Russ Baker's website, "Who, What Why", recaps the botched Congressional investigation of 9/11, especially related to an incomplete accounting of the Saudi government's role.
Baker ties into his story earlier reporting by The Miami Herald, the Broward Bulldog, and the Sarasota Tribune, and highlights untimely deaths in Saudi Arabia of highly placed individuals linked to the 9/11 terrorists.
Although Graham has not said so publicly, the implications are clear: the 9/11 attack on the United States could have been at a minimum, an operation of wealthy Saudis connected to the Kingdom who went rogue and, at worst, a conspiracy of which highly placed Saudis were aware.
In any case, the central thesis of Baker's -- detailed in "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years " -- holds today more than ever.
Why? Because the geo-political arrangements in the Mideast, advocated and defended strongly US presidents including George HW Bush and especially George W Bush -- now manifest as a refugee crisis tugging at European economic security.
The United States' arrangement with Saudi Arabia was a deal with the devil long before most Americans understood how the Saudi ruling families guaranteed their own safety and wealth by allowing Saudi-based Islamic extremists to export their brand of radicalism throughout the region. The deal protected a world economy based on fossil fuels.
Today the rushing tide of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Libya, and Syria -- attempting to flee into European nations that are now shutting down their borders for fear of capsizing their own economic boats -- reflects the failure of energy policies in the era after World War I.
9/11 wasn't just America's catastrophe. It was a point along a hundred year continuum of international politics that shielded great wealth and prerogatives.
On the positive side, the Obama administration and some states are rearranging energy policies gradually in a promising direction, along a path that won't solve the massive refugee crisis but could eliminate oil wealth as the determinant factor binding the US and Europe to its devil's deal. However, the rate of change doesn't match to the urgency and need.
To visualize that, one needs to close one's eyes and imagine the refugees captured by television news in California -- having lost everything they own to enormous forest fires as a consequence of global warming -- are in the same boat as the refugees from Syria fleeing warfare that has turned vast parts of their nation into smoldering, toxic rubble.
Our refugees have a system including families, friends, government and economic law and order, to eventually absorb despair. Americans need to understand the difference is not durable as it seems. In a widely emailed OPED from the Sunday New York Times, Yale professor Timothy Snyder ("The Next Genocide") wrote about the fragility of civilization when it is under stress as great as we are experiencing.
Our own state, Florida, is an example of the drifting. We not only host populations of immigrants, but Florida -- Sarasota, specifically -- harbored one Saudi family associated with the 9/11 attacks. The ringleader of the 9/11 attack, Mohammed Atta, sought flight training experience in Homestead. At the same time, the economic arrangements favoring the state's largest electric utilities have only hardened under a single (GOP) party leadership.
Why ricochet from isolated examples to conflate terrorism, forest fires, refugees streaming into Europe and GOP opponents of rooftop solar in Florida? Those who do not understand history are not just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past; they are ensuring that future generations cannot walk back those mistakes at all.
Baker ties into his story earlier reporting by The Miami Herald, the Broward Bulldog, and the Sarasota Tribune, and highlights untimely deaths in Saudi Arabia of highly placed individuals linked to the 9/11 terrorists.
Several of those alleged to have had knowledge of this putative scheme and its enormous implications met with untimely ends shortly after Zubaydah’s interrogation. In June, 2002, three months after Zubaydah’s capture, the man he identified as his controller, Prince Ahmed, died of what officials said was a heart attack while asleep. Another brother of Ahmed’s and Sultan’s, Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulazziz, died of a heart attack on July 25, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. The death of Fahd, who preceded his brother as head of EIRAD, is described in a Riyadh-datelined article by Middle East Newsfile, as follows:Former US Senator Bob Graham has been battling the FBI for stonewalling aspects of the 9/11 investigation.
"Prince Fahd died suddenly. Prince Fahd did not show any symptoms of any ailment. He had, however, made an appointment with a dentist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh to check a toothache."
A cousin, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died when his car crashed en route to Salman’s funeral. Zubaydah had supposedly implicated Prince Sultan bin Faisal, and another royal, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir. as Al-Qaeda supporters. All these men were in their forties. Still another key figure in Zubaydah’s monstrous scenario met an untimely death. On February 20, 2003, Mushaf Ali Mir, the Pakistani air force chief, his wife and fifteen others, were killed in a plane crash.
Not a hint of the above information appeared in the released portion of the presidential 9/11 commission report. It is not known whether any of it was in the 28 pages of material about Saudi connections that the Bush Administration censored on national security grounds.
Although Graham has not said so publicly, the implications are clear: the 9/11 attack on the United States could have been at a minimum, an operation of wealthy Saudis connected to the Kingdom who went rogue and, at worst, a conspiracy of which highly placed Saudis were aware.
In any case, the central thesis of Baker's -- detailed in "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years " -- holds today more than ever.
Why? Because the geo-political arrangements in the Mideast, advocated and defended strongly US presidents including George HW Bush and especially George W Bush -- now manifest as a refugee crisis tugging at European economic security.
The United States' arrangement with Saudi Arabia was a deal with the devil long before most Americans understood how the Saudi ruling families guaranteed their own safety and wealth by allowing Saudi-based Islamic extremists to export their brand of radicalism throughout the region. The deal protected a world economy based on fossil fuels.
Today the rushing tide of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Libya, and Syria -- attempting to flee into European nations that are now shutting down their borders for fear of capsizing their own economic boats -- reflects the failure of energy policies in the era after World War I.
9/11 wasn't just America's catastrophe. It was a point along a hundred year continuum of international politics that shielded great wealth and prerogatives.
On the positive side, the Obama administration and some states are rearranging energy policies gradually in a promising direction, along a path that won't solve the massive refugee crisis but could eliminate oil wealth as the determinant factor binding the US and Europe to its devil's deal. However, the rate of change doesn't match to the urgency and need.
To visualize that, one needs to close one's eyes and imagine the refugees captured by television news in California -- having lost everything they own to enormous forest fires as a consequence of global warming -- are in the same boat as the refugees from Syria fleeing warfare that has turned vast parts of their nation into smoldering, toxic rubble.
Our refugees have a system including families, friends, government and economic law and order, to eventually absorb despair. Americans need to understand the difference is not durable as it seems. In a widely emailed OPED from the Sunday New York Times, Yale professor Timothy Snyder ("The Next Genocide") wrote about the fragility of civilization when it is under stress as great as we are experiencing.
Our own state, Florida, is an example of the drifting. We not only host populations of immigrants, but Florida -- Sarasota, specifically -- harbored one Saudi family associated with the 9/11 attacks. The ringleader of the 9/11 attack, Mohammed Atta, sought flight training experience in Homestead. At the same time, the economic arrangements favoring the state's largest electric utilities have only hardened under a single (GOP) party leadership.
Why ricochet from isolated examples to conflate terrorism, forest fires, refugees streaming into Europe and GOP opponents of rooftop solar in Florida? Those who do not understand history are not just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past; they are ensuring that future generations cannot walk back those mistakes at all.
2 comments:
Interesting, but your view of "history" is limited. If you go back to the 1980's, Bin Laden was a sort of hero to many, fighting the USSR in Afghanistan and in fact defeating them, with Saudi and other (US?) backing. The Bin Laden family made their fortune as prominent Saudi contractors. Just because Afghanistan fell from USSR control, why would you expect prominent Saudis to cut ties with the Bin Ladens. The oil industry in Saudi Arabia originated with US oil companies which were gradually "bought out" by the Saudis from the 1980s-90s, but the US companies still have significant partnership and sit on the ARAMCO Board of Dir. It was the US oil industry that built the first airports, utilities, modern infrastructure etc. in Saudi Arabia. US military assistance over the years at least since the 1960s has helped keep the current Royal Family in power. US activity goes far deeper in that country than most know.
I second the first posters contribution, especially the: "US activity goes far deeper in that country than most know."
As every service member involved could tell a tale, if they where allowed to.
In the end it's going to be a moral question, like when we kicked segregation in the butt in the sixty's to finally try to live up to our rhetoric.
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