by Joe Giambrone
You probably didn't hear from your corporate media that those 28 pages concerning Saudi state support to the September 11th suicide-hijackers have been released to the public. Or if you had, you would have most likely heard only the Saudi spin, published widely, and parroted by Barack Obama's spokespeople, that the pages don't mean anything.
One might ask of those 28 pages: if they didn't mean anything in the first place then why cover them up for fifteen years until the population mostly forgot about them?
This September 11 th , if you actually read the pages yourself, they might wind up meaning quite a lot to you. Couched in Congressional weasel-words, "may have" being repeated throughout, the report is a shocking eye-opener. It was likely the catalyst for the September 9 unanimous House of Representatives vote to pass JASTA, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.
A single paragraph from the long-censored Congressional Joint Inquiry chapter should convey a sense of the disgraceful cover-up as it now stands:
" Osama Bassnan. ...Bassnan was a close associate of al-Bayoumi and Omar Bakarbashat, another one of the hijackers' close associates. He also lived across the street from the hijackers, and made a comment to an FBI asset that he did more than al-Bayoumi for the hijackers. According to an FBI document, Bassnan told another individual that he met al-Hazmi through al-Bayoumi and later that he met two of the hijackers through al-Bayoumi. He also told the asset that al-Bayoumi was arrested because he knew al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhur very well. ...Bassnan has many ties to the Saudi Government, including past employment by the Saudi Arabian Education Mission, referred to in an FBI document as [REDACTED, INEXPLICABLY]. The FBI also received reports from individuals in the Muslim community alleging that Bassnan might be a Saudi intelligence officer. According to a CIA memo, Bassnan reportedly received funding and possibly a fake passport from Saudi Government officials. He and his wife have received financial support from the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and his wife. ...The report states that during that trip a member of the Saudi royal family provided Bassnan with a significant amount of cash. FBI information indicates that Bassnan is an extremist and supporter of Usama bin Laden, and has been connected to the Eritrean Islamic Jihad and the Blind Shaykh."
That "Saudi Ambassador to the United States" is, of course, "Bandar Bush," otherwise known as Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
The Saudi regime has been an arms supplier, funding source and trainer of Sunni terrorists for a long, long time. Beginning in 1979 they partnered with the US CIA and Pakistani ISI to create a fundamentalist army in Afghanistan, otherwise known as Operation Cyclone, the largest CIA operation in history. The Central Intelligence Agency was on the same side as Osama bin Laden, who was supplied with fighters--covertly--from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a number of other nations where Al Qaeda types were deemed a bit too dangerous to remain at home. The Afghan strategy was to send the Wahabbi radicals off to fight their Jihad elsewhere, and so solve two problems with one action.
If the Islamists are blowing up Soviets or Syrians or Libyan government forces then they are not blowing up targets in their homelands, such as in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, et cetera. This strategy persists to this very day and fuels the carnage in Syria.
Lest anyone believe that the Saudis acted alone on September 11th of 2001, without US official protection, that argument is indefensible. The great lengths that two US administrations have gone to keep this crime covered-up should be sufficient to dispel that fantasy. A simple 1 plus 1 train of logic: if the Saudis acted without US permission to attack the USA and murder 3,000 Americans at home, including an attack on the Pentagon(!), their entire country would have been vaporized off the planet the following day 9/12/01. It is not even remotely plausible that the Saudis would act alone against the US, and they most certainly did not.
A longstanding partnership exists here, and so we must expose the treachery of US high officials as well. The counter-terrorism adviser tot he White House, terror "Czar" Richard Clarke has accused the CIA, and George Tenet specifically , of hiding the hijackers from him and from the FBI, and thus allowing the September 11 th attacks to succeed. FBI agents on the case also complained about the CIA's deliberate hiding of Al Qaeda terrorists/hijackers inside the United States. There has been zero accountability.
Clarke, the highest counter-terrorism official in the land on 9/11, points the finger directly at Tenet, but with a caveat. He proposes a cover-story about Saudis allegedly "recruiting" Al Qaeda to serve as double agents. This "recruiting" story should be disregarded as cheap talk, however. The CIA pretended to warn the Bush White House of " spectacular attacks " domestically, while it simultaneously continued to shield known Al Qaeda men inside the US from exposure and arrest--for over a year. As with all witnesses we must strip away any speculation or opinion from Richard Clarke's statements and deal only with the facts. The CIA deliberately withheld intelligence about hijackers inside the US from the Counter-Terrorism Adviser to the White House and from the head of the FBI.
Prince Bandar floated that same sort of recruiting-bad-guys story, claiming to have watched the hijackers "with precision." With Saudi "precision" he apparently watched them for over a year until they flew right into the World Trade Center. Some stories fail the laugh test, and this is clearly one of them. A security loophole was exploited by those who knew better. We see a cover-story in place to attempt to deflect blame, but the cover-story has yet been unnecessary owing to the success of the larger 9/11 cover-up. That cover-up is now unraveling.
The CIA deliberately failed to fulfill its core mission, its raison d'etre, why it was created in the first place post Pearl Harbor: to protect the nation from an attack. The fact that CIA was aware of Al Qaeda terrorists living inside the US during numerous warnings of suicide skyjackings and of "spectacular attacks," yet failed to simply phone up the FBI and alert them, is the glaring red flag here which reads "Treason."
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