[Image: White House senior advisor Jared Kushner (C) arrives to join U.S. President Donald Trump and the rest of the U.S. delegation to meet with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at the Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 20, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst"]“Last week [Sept. 2019], it was revealed that the Trump administration has taken extraordinary steps to continue the 18-year cover-up of Saudi government involvement in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
On Thursday, September 12, one day after the 18th anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, a federal court filing revealed that Attorney General William Barr has asserted the “state secrets” privilege to block the release of an FBI report detailing extensive relations between some of the 19 hijackers and Saudi government officials. Victims of the attacks and their families are pushing for access to the 2007 report as part of a lawsuit against the Saudi government launched in 2003 charging the despotic monarchy with coordinating the mass killings.
Barr declared there was a “reasonable danger” that releasing the report would “risk significant harm to national security.”
The court filing also revealed that the FBI has agreed to turn over to the families’ lawyers the name of a Saudi individual that is redacted in a four-page summary of the FBI report released in 2012. The summary lays out evidence concerning three Saudis who provided money and otherwise assisted two of the hijackers in California in finding housing, obtaining driver’s licenses and other matters.
Government investigations have established that the two people who are named in the FBI summary, Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Saudi consulate official, and Omar al-Bayoumi, suspected by the FBI of being a Saudi intelligence officer, were working in coordination with the Saudi regime. The third person, whose name is redacted, is described in the FBI summary as having assigned the other two to assist the hijackers.
Lawyers for the families last year subpoenaed the FBI for an unredacted copy of the summary based on the contention that the third person was a senior Saudi official. But as part of the court filing, citing the “exceptional nature of the case,” the FBI issued a protective seal to prevent the name of the third Saudi from becoming public. The agency also refused to provide any of the other information requested by the families.
An FBI official said the agency was shielding the name to protect classified information related to “ongoing investigations” and to protect its “sources and methods.”
In fact, the extraordinary measures taken to conceal the role of the Saudi regime in the 9/11 attacks are driven by the need of US imperialism to maintain its reactionary alliance with the Saudi sheiks and continue the false cover story on 9/11 that has served as an ideological pillar for aggression in the Middle East and the buildup of a police-state infrastructure within the US, carried out in the name of fighting a “war on terror.”
The Saudi monarchy has been a key ally of the United States in the Middle East for 70 years, and since 9/11 it has become, alongside Israel, Washington’s most important partner in the region. It has played a central role in the bloody wars for regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, which have killed more than a million people and destroyed entire societies. It is also the world’s biggest purchaser of US arms.
Its intelligence agencies have long worked in the closest collaboration with the CIA and the FBI. The exposure of Saudi complicity in 9/11 immediately implicates sections of the US intelligence establishment in facilitating, it not actively aiding, the terror attacks, and sheds light on the multiple unanswered questions about how 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, could carry out such a complex operation.
The 9/11 attacks were eagerly seized upon by the George W. Bush administration, with the support of the Democratic Party and media allies such as the New York Times, to implement longstanding plans to wage aggressive war in the Middle East.
The cover-up of Saudi involvement has been carried out over three administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. It began within hours of the attacks themselves. Eight days after the attacks, at least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to secretly leave the US on a chartered flight. One of the passengers, a nephew of the supposed number one on Washington’s “most wanted” list, had been linked by the FBI to a suspected terrorist organization.
The US association with bin Laden went back decades. Under the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, conducted between 1979 and 1989, the US and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to the mujahedeen “freedom fighters” waging war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, an operation in which then-US ally bin Laden played a key role. The proxy war in Afghanistan was pivotal in the later creation of Al Qaeda.
In July of 2016, the US government released to the public a 28-page section, suppressed for 14 years, of a joint congressional inquiry into 9/11. The 28-page chapter dealt with the role of the Saudi government and contained abundant and damning evidence of extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers in the period leading up to the attacks.
Among its revelations were:
▪ Two of the Saudi hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived for a time in Los Angeles and San Diego in 2000, where they obtained pilot training. They were given money and lodgings by Omar al-Bayoumi, who worked closely with an emir at the Saudi Defense Ministry. Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an Al Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and placed on a “watch list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless they were allowed to enter the US on January 15, 2000.
▪ Al-Bayoumi “received support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense,” drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The company also had ties to Osama bin Laden. His allowances jumped almost tenfold after the arrival of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Al-Bayoumi had found an apartment for the two, which they shared with an informant for the San Diego FBI, advancing them a deposit on the first month’s rent.
▪ Al-Bayoumi’s wife received a $1,200 a month stipend from the wife of Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of Saudi intelligence. The wife of his associate, Osama Bassnan, identified by the FBI as a supporter of bin Laden, received $2,000 a month from Bandar’s wife.
▪ Three of the hijackers stayed at the same Virginia hotel as Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi Interior Ministry official, the night before the attacks.
Despite such evidence, and much more, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by George W. Bush concluded that there was no conclusive evidence that “senior” Saudi officials played a role in the 9/11 attacks. When the 28-page section of the congressional report was released in 2016, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, denounced all suggestions of Saudi involvement as baseless.
However, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, said, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.”
Former Democratic Senator Robert Graham, cochair of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, said that there was “a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of the federal government, which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”
In the lawsuit filed by the families of the victims, he filed an affidavit that stated, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”
It is significant, but not surprising, that the corporate media has given only the most perfunctory and muted coverage to the moves by the Trump administration to once again suppress the role of the Saudi regime in 9/11, and the Democrats have been completely silent.
One should compare thisresponse to damning evidence of Saudi culpability and US cover-up in relation to an event that took nearly 3,000 livesto the hysteria of the anti-Russia witch hunt led by the [Republican and] Democratic Party, the New York Times and the bulk of the media, based on completely unsubstantiated charges.”
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This appears to be a monumental campaign to bulldoze the more moderate strains of Islam, and replace them with the theo-fascist Saudi variety. Despite being well aware of the issue, Western powers continue to coddle the Saudis or, at most, protest meekly from time to time.
For instance, a Wikileaks cable clearly quotes then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” She continues: “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.” And it’s not just the Saudis: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also implicated in the memo. Other cables released by Wikileaks outline how Saudi front companies are also used to fund terrorism abroad."...
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Added: US sells cluster bombs to the Saudis who use them against civilian targets in Yemen:
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Americans accept that "their" government continually backs Saudi headslicers over innocent Americans.
Syria: In 2014 Biden told the truth about Syria: That there are no "moderate middle" fighters, and that US Sunni "allies"--Saudis, Turks, and UAE--funded and armed Al Nusra and Al Qaeda. But Obama made Biden apologize to all of them for telling the truth....The White House’s YouTube channel...Biden remarks made in Q and A session:
Biden: Turks, Saudis, UAE funded and armed Al Nusra and Al Qaeda," mideastshuffle.com, Sandboxer
"Update: The White House on Saturday said Vice President Joe Biden “apologized for any implication that Turkey or other [Sunni] allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL (IS, ISIS) or other violent extremists in Syria.” The operative word here is “intentionally” – please note that this language does not constitute a retraction of Biden’s claims that the US’s closest Mideast allies armed and funded extremist groups in Syria."...
10/7/2014: ""He [Biden] clarified that his recent remarks regarding the early stages of the conflict in Syria were not meant to imply that the UAE had facilitated or supported ISIL, Al Qaeda, or other extremist groups in Syria," said a statement from his office."
And:
10/6/2014, "In a similar apology to Turkey, Biden’s office said on Saturday, "The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other [Sunni] allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of the ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria."
(continuing): "The US vice president, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on Thursday told his audience – point blank – that America’s Sunni allies are responsible for funding and arming Al Qaeda-type extremists in Syria.
And he named names: Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, specifically. Others – like Qatar – are undoubtedly complicit too, but Biden’s comments were made off-the-cuff during the question and answer period following his prepared statement.
Of course, much of what Biden said has been suspected for years by Syria watchers....
But that’s not all. Biden also managed to fundamentally undermine his administration’s efforts to train and arm “moderate” Syrian rebels [terrorists] today, by claiming there is no “moderate middle (in Syria) because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.”
Keep in mind now that just two weeks ago [2014] Congress approved – at the request of this White House – $500 million [US taxpayer] dollars to train and arm “moderate” Syrian [headslicing] rebels. Obama’s second-in-command is saying there are none of those, so who exactly are US forces teaching to fight with heavy weapons in Saudi training camps today?
Let’s go directly to the Q&A session following Biden’s speech. Here is an unedited version taken from the audio recording released on The White House’s YouTube channel:
"Question: In retrospect do you believe the United States should have acted earlier in Syria, and if not why is now the right moment?
Biden: The answer is ‘no’ for 2 reasons. One, the idea of identifying a moderate middle has been a chase America has been engaged in for a long time. We Americans think in every country in transition there is a Thomas Jefferson hiding beside some rock – or a James Madison beyond one sand dune. The fact of the matter is the ability to identify a moderate middle in Syria was – there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers – they are made up of people who in fact have ordinary elements of the middle class of that country. And what happened was – and history will record this....My constant cry was that our biggest problem is our allies – our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends – and I have the greatest relationship with Erdogan, which I just spent a lot of time with – the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. Now you think I’m exaggerating – take a look. Where did all of this go? So now what’s happening? All of a sudden everybody’s awakened because this outfit called ISIL which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially thrown out of Iraq, found open space in territory in eastern Syria, work with Al Nusra who we declared a terrorist group early on and we could not convince our colleagues [Saudis, Turks] to stop supplying them. So what happened?... the President’s [Obama] been able to put together a coalition of our Sunni neighbors, because America can’t once again go into a Muslim nation and be seen as the aggressor – it has to be led by Sunnis to go and attack a Sunni organization. So what do we have for the first time?"
The audio clip ends there. While you are taking a moment to readjust your worldview and re-categorize the ‘good guys’ and bad guys,’ do also note the veiled swipe Biden takes at former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whose recent book criticizes Obama’s Syria decisions while he is still a sitting president.
Before you allow Biden to transfer all blame for the radicalism in Syria onto the convenient Muslims-du-jour, consider for a moment the US’s role in all of this.
We have press reports that the CIA was a major conduit for the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria – a role, no doubt, facilitated by US Ambassador Christopher Stevens who was killed in Benghazi by unknown extremists.
We are also told that the US assisted in the logistics of delivering a Saudi-bankrolled transfer of Croatian weapons in 2012 to Syrian ‘rebels' [terrorists]. According to the BBC: “The CIA is also reported to have been instrumental in setting up the alleged secret airlift of weapons from Croatia. And here is The Telegraph‘s take on things:
“The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria’s neighbors.”
These weapons were later caught on video in the hands of Ahrar al-Sham, which today is a [alleged] target of US airstrikes inside Syria. The New York Times goes further [10/24/2013]:
“With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s [terrorist] opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.”
“From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have [supposedly] vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.”
Exactly how does that exonerate Americans from delivering weapons to “Al Nusra and Al Qaeda?”...
Biden’s comments on Thursday were a bombshell that will be heard across the globe....So what did the mainstream US media say about it? Nothing. Zip. Nada.
No – wait. There were headlines about Biden’s speech – let me be fair. But this is what CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News pulled out of their collective hats:
CNN: “Joe Biden gets colorful on being a VP – and it rhymes with glitch.” This, a reference to Biden’s use of the word “bitch” in jokingly describing the job of a vice president.
CNN (again): “Joe Biden explains how Ebola is like ISIS.”
ABC: “This might be the best thing Joe Biden’s ever said.” Another reference to the ‘bitch’ comment.
NBC: “Vice President Joe Biden’s Foul-Mouthed Quip on Job Draws Laughs.” Bitch, again.
CBS: “Joe Biden’s salty description of being VP.” Yawn.
Fox: “Biden on being Vice President: It’s a b-itch.” Kill me now.
Enough said. Washington’s partners in [supposedly] fighting [terrorism] extremism – and trampling all over international laws to do it – are the same ones who have fueled it. The Vice President of the United States just said so. And Americans are snickering over the B-word. Leaders of the free world indeed."
"Thanks to Walid Itayim for his research assistance on this blogpost. Follow the author on Twitter and Facebook."
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Added: CIA has funded terrorists in Syria since at least 2012....
“Every single Syrian death in this [9 year] conflict is, legally, the fault of the aggressors: the United States."
“Every single Syrian death in this [9 year] conflict is, legally, the fault of the aggressors: the United States."
Image, March 25, 2013, Free Syrian Army terrorists inside a house in Aleppo, Reuters, via NY Times. "US has been helping Arab governments and Turkey send arms to the [terrorists] rebels"
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9/20/2015, "Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s Government," FAIR.org, Adam Johnson
"FAIR has noted before how America’s well-documented clandestine activities in Syria have been routinely ignored when the corporate media discuss the Obama administration’s “hands-off” approach to the four-and-a-half-year-long conflict. This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.
First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years [as of 2015], we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget.
In addition to the CIA’s efforts, there is a much more scrutinized and far more publicized program by the Department of Defense [Pentagon] to train “moderate rebels,” of which only a few dozen actually saw battle. The Pentagon program, which began earlier this year and is charged with fighting ISIS (rather than Syrian government forces), is separate from the covert CIA operation. It has, by all accounts, been an abysmal failure.
One thing the DoD’s rebel training program hasn’t been a failure at, however, is helping credulous reporters rewrite history by treating the Pentagon program as the only US effort to train Syrian [terrorists] rebels–now or in the past. As the US’s strategy in Syria is publicly debated, the CIA’s years-long program has vanished from many popular accounts, giving the average reader the impression the US has sat idly by while foreign actors, Iranian and Russian, have interfered in the internal matters of Syria. While the White House, Congress and the Pentagon can’t legally acknowledge the CIA training program, because it’s still technically classified, there’s little reason why our media need to entertain a similar charade.
Let’s start with Peter Baker’s New York Times piece from September 17 and some of its improbable claims:
"By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State [ISIS] on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting."
Notice the sleight-of-hand. There may only be “four or five American-trained fighters…fighting” expressly against ISIS, but there is no doubt thousands more American-trained fighters are fighting in Syria. The DoD’s statement is manifestly false, but because the New York Times is simply quoting “the military”—which, again, cannot not legally acknowledge the CIA program—it is left entirely unchallenged. This is the worst type of “officials say” journalism. The premise, while ostensibly critical of US foreign policy, is actually helping advance its larger goal of rewriting US involvement in the Syrian [so-called] civil war. A four-year-long [as of 2015] deliberate strategy of backing anti-Assad forces–which has helped fuel the bloody civil war and paved the way for the rise of ISIS–is reduced to a cheesy “bumbling bureaucrat” narrative.
Baker went on:
"But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”
In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain."
The sleight-of-hand continues: The article presents the training of [terrorists] rebels as a “way to combat the Islamic State,” but repeatedly speaks in general of training Syrian [terrorist] rebels as something “Obama always had been a skeptic of”–which flies in the face of the fact that he did so, to the tune of $1 billion a year over four years [$4 billion total], with 10,000 rebels trained.
But the piece goes on to make clear that when it’s talking about “training Syrian rebels,” it’s referring not only to the anti-ISIS program but to efforts to overthrow Syria’s government as well:
"The idea of bolstering Syrian rebels was debated from the early days of the [so-called] civil war, which started in 2011. Mrs. Clinton, along with David H. Petraeus, then the CIA director, and Leon E. Panetta, then the Defense secretary, supported arming [terrorist] opposition forces, but the president worried about deep entanglement in someone else’s war after the bloody experience in Iraq.
In 2014, however, after the Islamic State had swept through parts of Syria and Iraq, Mr. Obama reversed course and initiated a $500 million program to train and arm [terrorist] rebels who had been [allegedly] vetted and were told to fight the Islamic State, not Mr. Assad’s government."
This is outright false. These two paragraphs, while cleverly parsed, give the reader the impression Obama parted with the CIA and Mrs. Clinton on arming opposition forces, only to “reverse course” in 2014. But the president never “reversed course,” because he did exactly what Panetta, Petraeus and Clinton urged him to do: He armed the [terrorist] opposition. Once again, the Pentagon’s Keystone Kop plan is being passed off by journalists who should know better as the beginning and end of American involvement in the [alleged] Syrian rebellion. Nowhere in this report is the CIA’s plan mentioned at all.
The whitewashing would get even worse:
"Some Syrian [terrorist] rebels who asked for American arms in 2011 and 2012 eventually gave up and allied themselves with more radical groups, analysts said, leaving fewer fighters who were friendly to the United States." [Gee, they wouldn't have "gone radical" if US taxpayers had given them more weapons to kill innocent Syrians].
But the US did get arms to Syrian [terrorists] rebels in 2012. In fact, Baker’s own publication reported this fact in 2012 (6/21/12):
"CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian [Terrorist] Opposition"
Indeed, according to a rather detailed New York Times infographic from 2013 (3/23/13), shipments began, at the latest, in January 2012: Note that this map accompanied an article headlined “Arms Airlift to Syria [terrorist] Rebels Expands, With Aid From CIA.”
3/25/2013, "An Arms Pipeline to the Syrian [Terrorists] Rebels," NY Times
"More than 160 military cargo flights for Syria’s [terrorists] rebels, mostly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have landed in Turkey and Jordan since January 2012."..."Weapons from the former Yugoslavia were spotted in Syria this winter, after a series of military cargo flights from Zagreb to Amman. From Jordan and Turkey, trucks take the weapons to the border with Syria."...
The CIA’s program, when discussing a fraught foreign policy issue like Syria, is simply thrown down the memory hole. How can the public have an honest conversation about what the US should or shouldn’t do in Syria next when the most respected newspaper in the US can’t honestly acknowledge what we have done thus far?
The New York Times wouldn’t be alone. Comcast-funded Vox would also ignore the CIA [terrorist] rebel training program in its almost 4,000-word overview of the Syrian civil war.
Again, the Pentagon’s program would be the sole focus in regards to funding rebels, along with reports of Gulf states doing so as well. But the CIA funding, training and arming thousands of rebels since at least 2012? Nowhere to be found. Not mentioned or alluded to once.
Reuters and the Washington Post’s reports on the US’s Syrian strategy revamp, while they didn’t fudge history as bad as the Times and Vox, also ignored any attempts by the CIA to back Syrian opposition rebels. This crucial piece of history is routinely omitted from mainstream public discourse.
As the military build-up and posturing in Syria between Russia and the United States escalates, policy makers and influencers on this side of the Atlantic are urgently trying to portray the West’s involvement in Syria as either nonexistent or marked by good-faith incompetence. By whitewashing the West’s clandestine involvement in Syria, the media not only portrays Russia as the sole contributor to hostilities, it absolves Europe and the United States of their own guilt in helping create a refugee crisis and fuel a [US caused] civil war that has devastated so many for so long."
Added: “Every single Syrian death in this [9 year] conflict is, legally, the fault of the aggressors: the United States."
9/6/2018, “Trump Protects Al Qaeda, “The Resistance” Applauds, Cursing “Russians”,” Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford
“Every single Syrian death in this [9 year] conflict is, legally, the fault of the aggressors: the United States and its allies, who spent billions [of US taxpayer dollars] to deploy as many as 100,000 jihadists to wage war against a sovereign nation –– a crime against peace, the highest crime under international law, for which Obama, Clinton and other ranking U.S. civilian and military officials deserve the most extreme punishment. Donald Trump is now guilty of the same crime–the one that ten Nazis were hanged for at Nuremburg."...
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