Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
By now, it has been well documented that, as I documented on January 29th, “Al Qaeda Funded by Royal Sauds, U.S. Gov\u2019t. Documents\u201d<\/span><\/a>. And, yet, despite the massive documentation which the U.S. Government itself possesses regarding this (and which has been suppressed by the U.S. \u2018news\u2019media but is linked-to in that article so that the public can get to see it), both President Barack Obama and now President Donald Trump were and are arrantly ignoring it, and are instead continuing to do the bidding of the royal Sauds, who individually donated (according to the court-testimony in 2014 by Osama bin Laden\u2019s former bookkeeper and financial bagman prior to 9\/11<\/span><\/a>) over a million dollars in cash each, to Al Qaeda, leading up to 9\/11<\/b>; and, furthermore, out of these donations, the 9\/11 terrorists received their \u201csalaries,\u201d and \u201cwithout the money of the \u2014 of the Saudi, you will have nothing\u201d of Al Qaeda: none of the training, none of the international transportation, none of the weapons, \u2018nothing\u2019 at all<\/i>. That\u2019s what he said, but how much was this incredibly important testimony (in a U.S. court-case) publicized in the U.S. press? And why wasn\u2019t it? Will it now be?<\/span><\/p>\n The latest on this, is on September 9th this year, when the New York Times<\/i> headlined “Trump\u2019s Bid to End Saudi-Qatar Stalemate Ends in Recriminations\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and reported that though President Trump was trying to remain neutral in the Saudi embargo against Qatar, he seems to be siding with the Sauds, and no mention was made in that article, regarding the 9\/11 attacks, which were almost entirely financed and perpetrated by Saudis \u2014 mainly funded by the royal Saud family, but using jihadists from the network of the Saudi aristocrat Osama bin Laden\u2019s Al Qaeda.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, as I documented on 20 July 2016, headlining “9\/11: Bush\u2019s Guilt, And The ’28 Pages\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n What these 29 long-suppressed pages revealed was well summarized by one succinct reader who wrote: <\/i>\u201cThe Inquiry discloses that there is a very direct chain of evidence about financing and logistics \u2026 [that] goes from the Saudi Royal family (Amb. Bandar’s wife and Bandar’s checking account) and Saudi consulate employees (al Thumiari) to the agent handlers (Basnan and al Bayoumi) to some of the 9\/11 hijackers (Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi).\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/a> In other words: Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al-Saud, known in Washington as \u201cBandar Bush\u201d (for his closeness to the Bush family), and who served at that time as Saudi Arabia\u2019s Ambassador to the United States, paid tens of thousands of dollars to Saudi Arabia\u2019s \u201chandlers\u201d who were directing two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Also, one of Bandar\u2019s subordinates at the Embassy, named al-Thumiari, was likewise paying the person who was paying and managing those two jihadists.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The report said: \u201cFBI files suggest that al-Bayoumi provided substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000. \u2026 According to an October 14, 2002 FBI document, al-Bayoumi has \u2018extensive ties to the Saudi Government\u2019. \u2026 According to the FBI, al-Bayoumi was in frequent contact with the Emir at the Ministry of Defense, responsible for air traffic control. \u2026 Al-Bayoumi was receiving money from the Saudi Ministry of Defense. \u2026 Al-Bayoumi was known to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that he did not appear to hold a job. \u2026 Al-Bayoumi\u2019s pay increased during the time that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the United States.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Also, an FBI agent testified on 9 October 2002 regarding al-Bayoumi, and said Bayoumi: \u201cacted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion. And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if he provided some sort of financing \u2026 then I would say that there\u2019s a clear possibility that there might be a connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL [Usama bin Laden].\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Moreover: \u201cThe FBI has now confirmed that only Osama Bassnan\u2019s wife received money directly from Prince Bandar\u2019s wife, but that al-Bayoumi\u2019s wife attempted to deposit three of the checks from Prince Bandar\u2019s wife, which were payable to Bassnan\u2019s wife, into her own accounts. \u2026 Bassnan was a very close associate of Omar al-Bayoumi\u2019s and was in telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a day.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore: \u201cBassnan\u2019s wife received a monthly stipend from Princess Haifa.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n And: \u201cOn at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar\u2019s account. According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan\u2019s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar \u2026 for $10,000. \u2026 FBI Executive Assistant Director D\u2019Amuro commented on this financing: \u2018I believe that we do have money going from Bandar\u2019s wife, $2,000 a month up to about $64,000.\u2019\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Also: \u201cOn March 28, 2002, U.S. and coalition forces retrieved the telephone book of Abu Zubayda, whom the U.S. Government has identified as a senior al-Qa\u2019ida operational coordinator. According to an FBI document, \u2018a review of toll records has linked [to] ASPCOL Corporation in Aspen, Colorado. \u2026 ASPCOL is the umbrella corporation that manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador. \u2026 The U.S. Government also located another Virginia number at an Usama bin Laden safehouse in Pakistan \u2026 [where a person was] interviewed by the FBI in June 2002. He could not explain why his number ended up at a safehouse in Pakistan, but stated that he regularly provides services to a couple who are personal assistants to Prince Bandar.\u201d <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n This has to be seen in the context of George W. Bush\u2019s very close and longstanding personal friendship with Prince Bandar, and also in the context of Bandar\u2019s career.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Bandar has long been involved, both officially and unofficially, in the intelligence operations of the Saud family (which own Saudi Arabia). During October 2005 through January 2015, he served as secretary general of Saudi Arabia\u2019s National Security Council, and he also was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. Furthermore the just-released report asserts: <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe FBI also received reports from individuals in the Muslim community alleging that Bassnan might be a Saudi intelligence agent. According to a CIA memo, Basnan reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi Government officials. He and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and his wife. \u2026 A CIA report also indicates that Bassnan traveled to Houston in 2002 and \u2026 that during that trip a member of the Saudi royal family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash. \u2026 FBI information indicates that Bassnan is an extremist and a supporter of Usama bin Laden.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Regarding Shaykh al-Thumairy, he was \u201can accredited diplomat at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and one of the \u2018imams\u2019 at the King Fahd Mosque \u2026 built in 1998 from funding provided by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Crown Prince Abdulaziz. The mosque \u2026 is widely recognized for its anti-Western views.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The 29 pages also include lots more, but those facts give at least some solid indications of the links that Prince Bandar had to 9\/11.<\/i>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Thus, in addition to the detailed testimony of bin Laden\u2019s former bagman, which I mentioned at the start (and link to again here<\/span><\/a>), there was the FBI\u2019s investigation that was presented in the redacted \u201828 pages\u2019 and that finally was made public 14 years after the redacted and quiet publication on Friday night 15 July 2016, of those crucial pages from the 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11<\/span><\/a>. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton\u2019s leaked communications included \u201cDonors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,\u201d and, more recently, \u201cWe need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.\u201d (But, of course, President Trump is focusing only against Qatar\u2019s royals, not against Saudi Arabia\u2019s.)<\/span><\/p>\n Though the U.S. Government has all this information connecting the 9\/11 attacks to the royal Sauds as the chief financial backers of the operation, the U.S. Government has fined Iran\u2019s Government $10.5 billion for it, on the flimsiest imaginable basis<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n On June 7th, I took up the \u2018evidence\u2019 that Israel\u2019s Government was, somehow, behind the 9\/11 attacks<\/a><\/span>, and found that everything that\u2019s been presented along those lines is based upon ignoring the actual evidence (summarized above), and upon ignoring the reason why the FBI finally gave up on its investigations into Israel\u2019s possibly having been behind 9\/11: they gave up on the hypothesis because of such things as that the timelines presented by the proponents of that hypothesis are false. For example, regarding the \u201cdancing Israelis,\u201d they definitely started their dancing, and their filming of the attacks against the World Trade Towers, after<\/i> the first plane had hit, not<\/i> before (as is alleged by the proponents of that hypothesis). (The reader-comments to my article were in disbelief, but that\u2019s what the FBI\u2019s investigation of the matter had concluded, and I linked to that record, but those commenters simply continued to ignore it.) And then there are the many sites that (such as this one<\/span><\/a>) allege 9\/11 was part of an international Jewish conspiracy, and that (somehow) no Christians, Muslims, atheists, or other non-Jews, were part of it (except, perhaps, as underlings of \u2018Jews\u2019).<\/span><\/p>\n Moreover (and this is very important here), the Sauds have long been allied with Israel\u2019s Government to serve them as their agents to propagandize in the United States for U.S. Government policies that the Sauds want but know they can\u2019t as effectively as the Israelis (and U.S. supporters of Israel) propagandize directly to the U.S. public<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s a secret alliance between the Sauds and the Government of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n Iran and Israel aren\u2019t the only two nations that are accused, on ridiculous grounds, as having financed and helped to plan the 9\/11 attacks; there\u2019s now also Qatar, which the Sauds recently decided needs a regime-change. After the Saud family (and their aristocratic and royal friends in UAE and some other Arab nations) started their blockade against Qatar, on June 23 of this year<\/span><\/a>, the far-right Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Sky News headlined in July their quickly-thrown-together 40-minute documentary \u201cRoad to Manhattan\u201d<\/span><\/a>, blaming Qatar for the 9\/11 attacks, on the basis that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had lived several years in Qatar and had friends among Qatar\u2019s royal family, who were the major funders of the Muslim Brotherhood, all of which is true, but hardly the caliber or quantity of relevant information that implicates the Sauds \u2014 it\u2019s instead a few strands of guilt-by-association, plus the almost universal support that Islamists, including terrorist groups, have had from fundamentalist Sunnis, including from all of the royal families who run the Arab Gulf nations. Deflecting the blame for 9\/11, away from themselves, would be a natural tactic for the royal Sauds to employ. And, certainly, Sunni fundamentalists in all countries (not only in Arabia) have been more supportive of the various jihadist groups that target the U.S. and EurAsia than should be the case. (As I headlined and documented on June 9th, \u201cAll Islamic Terrorism Is Perpetrated by Fundamentalist Sunnis, \u2026 Except Terrorism Against Israel\u201d<\/span><\/a>. Terrorism against Israel comes both from Sunnis and from Shiites.) But there\u2019s a big difference between that, and being the main country whose leaders were funding \u2014 providing the bulk of the funds that made possible \u2014 the 9\/11 attacks. Also important to note is that both the royal Sauds and the Government of Israel are rabidly anti-Iran and anti-Shia. The anti-Iran, anti-Shia, portfolio, in the Saud-Israel alliance, is carried to U.S. politicians and to the American public, almost entirely by Israel\u2019s agents, but on behalf of both the Saud family and Israel\u2019s Government. Consequently, both Israel and the Sauds benefit from re-directing the blame for 9\/11 to Iran. And, now that Qatar is practically being forced into a partial alliance with Iran (its former enemy, which the Sauds rabidly hate), Qatar too is being officially targeted for blame regarding 9\/11.<\/span><\/p>\n Though the U.S. Government is determined to blame Iran for 9\/11, and many in the public blame Israel for 9\/11, and the royal Sauds blame the royals in Qatar for the 9\/11 attacks, the evidence that has long been in possession of the FBI and of other U.S. federal offices (but not broadcast by the \u2018news\u2019media), proves that at least some of the royal Sauds were financing the 9\/11 attacks, and that Prince Bandar and his wife were particularly involved in it, and that George W. Bush had instructed Condoleezza Rice to block any top intelligence professional from gaining access privately to tell him anything actionable about the planned attacks until after they would already have occurred \u2014 so that there was a determination by him to retain plausible deniability regarding any involvement by himself in the matter. If the U.S. had an honest press (i.e., were a democracy<\/span><\/a>), then the Sauds would already be widely blamed in the U.S., for having been (along with Bush, etc.) behind the 9\/11 attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, there is a very extensive connection between Prince Bandar and Zbigniew Brzezinsky in their jointly having created in 1979 the group that soon thereafter came to be called Al Qaeda; and also between \u201cSoros Capital\u201d and \u201cmembers of Saudi Arabia\u2019s bin Laden family.\u201d<\/span><\/a> It didn\u2019t start with 9\/11. And, though most people think that the U.S. aristocracy wag the Saudi royal tail, the evidence as I see it is the exact opposite: that the royal Sauds have been wagging the U.S. tail.<\/span><\/a> And things don\u2019t seem to have changed with the recent change in the occupancy of the White House: Under Trump, the U.S seems to be even more subservient to the royal Sauds than before.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n And, according to https:\/\/28pages.org\/<\/span><\/a>, which is the website that reports ongoing efforts by the U.S. Government to squash efforts by the 9\/11 victim-families to pursue legal charges against the royal Sauds and others involved in the conspiracy to perpetrate 9\/11, this U.S. Governmental obstructionism continues right up till now, with recent reports by that site being published both in August 2017 and in September 2017. <\/span><\/p>\n Ever since 9\/11, there has been permanent war (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.), massive increases in federal spending to purchase weapons from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. weapons-makers, and a general transformation of the U.S. Government toward becoming an American police-state, which is very useful to the elite who are actually in control<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n A phenomenally good investigative article was issued on 22 January 2015, by the great Nafeez Ahmed, about the role that Silicon Valley billionaires have been and are playing in this, titled \u201cHow the CIA Made Google\u201d<\/span><\/a>. One can\u2019t correctly understand any international news without knowing what Ahmed disclosed there. It importantly fills in some of the many areas that have been previously in the dark about this entire decades-long emerging American police-state operation.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse By now, it has been well documented that, as I documented on January 29th, “Al Qaeda Funded by Royal Sauds, U.S. Gov\u2019t. Documents\u201d. And, yet, despite the massive documentation which the U.S. Government itself possesses regarding this (and which has been suppressed by the U.S. \u2018news\u2019media but is linked-to in that article so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":325491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[1022,30,1036,96,34,67,522,871,20344,6257,49,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-325490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire","8":"tag-1022","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-breaking-news","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-iran","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-obama","15":"tag-qatar","16":"tag-sauds","17":"tag-trump","18":"tag-usa-news","19":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}