Saudi king Salman talks to the media during a meeting with US president Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington, September 4, 2015. (photo: Yuri Gripas/AFP)
What
We Know From 28 Saudi Arabia 9/11 Pages
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
16 July 16
The
families of 3,000 dead Americans are still waiting for justice.
Even
given my longtime respect for Friday news dumps, this is a whopper. About damn
time, too. Speak to us, mother Times.
The 28-page document is a wide-ranging catalog of possible links
between Saudi officials and Qaeda operatives. It details contacts that Saudi operatives
in Southern California had with the hijackers and describes the discovery of a
telephone number in a Qaeda operative's phone book that was traced to a
corporation managing a Colorado home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the
Saudi ambassador to Washington.
The
White House soft-pedaled this stuff Friday afternoon, but there's still a lot in here that
smells like a dead mackerel in the noonday sun.
But some investigators remain puzzled by the exact role played by
Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi consular official based in the Los Angeles area at
the time of the attacks. They believe that if there had been any Saudi
government role in the plot, it probably would have involved him. Mr. Thumairy
was the imam of a mosque visited by two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and some
American government officials have long suspected that Mr. Thumairy assisted
the two men—Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid al-Midhar—after they arrived in Los
Angeles in early 2000. An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an
independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy "immediately
assigned an individual to take care" of Mr. Alhamzi and Mr. Midhar
"during their time in the Los Angeles area," but the F.B.I. has been
unable to piece together other details of the movement of the two men during
their early days in the United States. Two investigators for the Sept. 11
commission interviewed Mr. Thumairy for several hours in Riyadh, the Saudi
capital, in February 2004, but he denied having any ties to the hijackers—even
after being presented with phone records that seemed to link him to the two
men.
Well,
I'm convinced. This al-Bayoumi cat also appears to me to be worth a second
look. Per NBC:
For example, the report speculates that a U.S. resident named Omar
al Bayoumi may have been a Saudi intelligence agent. He had extensive contacts
with Saudi officials and received money from a Saudi defense contractor. As is
well known, the report discusses Bayoumi providing assistance to future 9/11
hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in
San Diego. He was arrested in Britain after the 9/11 attacks, but released
after the FBI could not tie him to al Qaeda. The 9/11 commission found "no
credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist
groups." The Saudis deny he was their asset.
Actually,
the 28 pages themselves say a lot more than that.
They
say that the FBI has information that al-Bayoumi provided "substantial
assistance" to the two hijackers. Then there's Osama Bassman, a friend of
al-Bayoumi's who also helped the same two hijackers and who the FBI suspected
had connections not only with Saudi intelligence, but also with Osama bin
Laden, the Eritean Islamic Jihad, and with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh
who is currently enjoying the government's hospitality at the SuperMax in
Colorado.
It is
here where we remind you that two of Dzokhar Tsarnaev's friends are doing
serious federal time merely for cleaning out his room in the wake of the Boston
Marathon bombing in 2013. I'm sure this will set the Intertoobz aflame with
unfounded and occasionally lunatic conspiracy theories, but there is a helluva
lot of smoke coming from these 28 pages and there certainly doesn't seem to be
any good reason for its having taken so long to pry them loose from our
government. And covering an ally's ass is not a good enough reason, not with
the families of 3,000 dead Americans still waiting for justice.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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