Saudi sources may have been the source of chemical weapons in Syria – not Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, as the U.S. government suggested. Reporter Yahya Ababneh, who was on the ground in Syria for the report, interviewed Syrian rebels and witnesses shortly after the attack took place:
“[Abu] Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.”… “They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”
While Democracy Now called the attack an “Iran-Contra Redux,” and raised the question of Prince Bandar’s involvement, Saudi Arabia was largely kept out of the U.S. media conversation over the chemical weapons attack. But now that the biggest bombshells from Zacarias Moussaui’s testimony are getting published in major news outlets like Reuters and the New York Times, the U.S. may no longer be able to turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of terrorism.
The contents of the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 Commission Report are still unknown, and probes are ongoing. But the Mexican standoff between the American and Saudi Arabian governments will likely come to a head before 2016. At that point, Americans will likely have to ask themselves if they would rather continue to have cheap oil or if they would rather have justice for 9/11 victims. Any official action from the U.S. government would likely result in an oil embargo similar to 1973, and politicians running for re-election probably don’t want record-high gas prices on their watch.
Carl Gibson, 27, is a regular featured columnist and editor for Reader Supported News, @RSN_Godot. In addition Carl co-founded US Uncut, a direct action group that mobilized thousands against corporate tax dodging and budget cuts in the months leading up to Occupy Wall Street. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the award-winning, Sundance-selected documentary We're Not Broke, which is available on Netflix. He is also author of the book, How to Oust a Congressman, about his experience organizing the ouster of a member of Congress from New Hampshire in the 2012 elections. Carl has been profiled in Fox Business, Marketwatch, and Crikey.com. Carl has been a guest on MSNBC and many other political discussion forums. Follow him on Twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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They use US dependence to finance the spreading of their ideology.
As for the opposition between the Saudis and Israel, it is less and less obvious - Israel and the Saudis make common cause on their common enemy, namely the coalition of Shiite they refer to as "the crescent" which goes from Hezballah in Lebanon to Iran through northern Syria and Iraq. the recent killing of a Hezballah chief together with an Iranian general in northern Golan by Israeli drones when they were observing ISIS position (radical Sunni supported by the Saudis) should tell you something.
Eh????
US troops then on Saudi soil was the straw that led al Qaeda to attack in Saudi Arabia. Moussaoui changed his statements back and forth seeking death. An excerpt from the time-line follows:
March 27, 2006:
In a major blow to his defense, Moussaoui tells the court that he was training to attack the White House in a fifth hijacked plane on Sept. 11, and was to be accompanied on the mission by British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Under cross-examinati on, Moussaoui says that he did not know exactly when the attacks on New York and Washington were to take place, but that he lied to investigators after his arrest to ensure that they would be carried out.
WOW, American do not even know it ever existed. LOL.
Nothing is done because of oil.
We've left Syria alone for years because oil interests pipelines run through the country. We have turned a blind eye to terrorist training camps along the route.
And then there's Israel who gets to claim nuclear ambiguity when we know full well that it has nuclear weapons. When is US Foreign policy going to fess up and own up? Never. The world works with strange bedfellows.
http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-the-saudi-911-coverup/
http://digwithin.net/2014/03/16/28-missing-pages/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/12/the-missing-pages-of-the-9-11-report.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/01/former-senator-says-huge-breakthrough-is-coming-with-classified-911-information/
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/twenty-eight-pages
uh, how can you "connect the dots" when 28 pages of "dots" are missing?
This issue has been fermenting for a while. Let's see how long it takes congress to release the missing 28 pages.
That is over-simplifyin g a bit. We should have been transitioning to renewals starting before 911 but we weren't. Because we weren't our economy was totally dependent on oil. It's easy to say that is just money, but a tanked economy destroys the livelihoods of millions of people. Money for millionaires and billionaires is one thing but money that ordinary people depend on for survival is another. It's always the people on the bottom that suffer the most.
We know from his statements prior to 9/11 that among Bin Laden's main grievances was Saudi Arabia's dependence on the US. American aircraft carriers are constantly patrolling the Straits of Hormuz and have spent about $8 trillion doing so over the years. Indeed, because Saudi Arabia sits on the world's largest reserve of easily and inexpensively accessible oil, the US has pledged to be its royal family's ultimate protector. In effect, they were/are joined at the hip.
To repeat, it makes no sense for the king, the royal family or ministers to have been involved in 9/11.
Bin Laden was a rich/upper echelon Saudi.
What a lot of bloody cobblers!
"Frackin'?? You're frickin' kiddin', right (But you're not are ya)???
Iraq is a failed nation divided and run by warlords with portions under ISL's cheerful dominion, thanks to that lying pack of cowards and neocons figureheaded by Dimwits of the Shrubbery die-nasty that got the US and UK into the wreckage of a former cradle of civilization in the first place.
Tell you what: explain to us here on RSN how you'd go about bleeding Iraq any more than has been done already, and which of the many ruling factions are so "Like us" that they'd even discuss the subject with the fading Empire and how it would benefit them or us (Another "Shock and Awe"???).
Then allow one of the extractive behemoths to undertake the Friggin' Fracking under YOUR home and place of work (as Cameron is trying to do in England but has been banned from Scotland), let us know how it goes blow-by-blow and we'll maybe take notice of y'r specious (and that's putting it politely) theorem of self-sufficienc y.
Y'r horses all seem to be nags with the botts and glanders!
Again -unless you're just kiddin' around, you naughty little Tom-boy you.
There are many people and organizations out there who are doing the work needed to heal America. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is certainly providing important critiques of the official accepted scenario for 9/11, which is revealed to be a total hoax when investigated objectively. Kevin Ryan's book "Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects" (2014) presents not only the known facts of 9/11 not consistent with the official version, but also the connections among the real perpetrators going back to the Reagan years.
The progressive community as a whole needs to become more aware of the fact that 9/11 was more a manifestation of a home-grown political cancer than a result of ethically questionable international relations.
None of them had to order it.
The NORAD exercise was scheduled in advance. They only had to know WHEN it was going to take place to take advantage of it.
"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief." - Frantz Fanon (Very relevant on the issue of 911. in the U.S this is why the people of the U.S. are unable to even consider, their own Government carried out this crime.)
"Al-Omari has since been found in Saudi Arabia and is apparently cleared in the case" - New York Times
Salem Al-Hazmi is alive and indignant. not one of the people who perished in the American Airlines flight that crashed on the Pentagon. He works at a government-owne d petroleum and chemical plant in the city of Yanbu.
He said 13 years ago that he had not left Saudi Arabia for two years, but that his passport had been stolen by a pickpocket in Cairo three years ago.
Waleed Al-Shehri, is living in Casablanca, according to an official with the Royal Air Moroc, the Moroccan commercial airline. Al-Shehri lived in Dayton Beach, FL where he took flight training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Now he works for a Moroccan airline." On Sept. 22, 2001, AP reported that Alshehri had spoken to the U.S. embassy in Morocco.
Waleed Al Shehri - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm
We might not know who did 9-11, but we can imagine who wanted us to think it was Arabs.
'The government' of 'the US' under President W. Bush did not act--and under Pres. Obama is not apt to act on this matter because of financial/intel ligence community relationships those two figures share. Those overlap more in London than Riyadh.
Do not be misled by the variations in political marketing between the two Presidents.
Many of the problems we deal with today date back to post WW II when the US, UK, France and Russia carved up the map of the world based on what they wanted and without consideration for anyone else. Israel was born and forced into the mix - not that Israel is a bad thing but the issue regarding the Palestinian people was never fully addressed and poses a huge problem to this day.
I have come to believe that when the wealthy gather doing the right thing takes a back seat to power and greed. And I don't think there exists any political leadership in this world which, even for a second, considers the well being of the people anywhere. All I have to do is follow the money, which leads to the big question: Can this continue?
Each of us, as individuals, must examine our world. If war is not the right thing why do we support it? Why do we keep doing the same things, over and over, expecting different results?
Quote of the month for me. Check.
The oil angle is also very interesting. Ironically the price of oil has now collapsed while oil states traditionally opposed to the US, like Venezuela and Iran, are in economic trouble. One wonders what the Saudi gameplan is in all this. As we know the Saudis are now worried by the new Iran-influenced regime which has taken over in neighbouring Yemen.
It will be very interesting to learn more from the congressional report about Saudi 9/11 involvement and the FBI probe of Saudis who supported 9/11 hijackers in Florida, if and when they are released.
The Saudi's increase output so the price would go down hoping to run shale oil producers out of business because it is much more expensive than the sweet crude they have. No doubt they will cut production and thus raise prices again if they succeed. It cuts both ways for the US. Consumers are happy with lower gas prices, but the US also has shale oil production that is being squeezed. And the stock market hates low oil prices. It has started to go up again because of hits that oil prices have bottomed out.
Supply and demand. Oil is a global market. The higher the supply, the lower the price.
Didn't we know this in 2002?
Eh????
our economy is wedded to saudi arabia's, warts and all
while bush was prez and until now (except for the year 2008 leading up to obama's election - saudis were promoting bush's economy and mccain's candidacy with low prices), saudis turned the oil taps down, enabling opec to charge over $100 per barrel crude, allowing oil companies to earn record profits every year (despite pumping less every year) while we paid trillions too much to keep our economy rolling - trying to steam ahead while dragging anchor
the wart on saudis current favor of keeping the taps open while it suits them (they are driving high price american shale and canadian tar sands crude out of business), like now, is that they love to gift profits from what they sell to fundamentalist wahabi jihads, their people. we are too dependent on saudi taps to dare offend them - no matter what the cost, in money terms it's far too small to risk our precious relationship with the controllers of the taps
Carter called his proposal "the moral equivalent of war".
He lost the next election, of course, and as far as the "war" is concerned, America appears to have defaulted.
There is of course a great deal of renewable energy equipment being manufactured, at prices lower than could be imagined in the mid-70s. Virtually all of it is made in China.
Call the Saudis for what they are. Get independent of the oil. Let them drink their oil !
that George Bush senior also worked for
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