The Saudi role in 9/11

[noise]

Excerpt of an interview with Sen. Graham:

In general terms it included the details of why we had raised suspicion that the Saudi government and various representatives of Saudi interests had supported some of the hijackers -- and might have supported all of them. My own personal conclusion was that the evidence of official Saudi support for at least two of the terrorists in San Diego was, as one CIA agent said, incontrovertible. That led us to another question: Why would the Saudis have provided that level of assistance to two of the 19 and not the other 17? There wasn't an adequate attempt to answer that question. My feeling was there wasn't anything to justify that discrepancy, and so there was a strong possibility that such assistance had been provided to others of the terrorists, but we didn't know about it. Then there's another question: If there was this infrastructure in place that was accessed by the terrorists, did it disappear as soon as 9/11 was completed? There's no reason to believe that it did.

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Author Joe Trento goes further and says Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were Saudi intelligence agents. I followed up with Trento and learned that he relied on multiple sources to confirm their GID status.

After 9/11, an unnamed former CIA officer who worked in Saudi Arabia will tell investigative journalist Joe Trento that hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were allowed to operate in the US unchecked (see, e.g., February 4-Mid-May 2000 and Mid-May-December 2000) because they were agents of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency. “We had been unable to penetrate al-Qaeda. The Saudis claimed that they had done it successfully. Both Alhazmi and Almihdhar were Saudi agents. We thought they had been screened. It turned out the man responsible for recruiting them had been loyal to Osama bin Laden. The truth is bin Laden himself was a Saudi agent at one time. He successfully penetrated Saudi intelligence and created his own operation inside. The CIA relied on the Saudis vetting their own agents. It was a huge mistake. The reason the FBI was not given any information about either man is because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States.” In a 2006 book the Trentos will add: “Saudi intelligence had sent agents Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi to spy on a meeting of top associates of al-Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, January 5-8, 2000. ‘The CIA/Saudi hope was that the Saudis would learn details of bin Laden’s future plans. Instead plans were finalized and the Saudis learned nothing,’ says a terrorism expert who asks that his identity be withheld…

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According to Shenon, several staff members working under Snell, “felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection,” based on “explosive material” on al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, a “shadowy Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles.”

Shenon recounts how Snell, in preparing his team’s account of the plot, purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government and moved the “explosive” supporting evidence to the small print of the report’s footnotes. (The Commission, pp. 398-399)

Two commission investigators who were working on documenting the 9/11 plot, Michael Jacobsen and Raj De, argued that it was “crazy” to insist on 100 percent proof when it came to al-Qaeda or the Saudi regime. In the end, however, and with a publishing deadline looming, Snell’s caution and Zelikow’s direction buried apparently promising leads.

In similar fashion, 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry Report produced by Congress -- an entire chapter outlining evidence of Saudi and other state sponsorship -- were redacted.

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How did two undercover GID agents (alleged double agents) associated with Cole plotters (by way of the January 5-8, 2000 Malaysia meeting) take part in a 2nd more deadly attack almost a year later? Here is a possible explanation:

"Saudi security was actively following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision," Bandar, the national security advisor to Saudi King told the Arabic satellite network, Al-Arabiya, Thursday.

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," Bandar said.

It would be nice to know what he means by this. All this time later we still don't know the truth about US/Saudi communication in relation to al Qaeda terrorist attacks. The record shows this is not indicative of 'conspiracy theory.' Rather, it demonstrates the successful efforts of the US government to conceal the truth about 9/11 from the American public.

[victordrazen]

1. I remember reading from a decent source

quite awhile ago, I do not recall where, that the Saudis were the biggest funders of the so called Middle East terrorists. The reason that was given is that the Saudi government is seen to be too worldly and not supportive enough of Islam and so to gain the support of citizens they fund various fundamentalist groups which would be considered terrorists by the west. Then a few months ago, it was reported that Bush had signed some enormous arms agreement with the Saudis where the Saudis recieved all sorts of weapons. So...what are those arms for?

Sorry I can't address your post more specifically. But that is something I wanted to see if there was a discussion on at Dem Und. I did a search for the topic and ended up here.

[jberryhill]

2. "If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner"

More crap from Bandar Bush.

The problem is thinking of "The Saudis" as if they were organized any better than a poorly-disciplined crime family.

There is more backstabbing and skullduggery among them, that the word "corrupt" simply seems to be a quaint notion.

"Engaging" with Saudi intelligence is simply asking to have double agents and freelancers invited to the party.

This idea of an "official Saudi interest", apart from the collective and competing aims of the individual members of the extended Saudi royal family reflects a profound naivete about these untrustworthy bastards who would just as soon stab their own mothers to advance their individual ambitions.