It’s becoming impossible to deny Saudi government complicity in 9/11. So why does Joe Biden want to sign a security pact with the kingdom that would obligate Americans to fight and die on its behalf?
May 25, 2024
Source: Jacobin
US vice president Dick Cheney meets with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud at the Naval Observatory, February 11, 2002. (Presidential Materials Division / Wikimedia Commons)
It’s never a bad time to reflect on the copious evidence for the Saudi government’s role in facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, it’s arguably more important than ever right now, with the Biden administration seemingly dead set on signing a mutual defense pact with that same government — a pact that would legally oblige the United States to get dragged into another Middle Eastern war by fighting alongside Saudi Arabia if and when it comes under attack. As this terrible idea limps closer to reality, even more evidence for Saudi government complicity in the attacks has come to light.
First reported by the Florida Bulldog, the latest revelations come from a May court filing that has come out of the ongoing lawsuit that 9/11 victims’ families launched against the Saudi government, challenging the kingdom’s attempt to have the suit dismissed. Littered through the filing are copious references to never-before-seen evidence collected by the families’ lawyers in the process of discovery and included in the material declassified by President Joe Biden in September 2021, which they argue shows without a shadow of a doubt that the Saudi government played an integral and deliberate role in helping the 9/11 hijackers kill nearly three thousand Americans.
Reading the filing, it’s hard to disagree.
One piece of evidence mentioned is a video found by authorities in the apartment of Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi after they raided it shortly after the attacks. Al-Bayoumi was not simply an asset of the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), Saudi Arabia’s principal spy agency, as damning as that is alone. According to a 2017 FBI report declassified two years ago, he was also paid his monthly GIP stipend through, and reported his intelligence gathering to, the then Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, a well-connected, long-serving official who was friends with, among others, the Bush family.
According to the filing, the tape, which the police produced “just days” before the document was filed, shows al-Bayoumi driving around Washington, DC — with two Saudi embassy officials who the FBI determined had a “nexus to al-Qa’ida” — in which “he surveys the US Capitol at length,” noting its “structural features, entrances, and security posts,” and “mak[ing] remarks throughout reflecting hostility to the West and Congress, including the senators who ‘make all the decisions.’” As the filing states, the US Capitol was among the targets the hijackers had discussed hitting, and may well have been the intended target of Flight 93 before a passenger uprising made it crash in Pennsylvania.
Another piece of evidence gathered from al-Bayoumi’s apartment: a drawing of a plane alongside an equation and calculations that were meant “to discern the distance at which a target on the ground will be visible from a certain altitude,” as determined by an aviation expert.
The 9/11 hijackers would have needed to know “from what distances and altitudes they would be able to see their targets,” and this information gave them “the visual cues needed to fly the hijacked jetliners into their targets,” the filing quotes the expert as saying. Meanwhile, the filing states, the equation on the drawing had nothing to do with what al-Bayoumi later claimed after the fact in a later deposition: that the drawing was merely about measuring the distance between different cities.
In its 2017 report, the FBI concluded that “there is a 50/50 chance [al-Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur.” But these two pieces of evidence alone make that one of this century’s great understatements. If al-Bayoumi had possible foreknowledge about the 9/11 attacks, it’s because he was clearly intimately involved in planning them.
Meanwhile, phone records cited in the filing show back-and-forth calls between al-Bayoumi and the Saudi embassy, consulate, and various of its officials at key points: before the arrival of two of the hijackers in Los Angeles, “between and prior to and directly following key events of logistic assistance provided” to the hijackers, and before and after the party al-Bayoumi held for the hijackers connecting them to a local support network.
Other phone records show al-Bayoumi and Saudi consular official Fahad al-Thumairy calling Ismail Mana, another official with the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs (MOIA, which has long been accused of being a vehicle for the spread of extremism), shortly before he met with the hijackers. He placed calls for the purpose of finding the hijackers an apartment before they arrived. In fact, al-Bayoumi had visited the rental office of his own apartment complex at least five times before their arrival, asking if there was an apartment available in “close proximity” to his, according to evidence gathered via discovery. All this, even though al-Bayoumi would later claim he met the two hijackers on the day they arrived entirely by chance.
The filing also sheds more light on Mana himself, previously a figure mentioned in the sworn deposition of a former FBI counterterrorism agent. One member of the King Fahad Mosque that Mana helped oversee as part of his MOIA work — a mosque, incidentally, that Saudi Arabia had funded and that the FBI had concluded had been the site of “extremist-related activity both before and after September 11” — testified that he “had a fierce hatred of non-Muslims and held anti-American beliefs.” Evidence shows that al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy knew and worked with Mana, the filing states, including al-Bayoumi’s phone book, which listed Mana under the Saudi Consulate with the identifier “Islamic affairs.” Al-Bayoumi met with the other two at the mosque shortly after meeting the hijackers, according to witness testimony.
These are just some of the most eye-popping revelations contained in the filing that builds on previous disclosures, all making it more and more undeniable that the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have happened without the direct, deliberate efforts of the Saudi government and its officials. In short, they establish that a Saudi intelligence asset paid by the Saudi ambassador and with numerous official Saudi official contacts not only helped get two of the future 9/11 hijackers set up in the United States, but was apparently closely involved in the actual planning of the attacks — to the point of casing out one of their potential targets.
The big question right now is, why on Earth would Americans ever bind themselves to fight and die on behalf of a government that did this, as the Biden administration wants?
The answer is they wouldn’t — not unless they are forced to, against their informed consent. First, by a president desperate to claim that the disaster he’s created in the Middle East has somehow all been worth it; and above all, by a political class that treats the wishes of a faraway foreign government as more important than the struggles of its own people.
Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
US vice president Dick Cheney meets with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud at the Naval Observatory, February 11, 2002. (Presidential Materials Division / Wikimedia Commons)
It’s never a bad time to reflect on the copious evidence for the Saudi government’s role in facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, it’s arguably more important than ever right now, with the Biden administration seemingly dead set on signing a mutual defense pact with that same government — a pact that would legally oblige the United States to get dragged into another Middle Eastern war by fighting alongside Saudi Arabia if and when it comes under attack. As this terrible idea limps closer to reality, even more evidence for Saudi government complicity in the attacks has come to light.
First reported by the Florida Bulldog, the latest revelations come from a May court filing that has come out of the ongoing lawsuit that 9/11 victims’ families launched against the Saudi government, challenging the kingdom’s attempt to have the suit dismissed. Littered through the filing are copious references to never-before-seen evidence collected by the families’ lawyers in the process of discovery and included in the material declassified by President Joe Biden in September 2021, which they argue shows without a shadow of a doubt that the Saudi government played an integral and deliberate role in helping the 9/11 hijackers kill nearly three thousand Americans.
Reading the filing, it’s hard to disagree.
One piece of evidence mentioned is a video found by authorities in the apartment of Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi after they raided it shortly after the attacks. Al-Bayoumi was not simply an asset of the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), Saudi Arabia’s principal spy agency, as damning as that is alone. According to a 2017 FBI report declassified two years ago, he was also paid his monthly GIP stipend through, and reported his intelligence gathering to, the then Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, a well-connected, long-serving official who was friends with, among others, the Bush family.
According to the filing, the tape, which the police produced “just days” before the document was filed, shows al-Bayoumi driving around Washington, DC — with two Saudi embassy officials who the FBI determined had a “nexus to al-Qa’ida” — in which “he surveys the US Capitol at length,” noting its “structural features, entrances, and security posts,” and “mak[ing] remarks throughout reflecting hostility to the West and Congress, including the senators who ‘make all the decisions.’” As the filing states, the US Capitol was among the targets the hijackers had discussed hitting, and may well have been the intended target of Flight 93 before a passenger uprising made it crash in Pennsylvania.
Another piece of evidence gathered from al-Bayoumi’s apartment: a drawing of a plane alongside an equation and calculations that were meant “to discern the distance at which a target on the ground will be visible from a certain altitude,” as determined by an aviation expert.
The 9/11 hijackers would have needed to know “from what distances and altitudes they would be able to see their targets,” and this information gave them “the visual cues needed to fly the hijacked jetliners into their targets,” the filing quotes the expert as saying. Meanwhile, the filing states, the equation on the drawing had nothing to do with what al-Bayoumi later claimed after the fact in a later deposition: that the drawing was merely about measuring the distance between different cities.
In its 2017 report, the FBI concluded that “there is a 50/50 chance [al-Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur.” But these two pieces of evidence alone make that one of this century’s great understatements. If al-Bayoumi had possible foreknowledge about the 9/11 attacks, it’s because he was clearly intimately involved in planning them.
Meanwhile, phone records cited in the filing show back-and-forth calls between al-Bayoumi and the Saudi embassy, consulate, and various of its officials at key points: before the arrival of two of the hijackers in Los Angeles, “between and prior to and directly following key events of logistic assistance provided” to the hijackers, and before and after the party al-Bayoumi held for the hijackers connecting them to a local support network.
Other phone records show al-Bayoumi and Saudi consular official Fahad al-Thumairy calling Ismail Mana, another official with the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs (MOIA, which has long been accused of being a vehicle for the spread of extremism), shortly before he met with the hijackers. He placed calls for the purpose of finding the hijackers an apartment before they arrived. In fact, al-Bayoumi had visited the rental office of his own apartment complex at least five times before their arrival, asking if there was an apartment available in “close proximity” to his, according to evidence gathered via discovery. All this, even though al-Bayoumi would later claim he met the two hijackers on the day they arrived entirely by chance.
The filing also sheds more light on Mana himself, previously a figure mentioned in the sworn deposition of a former FBI counterterrorism agent. One member of the King Fahad Mosque that Mana helped oversee as part of his MOIA work — a mosque, incidentally, that Saudi Arabia had funded and that the FBI had concluded had been the site of “extremist-related activity both before and after September 11” — testified that he “had a fierce hatred of non-Muslims and held anti-American beliefs.” Evidence shows that al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy knew and worked with Mana, the filing states, including al-Bayoumi’s phone book, which listed Mana under the Saudi Consulate with the identifier “Islamic affairs.” Al-Bayoumi met with the other two at the mosque shortly after meeting the hijackers, according to witness testimony.
These are just some of the most eye-popping revelations contained in the filing that builds on previous disclosures, all making it more and more undeniable that the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have happened without the direct, deliberate efforts of the Saudi government and its officials. In short, they establish that a Saudi intelligence asset paid by the Saudi ambassador and with numerous official Saudi official contacts not only helped get two of the future 9/11 hijackers set up in the United States, but was apparently closely involved in the actual planning of the attacks — to the point of casing out one of their potential targets.
The big question right now is, why on Earth would Americans ever bind themselves to fight and die on behalf of a government that did this, as the Biden administration wants?
The answer is they wouldn’t — not unless they are forced to, against their informed consent. First, by a president desperate to claim that the disaster he’s created in the Middle East has somehow all been worth it; and above all, by a political class that treats the wishes of a faraway foreign government as more important than the struggles of its own people.
Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
No comments:
Post a Comment