Authors trace connections between Saudi Royals and the 9/11 Hijackers

[James H. Fetzer]

NOTE: There appears to be a full-court press to promote one or another variation on the official account of 9/11, which was reinvigorated by the faked/staged killing of Osama bin Laden.  This appears to be yet another red herring to me.

 

STORY:

 

Was there a foreign government behind the 9/11 attacks? In an adaptation from their new book, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan examine the connections between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers, the Bush White House’s decision to ignore or bury evidence, and the frustration of the lead investigators—including 9/11-commission staffers, counterterrorism officials, and senators on both sides of the aisle. The press release is below.

To see the full text go to: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-2011-201108


FOR RELEASE: June 30, 2011

VANITY FAIR
AUTHORS TRACE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN SAUDI ROYALS AND THE 9/11 HIJACKERS

New York, N.Y. — Former senator Bob Graham, co-chair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry on 9/11, tells Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan that the committee found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers.” In a Vanity Fair adaptation from their new book, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, Summers and Swan trace connections between the Saudi royal family and the 9/11 hijackers—threads that are blurred in the 9/11-commission report.
 
“It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States,” Graham says of the Saudis. “I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.” Graham tells the authors that those involved “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” When Summers and Swan ask if it is credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation, the former senator says, “I think that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”
 
According to the authors, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar declared in a sworn statement after 9/11 “that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps.” The authors also note that “Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. . . . A former Clinton administration official has claimed—and U.S. intelligence sources concurred—that at least two Saudi princes had been paying, on behalf of the kingdom, what amounted to protection money since 1995.” Summers and Swan speak with Simon Henderson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who names two Saudi princes—Naif, the interior minister, and Sultan, heir to the Saudi throne—who, he alleges, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi official money to al-Qaeda.
 
“We had known for years that Saudi royals . . . were funding al-Qaeda,” says former C.I.A. operative John Kiriakou, who led the operation in Pakistan to capture Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner to undergo waterboarding. Kiriakou tells Summers and Swan that the bin Laden aide mentioned three Saudi princes during his interrogation. “[He] raised their names in sort of a mocking fashion, [indicating] he had the support of the Saudi government,” Kiriakou says. The princes—Ahmed bin Salman, Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir—all died within a week of one another, of a heart attack, in a car accident, and of thirst, respectively.
 
Summers and Swan’s inquiries reveal that information on the Saudi/al-Qaeda link to 9/11 remains shrouded in secrecy 10 years later. When they made a request to the George W. Bush Presidential Library for a previously published photograph of the president and Saudi diplomat Prince Bandar taken on the Truman Balcony days after the 9/11 attacks, they were told that the former president’s office was “not inclined to release the image from the balcony at this time.” The National Archives refused even to say whether commission files contain a record of an interview with Prince Turki, the former head of the G.I.D.
 
According to Summers and Swan, the 28 pages redacted from the Joint Inquiry report “were technically the responsibility of the C.I.A.,” but, the authors assert, “the agency would not have obstructed release of most of the pages.” They conclude, “The order that they must remain secret had come from President Bush.”
 
The August issue of Vanity Fair will be available in New York and L.A. on Thursday, June 30, and nationally and on the iPad on Tuesday, July 5.