Eric Zuesse, supplemented from original post at strategic-culture.org
The chief source of funds to Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups is Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
Documentation comes from testimony of the captured top Al Qaeda financial operative to a U.S. Court; and from testimony cited in the ‘missing 28 pages’ of the congressional investigation into 9/11; and from private communications of a U.S. Secretary of State.
These documents cover Al Qaeda’s finances, not only pre-9/11, but up through at least 2014, and they consistently indicate that — throughout at least this lengthy period — the royal Saud family provided the essential funds that enabled Al Qaeda’s global operations, including the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda isn’t merely an extension of the Sauds’ Sunni-fundamentalist Wahhabist-Salafist jihadist beliefs, but every one of Al Qaeda’s members also receives a “salary” and is therefore a mercenary who is fighting for a cause that he not only believes in, but also receives his livelihood from.
Unlike many court cases, where some of the reliable evidence conflicts with other of the reliable evidence, all of the reliable evidence in this case is consistent: that the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the Saud family, have been the indispensable financial backers for Al Qaeda, and that Al Qaeda could not have succeeded as it has, without this money.
Furthermore, during the 1990s when Saudi King Fahd was in such ill health that the Saud family and Wahhab clergy were considering which of the Saud Princes were worthy of being in contention to become appointed as Fahd’s replacement, they requested and received from Al Qaeda’s chief, Osama bin Laden, a letter which was entirely private but was generally assumed to be providing his advice on that matter. The key passage about it, from the U.S. courtroom testimony was:
Q Do you have any understanding why in that context Osama bin Laden would have been sending letters to both members of the royal family and the senior ulema [the religious scholars]?
A: My understanding from talking with people like Abu Basir al-Wahishi who become the — the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, who I used to be close to, okay, or Halad or Shaykh Abu Hasan, Shayk Mujahideen, Shaykh Aman, and Shaykh Abul Sef — my understanding [was] that they — they want[ed] to know who they should support [to be the next King].
The following presentation of the evidence will start with the later period, and then will move backward in time, to the testimony from Al Qaeda’s financial chief (who just now was quoted) — the man who had collected all of the large cash donations to Al Qaeda until 9/11, and to his ultimate capture in the United States, on 16 August 2001, and prompt life-imprisonment, thus to hide him (and his testimony) from the American public, as much as possible, so that the Sauds’ role would not become known:
THE EVIDENCE
I: 17 August 2014.
As Liz Goodwin and Michael Isikoff noted on 11 October 2016 regarding a wikileak:
The Clinton email states: “We 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.”
NOTE IN CLARIFICATION: “ISIL” has been the U.S. government’s preferred term for ISIS. The Sauds prefer that it be called “Daesh.” Kamel Daoud headlined in The New York Times, on 20 November 2015, “Saudi Arabia, an ISIS that Has Made It”, and he said that ISIS isn’t actually much different from Saudi Arabia, and that, “The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking.” He reminded Americans: “Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex.” All of that is true. Yet, Saudi Arabia, whose “government” (as Clinton noted) sponsors Al Qaeda, isn’t ‘an enemy’ of ‘the U.S.’; but, instead, is ‘a U.S. ally’ — and its enemies, Russia and Iran, are ‘America’s enemies’ — or so the American aristocracy says. (America’s aristocracy determines which countries are ‘our’ enemies and we’ll invade, such as when we invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003. Whether or not the American public should believe what the American aristocracy says is a different matter, but the American public did believe the American aristocracy and its agents, prior to invading Iraq at that time, so as to eliminate ‘Saddam’s WMD’ — but actually to eliminate Saddam Hussein himself.)
This email from Hillary Clinton, https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/7243, was sent by her on 17 August 2014. Consequently, even more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, ‘our’ ‘allies’ were still financing “ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” And Hillary Clinton wasn’t saying this to the public; she was saying it privately, to a longtime friend — so the assertion wasn’t mere pretense from her. In fact, she was telling this to her soon-to-be Presidential campaign manager, John Podesta.
Any reference to the Saudi government (such as Ms. Clinton mentioned there) is a reference to the Saudi royal family, the Sauds, who own the Saudi government — it’s their fiefdom. She was actually referring to the Sauds, and to their retainers (including the bin Ladens). She was referring to the royals, and the rest of their aristocracy.
II: 30 December 2009.
I reported on 17 February 2016 that:
On 30 December 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a cable (subsequently released to the public by wikileaks) to America’s Ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan, headlined, “Terrorist Finance: Action Request for Senior Level Engagement on Terrorism Finance.”
It said:
She told those Ambassadors to make clear to each of the given nation’s aristocrats that, under the new U.S. President, Barack Obama, there would no longer be any allowance for continuation of their donations to Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups that attack the United States.
It opened, “This is an action request cable,” meaning that the operations of the local U.S. Embassy in the given nation would be monitored for compliance with the Secretary of State’s “request.”
Despite her assertion, there was no accountability, at all; yet she continued to complain in private about the Sauds’ financing of terrorist groups.
This was the situation in 2014 and in 2009, a decade and more after the 9/11 attacks. But those attacks in 2001 had actually been funded by the Royal Sauds. So, here was the situation prior to 9/11:
III: pre-9/11.
Osama bin Laden’s former bagman — the individual who prior to 9/11 had personally picked up each one of the million-dollar-plus donations (all in cash) for Al Qaeda (which financed the operation until the 9/11 attacks occurred) — said in a U.S. court hearing, “Without the money of the — of the Saudi, you will have nothing”. He also said that all Al Qaeda members were paid “salaries” from those donations — in other words, that this is why “you will have nothing” without their money: it’s a mercenary operation, albeit one that is rigorously based upon the Quran, utterly devout in the Sauds’ Wahhabist, fundamentalist Sunni, faith (which is called “Salafist” outside of Saudi Arabia; thus, ISIS, for example, is Salafist).
On 11 February 2015, I headlined “Al Qaeda’s Bookkeeper Spills The Beans”, which provided the most detailed and authoritative account ever of this huge cash operation pre-9/11, the account by the man who actually collected the money; and I reported there further, with links to the U.S. court-testimony documentation, that:
Zacarias Moussaoui was the bookkeeper and bagman (money-collector) for Al Qaeda, but the U.S. intelligence services have been keeping this fact secret as much as they can, because what he knows about the crucial financial backers of Al Qaeda can be very damaging to the U.S. aristocracy, which is heavily oil-based and closely allied with the Saudi royal family, which created Al Qaeda in order to please the Saudi clerics, who are Wahhabist Muslims who constantly threaten the royals with exposure of their economic and sexual corruption unless the royals finance the spread of the Wahhabist sect (such as by Al Qaeda), and thereby finance the spread of those clerics’ own international influence and power.
Or, so says the former bookkeeper of Al Qaeda, who was selected by Al Qaeda’s military chief, Abu Hafs (also known as “Mohammed Atef”), to serve Osama bin Laden in that capacity: Zacarias Moussaoui. This is his testimony, in brief.
Moussaoui swore to the court, that he collected multimillion-dollar cash donations to Al Qaeda from “Waleed — Waleed bin Talal, Prince — Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, Prince — Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Prince Mohammed Al Faisal Al Saud” and other Saudi royals. Prince Bandar, also known as “Bandar Bush,” was the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. on 9/11, and was documented in ‘the missing 28 pages’ to have been paying at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. Bandar was crucial to the 9/11 operation; so, he and his entourage (who were helped by Bush and Cheney in this) escaped from the United States promptly after the 9/11 attacks. Bandar later organized Al Qaeda’s leadership — via ‘Al Nusra’, or the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda — of the collective efforts by dozens of Arab-funded jihadist groups (including at least one sarin-gas attack), to overthrow and replace the existing government of Syria, since that government is allied with both Iran and Russia — both of which countries the Saud family hate.
IV: other pre-9/11 evidence.
On 10 September 2016, I reported on ‘the missing 28 pages’, which were actually 29 pages, which were kept secret — they were expurgated actually, from the congressional study on the origin of the 9/11 attacks — and I noted then that:
what that document actually showed, and proved (and cited FBI investigators who could then have testified in public, if requested), was the opposite of unimportant: that the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was known in Washington as “Bandar Bush,” because of his closeness to the Bush family), had secretly been paying the Saudi handlers of at least two of the 15 Saudis among the 19 9/11 hijackers, and that Bandar’s wife and other relatives were also paying those hijackers-to-be, and their families — thus enabling the future hijackers to obtain the necessary pilot-training etc., for the 9/11 attacks.
The reason why those 29 pages were hidden from the public for 13 years, and were misrepresented in the press as being insignificant when they finally were released, is that that portion of the 9/11 Commission’s report was the one which dealt with the financing behind the 9/11 attacks. In other words: it dealt with the high-level people who were really behind 9/11 — the people whom the U.S. aristocracy protected.
CONCLUSIONS
American citizens get the death penalty on far less, and far less-reliable, evidence than has already been published about Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, and even about a few other Sauds (and some key Americans, who also cooperated with him and them).
Why, then did U.S. President Barack Obama, though oath-bound to the U.S. Constitution and to the American people, veto a bill that Congress finally passed allowing the 9/11 families to sue the Saudi government — the Saudi royal family — for 9/11?
Whom was Obama protecting, and why? Did anyone publicly ask this question of him? Why not?
A PERTINENT NOTE: This same person, Obama, who protected the Sauds (like Bush did), said as follows about the non-sectarian, separation-of-church-and-state committed, anti-jihadist, leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, whom the U.S. and Saudi governments backed Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups in Syria in order to overthrow: As the Wall Street Journal headlined on 19 November 2015, “Obama Says Syrian Leader Bashar al-Assad Must Go”, and they reported Obama’s argument: “It is because it is unimaginable that you can stop the civil war here when the overwhelming majority of people in Syria consider him to be a brutal, murderous dictator. … He cannot regain legitimacy.” The slick liar Obama said that Al Qaeda in Syria and other such jihadists (whom he called ‘moderate rebels’) there should overthrow Assad (and would presumably be more ‘legitimate’ there) and that this would end the war there. But, in reality, even Western-sponsored polls consistently showed that Assad is the only person in Syria whom more than 50% of the Syrian people actually want to be their leader, and that the U.S. itself is loathed there because it is viewed by 82% of Syrians as being to blame for the tens of thousands of jihadists who have been imported into Syria (paid for by the Sauds and militarily trained by the Americans) causing immeasurable misery there for the Syrian people. The investigation by Mint Press News found that, “More than a dozen rebels interviewed reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government.” (This was consistent with what Moussaoui had said.)
Obama was (though never officially) a Saudi agent. Why are American Presidents impeached for extramarital sex but not for being traitors and for supporting America’s actual enemies, against the interests of the 9/11 victims and of the rest of the American people — as Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were? Is America’s government against the interests of the American people? If so, whom does it really represent? And why? And why are these facts (the evidence that’s avaliable at the links here) not being reported on television and in the newspapers, but only in online-news sites such as this? And why are not official lies called “lies” (except partisanly — by Democrats and Republicans only against each other — instead of by the mainstream press against both)?
And why is Zacarias Moussaoui still not allowed to speak, in public, to the American people, and to the global public?
Why is all of this crucially important news — now become history — still being hidden? Why are such crucial truths about 9/11 still news, even long after they have become (hidden from the general public as being) history?
Perhaps it’s because some of America’s ‘allies’ being America’s enemies is not merely history, it is even today’s reality. It’s not in the news — not being commonly reported as today’s reality. It’s still being hidden. Though the proofs for it are solid, and convicts receive the death penalty on far less — and less-solid — evidence, it is still being ignored.
And, as I reported earlier, “Bush Knew 2001 Terror-Attack Was Imminent and Wanted It”. It was an inside-job. The Sauds couldn’t have done it without cooperation from Bush. He demanded not to know when it would happen; he demanded to be kept uninformed of its details, as it was being planned and set afoot. Ignorance was his excuse, but it wasn’t really part of any explanation for what happened on 9/11.
PS: Saudi Arabia also produces more suicide-bombers than any other country. But, of course, given that nation’s aristocracy, and their clergy, that too makes sense. And 15 of the 19 9/11 jihadists were Saudi subjects (Saudi Arabia is a feudal kingdom, no democracy, so it has “subjects,” instead of “citizens”). And, on 27 January 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump banned immigration to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority nations, none of which had been involved in any terrorist attacks in the U.S., and none of which were allies of Saudi Arabia, which was overwhelmingly the chief source of Islamic terrorism both in the U.S. and elsewhere. The Trump-banned countries are: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Basically, Trump chose the most-anti-Saudi of the Islamic-majority nations, and he ignored not only Saudi Arabia, but also the other main sources of jihadism against the U.S: Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan. Maybe Trump, too, is a Saudi agent.
There were 19 hijackers on 9/11: 15 Saudi, 2 UAE, 1 Egypt, and 1 Lebanon. Trump’s order ignored all four nations. His order focused more against the Shiite-led countries, Iran and Syria, whose leaderships the Saud family are (with U.S. government assistance) trying to overthrow and replace.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.