Saudi Fingerprints Were All Over the 9/11 Attacks

 

It's hard to know how this will play out but it could be a corner stone to Joe Biden's presidential legacy.

Late Saturday night, Biden took the lid off a long-secret FBI report into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Lawyers for families of the 9/11 victims, who are suing the Saudi kingdom in federal court, said the document provided important support to their theory that a handful of Saudis connected to their government worked in concert to assist the first two Qaida hijackers sent to the United States in January 2000.

“This validates what we have been saying,” said James Kreindler, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “The FBI agents working this case detailed a Saudi government support network that was working in 1999, 2000 and 2001 to provide the hijackers with everything they needed to mount the attacks — apartments, money, English lessons, flight school.”

...FBI agents found evidence that several Saudi religious officials working in the United States had connections not only to people who assisted the hijackers but also to other Qaida operatives and suspected extremists. At the time, there were many Saudis in the country who had diplomatic credentials but were mainly involved in religious activity. The FBI later investigated many of them for extremism.

The report released on Saturday was written by a senior analyst on the Encore team, John Nicholson, after the leader of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, Carlos Fernandez, decided with federal prosecutors to reassign Nicholson and the rest of his New York team, effectively shutting down their work.

...It has long been known that the CIA had the hijackers under surveillance in Malaysia as they met there with other Qaida operatives early that January, days before leaving for the United States. The CIA then lost the hijackers’ trail and neglected for more than 16 months to alert the FBI, even after learning that at least one of them had entered the United States.

The report raises more questions than it answers. Why did the DoJ intervene to derail the FBI investigation? Someone, it seems, was feeding the Saudis information that allowed them to leave and then elude investigators. Who was the conduit. Could it have been prince Bandar bin Sultan, a.k.a. "Bandar Bush," a long time intimate of the Bush clan?

Comments

  1. TrailblazerSeptember 13, 2021 at 5:32 PM

    Saudi fingerprints are also all over the cheques they sign for US made military hardware .
    Similarly Pakistan who have aided extremists also sign big cheques for weapons.

    As they say; follow the money.

    TB

    ReplyDelete
  2. LorneSeptember 13, 2021 at 5:48 PM

    The saddest thing here, Mound, is that no matter how much the Saudis might be implicated, we know that there will be no justice, just as there was no justice in the Khashoggi murder. The Arab state is just too important to too many interests to make them mere legal mortals

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more