Will Shifting Loyalties in the Middle East (and Fracking) Bring Truth about 9/11?

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More at The Real News

As the IBT reported yesterday, Congressman Walter Jones recently managed to get intelligence gatekeeper Mike Rogers to share the 28 redacted pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into 9/11 that show Saudi involvement in the plot.

It took Jones six weeks and several letters to the House Intelligence Committee before the classified pages from the 9/11 report were made available to him. Jones was so stunned by what he saw that he approached Rep. Lynch, asking him to look at the 28 pages as well. He knew that Lynch would be astonished by the contents of the documents and perhaps would join in a bipartisan effort to declassify the papers.

He has now joined with Stephen Lynch in an effort to allow all of us to read about Saudi involvement in 9/11.

“I was absolutely shocked by what I read,” Jones told International Business Times. “What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly.”

The public may soon also get to see these secret documents. Last week, Jones and Lynch introduced a resolution that urges President Obama to declassify the 28 pages, which were originally classified by President George W. Bush.

And it’s not just the original findings about Saudi financial support for the terrorists. As IBT also notes, more recent reporting from Florida reveals possible ties between Saudi princes and the hijackers. Senator Bob Graham continues his efforts to get people to look more closely at the Saudi role (the entire Real News Network interview with him is a worthy review). And there is reason to believe NSA intercepts that were reviewed neither by the JICI nor the 9/11 Commission implicate Saudis in the attack.

All that — as well as details on how the Saudis refused to cut off funding for terrorism until at least 2009 — has been suppressed for 12 years because our relationship with the Saudis was deemed more important than our need to publicly understand the roots of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.

While it’s very early yet — Congress, many members of which who are funded indirectly by Saudis — are doing everything they can to ensure the Saudis remain ascendant in the Middle East. But if an Iran deal succeeds, and if we continue to wean ourselves from Saudi oil by replacing our ill-considered reliance on them with ill-considered efforts that ruin our own groundwater via fracking, then it may become politically possible to admit that individual Saudis had much more responsibility for 9/11 than, say, Saddam.

But there may be good reason to admit to that now. After all, Bandar flunkie (and the aide of a man who formally suppressed this information) just issued this warning.

An atmosphere this poisonous is dangerous, to say the least. The incentive for the Saudis to engage in all kinds of self-help that Washington would find less than beneficial, even destructive, is significant and rising. Driven into a corner, feeling largely abandoned by their traditional superpower patron, no one should doubt that the Saudis will do what they believe is necessary to ensure their survival. It would be a mistake to underestimate their capacity to deliver some very unpleasant surprises: from the groups they feel compelled to support in their escalating proxy war with Iran, to the price of oil, to their sponsorship (and bankrolling) of a much expanded regional role for Russia and China at America’s expense.

While the suppressed evidence shows more evidence that individual princes supported 9/11 than that the Saudi state did, plenty of still powerful princes have proven their ability to foster terrorism when need be. Particularly as Syria remains a rising source of volatility in the Middle East, it would be well for us to understand how deeply support for 9/11 extended 12 years ago.

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19 replies
  2. grayslady says:

    I’m not sure what you mean by certain members of congress being “indirectly funded by Saudis”. Could you elaborate?

    Yes, the Paul Jay interviews with Bob Graham were revealing and a bit frightening.

  3. DWBartoo says:

    Superb post, EW.

    One hopes this may gain the widespread public attention which it rightfully deserves.

    As well, “the ill-considered efforts” ought not be allowed to go unnoticed or intentionally ignored at the behest of still yet other “loyalties”.

    DW

  4. Frank33 says:

    I hate to snitch on National Security Reporters. But LA Times Ken Dilanian is revealing classified secrets and that is bad and is a crime. Plus Dilanian is a defeatist accusing our brave spies of being crooks and liars and failures.

    And Dilanian accuses our spies of failing to have enough informants in Al Qaeda. Actually he should congratulate Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda for their success infiltrating the CIA and NSA with their informants.

    The program also was tainted by financial irregularities, according to a former senior CIA official. The CIA’s inspector general found that some NOCs billed the agency for unjustified time and expenses, three former officials said, and it forced a few to repay money…

    Masking spies as engineers, consultants or other professions has long been part of the CIA playbook. But the push took on new urgency after the 2001 terrorist attacks exposed the CIA’s lack of informants inside Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

    And speaking of that classic false flag op, the 9-11 attacks, the truth is finally being revealed.

  5. Jessica says:

    Sheesh – that flunkie’s warning is a bit of a tantrum. Was he stomping his feet, too? And very revealing. Somewhat related, Patrick Cockburn has an excellent article on Counterpunch from Monday about Saudi funding of extremists:

    “But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa’ida members or al-Qa’ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa’ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.”

    Full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/09/the-deadly-pawns-of-saudi-arabia/

  7. ArizonaBumblebee says:

    First, we had the revelations of Edward Snowden via The Guardian. Then, we had the revelations of Seymour Hersh regarding Syria. Now, there are reports that everything we thought we knew about who was responsible for 9/11 may be wrong, or at least incomplete. If the reports of Saudi involvement in 9/11 are even partially true, it raises several profound questions. First, why aren’t we targeting for drone strikes any members of the Saudi royal family who provided support for the 9/11 attack and may still be providing financial support to al-Qaeda? Or, are we too busy bombing wedding parties and low-level flunkies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen? Second, why are we working with the Saudis to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, which could end up in establishing a jihadi regime in Damascus? Third, why aren’t we developing plans to bomb Riyadh rather than Tehran unless they come clean on their involvement in the 9/11 attack? All of the uncomfortable questions raised by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 regarding the Bush family’s relationships with the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family should be the focus of a congressional investigation, but they won’t be. Everyone talks about the Israel Lobby, and rightly so, but they don’t talk too much about the Saudi Lobby.

  8. Anonymous says:

    Hope Daniel Hopsicker’s work gets renewed attention (Welcome to Terrorland). According to his reporting, at least one of the hijackers’ flight schools, Huffman Aviation in South Florida, was a cover for a “protected” drug trafficking airport.

  9. Anonsters says:

    @Jessica:

    Eh, I don’t think that’s right, that the Shi’a (qua Shi’a) are the main targets for Sunni Islamists. First, the difference is between whether the target should be the “near enemy” or the “far enemy.” We (America) = the far enemy. The near enemy is anyone who stands in the way of establising fundamentalist Islamist rule in ME countries. That Shi’a are being killed is probably just a side-benefit. And the idea that they’re even being killed where there aren’t all that many of them isn’t convincing as evidence of Shi’ism being the main target because the places listed just so happen to be the places in the ME with the most governance chaos. That suggests to me that they’re targets of opportunity. The long-term goal for those focused on the “near enemy” still seems to be the overthrow of ME governments that do not or will not implement their particular (and peculiarly narrow) view of Shari’a.

  10. Anonsters says:

    I don’t know why the congresscritters are shocked by Saudi connections with terrorist groups. We’ve known about that for years and years and years now. Any of the books you read about al-Qaeda highlight their Saudi connections. Now, specific details about 9/11 may be news, but the very fact that Saudis were (and are) intimately connected with such groups and their plots strikes me as something everyone should already know by now.

    That they don’t, however, is typical. Have $$$? I see no evil!

  13. lysias says:

    If the Saudis were involved in 9/11, why were they? What was in it for them? If they did it, the likeliest explanation is that they were doing the bidding of at least some elements within the U.S. government.

  14. emptywheel says:

    @Anonsters: I’d distinguish between Saudi goals, which require hegemony legitimized through the two mosques, and AQ stated goals, which involve near and distant enemies.

    The Shias lie somewhere in that middle ground.

  15. Anonsters says:

    @emptywheel:

    If we’re being honest, we should probably distinguish goals on a group-by-group basis. That we tend not to is a failure on our part to cope with nuance. Hell, even AQ itself isn’t completely unified in its orientation.

    More reason for us to be investing in educating and training intelligence officers to be cultural experts, rather than training them to blow shit up and do other covert action crap.

  17. klynn says:

    This is amazing to see finally coming out. If you had asked me a week ago if I thought what we had long suspected would be confirmed? I would have said, “No!” Goodness was someone listening?

  19. Ronald says:

    Just how did those three towers come down?
    Steel framed buildings don’t fall down in their own footprint at the speed of gravity after negligible fires, or ANY fires for that matter.
    Not to mention that airplane fuel isn’t hot enough to do significant damage to steel.
    NOt to mention the fires were going out when the buildings were brought down.
    Not to mention the buildings were brought down so soon BECAUSE the fires were going out.
    Much much bigger fires failed to bring down such buildings.

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