Eric Zuesse

Evidence will be presented here that will explain, in a comprehensive and internally consistent way — and fully in accord with all of the existing evidence that has been published thus far — many key questions regarding 9/11. Also explained here will be why some of this evidence has been suppressed — such as the crucial testimony of Osama bin Laden’s bag-man who personally collected all of the million-dollar-plus cash donations into Al Qaeda. Also suppressed has been the reason why no persons have been prosecuted for their massive funding of the 9/11 terrorists, including of their training for this complex international terrorist act. In other words: the reasons, and the funders, of the 9/11 attacks, have both been suppressed, until now. But all of these matters are actually part of a broader picture, which also will be explained and documented here:

Why did U.S. President Barack Obama, who bowed down to King Saud (a tyrant in a brutal hereditary dictatorship, and the world’s largest buyer of U.S.-made weaponry), veto the bill that would allow the evidence regarding who financed the 9/11 operation to be presented and judged in a court of law?

Why did U.S. President George W. Bush, during the month before 9/11, refuse to allow his CIA Director, George Tenet, to speak with him alone in private, even when Tenet frantically urged Bush’s gatekeeper Condoleezza Rice to allow him to, or else something terrible, which he couldn't discuss with anyone but the President, would (not could — would) happen very soon?

Why did U.S. President Donald Trump, in his supposed anti-terrorist ban, choose to target the seven muslim-majority nations that he did, which hadn’t done terrorism against the U.S. (and not much international terrorism at all, really), and not target at all the world’s leading nation in both financing terrorism, and producing suicide-bombers — Saudi Arabia — not even include that country?

It’s not just about money — although the Saud King has a net worth higher than a trillion dollars, but Forbes and Bloomberg don’t even include any heads-of-state in their “billionaires” lists, though the world’s few richest people happen to be also royals (and therefore not listed).

It’s also, and even more, about power. We’re not supposed to learn about the manners of functioning of money and power at the very top, but nobody can understand 9/11 without addressing this issue, unless it’s being addressed as mythology rather than as history, which — in the case of 9/11 at least — it has.

Zacarias Moussaoui is the man who knew too much, and so he’s spending six life sentences without parole, at the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. That prison is designed for heads of dangerous gangs, who have, at other Supermax prisons, been able to communicate (usually in codes) to their subordinates outside (basically continuing to run the gang, from prison), and so this prison is the best one of all, for prohibiting Moussaoui from ever being able to communicate, to anyone on the outside, not only not to other members of Al Qaeda, but to anyone at all. Nonetheless, the 9/11 survivors and victim-families were finally able, in October 2014 (13 years after the enormous crime that had been committed against them on 9/11), to obtain the sworn testimony (sworn upon a Quran) in the legal case that they have been pursuing for over a decade in order to get to the bottom — or, really, to the top — of this crime, which has so diminished their own lives.

He had been the bag-man, who travelled out to the big cash donors (cash so that no one could trace their money going to Al Qaeda) and stashed it into a suitcase and then got back onto a plane to return to Osama bin Laden with it. He also did the bookkeeping for the organization. But perhaps 9/11 was going to be the stellar action and he had wanted to be a part of it, and Osama gave him his wish — the reason why an intimate colleague of bin Laden’s was, by good luck, captured on an immigration-violation charge, by an earnest low-ranking FBI agent, on 16 August 2001, in Minneapolis, isn’t definitely known. Only a few facts about Moussaoui are publicly known, such as that he had failed his 57 hours of flying lessons in Norman Oklahoma, and the suppressed testimony that he provided in this court case.

But, here are some of the things he said in that court-case:

In that testimony, he identified, by name, almost all of the top Saud Princes, when asked whom he had visited to pick up big (million-dollar-plus) cash donations; and one of the Princes he named was Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, who also happened to be the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, and a close friend of George W. Bush. If Prince Bandar’s father, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, had not died in 2011 before King Abdullah’s death in 2015, then Sultan would probably have been Abdullah’s choice to be his successor, and Bandar would then likely have become Crown Prince, the next in succession to the throne; but his father’s death ended that possibility for him — Bandar was out of the running, after 2011.

Moussaoui was asked:

Q: The money that was coming from the Saudi donors, how important was it to bin Laden’s ability to maintain the organization?

A: It was crucial. I mean, without the money of the — of the Saudi, you will have nothing.

He was asked:

Q: And all of this money was used to sustain al-Qaeda’s operations, correct?

A: Absolutely. I mean, all this.

Q: To clarify, you’re saying that the al-Qaeda members received salaries?

A: They do, absolutely.

So: all of the hijackers were not only Salafist-Wahhabist fundamentalist Sunni Muslims who believed that they’d be rewarded in the hereafter, but they were also rewarded while they were alive; they were dedicated warriors who were paid for their work. Without that, and without someone paying for their flight-training, and rent, and food, etc., 9/11 wouldn’t even have been possible. This is what Moussaoui was saying.

He was asked many questions about Osama bin Laden’s role regarding both the royal Saud family Princes, and the Wahhab clergy, and said:

So the Saudi cannot keep power in Saudi Arabia without having the agreement, okay, of the Wahhab, the Wahhabi, the scholar. …

So … father of Osama bin Laden was best friend, he was known, okay, of — of — of Fahd Al Saud, the ruler, the King of Saudi Arabia, and he’s the one — Al Saud — okay, who give to bin Laden [money] to rebuild the Holy Mosque in Mecca and to rebuild the Holy Mosque in Medina and also to rebuild the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem, okay. So the three mosques … the three holy sites in Islam was built by the father of Osama bin Laden.

He described how, when back in the 1990’s, King Fahd Al Saud was ill, these clergy were considering which Princes to select as being worthy of consideration by the King to succeed him at his death, and they wanted Osama bin Laden’s advice on that. Approval by the Wahhab clergy is essential in order to be named King. Moussaoui at that time was sent to the clerics, from Afghanistan, with a sealed letter from bin Laden. The Saud Princes wanted to be in bin Laden’s good graces; so, gifting him a few million dollars might have been just pocket change for them, but it bought things that could turn out to be far more valuable in return — maybe the title of King (and what that entailed: control over the entire government of Saudi Arabia, including its oil company, Aramco, the world’s largest — and all of the country’s land). These Princes, by donating to Al Qaeda, were making a small investment, for potentially vast returns.

(A British socialite who sued King Fahd for child-support for a child she bore from him said “What's £12m? It's their laundry bill every week.” She “won more than £20m.”)

The only Saudi Princes who have a chance to win in this contest are either a brother of the existing King, or a son of the existing King (at the option of the existing King); so, the contestants are few in number, for enormous rewards, and the motivation to please the King is probably obsessive on the part of most of those few contestants; but, if the Wahhab clergy say no to any of them, then any such person is effectively banned from being considered by the King. So, all of the contestants seek to have the approval of the clergy. (This arrangement goes back to an agreement that was reached in 1744 between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Wahhab, which founded Saudi Arabia.)

On 10 September 2016, I reported on ‘the missing 28 pages’, which were actually 29 pages, which were kept secret — they were expurgated actually, from the congressional study on the origin of the 9/11 attacks — and I noted then that:

what that document actually showed, and proved (and cited FBI investigators who could then have testified in public, if requested), was the opposite of unimportant: that the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was known in Washington as “Bandar Bush,” because of his closeness to the Bush family), had secretly been paying the Saudi handlers of at least two of the 15 Saudis among the 19 9/11 hijackers, and that Bandar’s wife and other relatives were also paying those hijackers-to-be, and their families — thus enabling the future hijackers to obtain the necessary pilot-training etc., for the 9/11 attacks.

Bandar is one of the men from whom Moussaoui had also picked up in Saudi Arabia big direct donations to Al Qaeda. But in “the missing 29 pages,” Bandar was documented to have been paying — and his wife also separately was paying — regularly in multi-thousand-dollar amounts, to the Saudi handlers who were paying the bills of the terrorists. (Maybe this was Bandar’s bid — approved of by his father — to become selected ultimately as King, the successor to a future King Sultan. For Bandar to have been doing this without the approval of his father, Crown Prince Sultan, wouldn’t have made any sense. But, for whatever reason, Bandar was doing this: that’s clear in “the missing 29 pages.” Getting to motive would be a big subject in the court case.)

Brian P. McGlinchey proved in 28pages.org/2016/04/18/911-commission-investigators-proposed-examining-possible-political-economic-and-other-influences-on-inquiries-into-saudi-ties-to-attacks/">his 18 April 2016 report at 28pages.org, that, ”The Bush administration’s lack of cooperation with Saudi-related 9/11 inquiries is well-documented.” Many examples were cited there, such as: investigators at the 9/11 commission who wanted to explore those connections were fired — it was not allowed to investigate any member of the Saudi royal family.

The reason why those 29 pages were hidden from the public for 13 years, and were misrepresented in the press as being insignificant when they finally were released, is that that portion of the 9/11 Commission’s report was the one which dealt with the financing behind the 9/11 attacks. In other words: it dealt with the high-level people who were really behind 9/11 — the people whom the U.S. aristocracy protected, the masterminds other than the jihadists, who financed their operation, even inside the United States. The information in those 29 pages was the tip of an iceberg, and looking below that tip was not allowed; but even the tip of it was hidden from the public, for 13 years.

Why, then did U.S. President Barack Obama, though oath-bound to the U.S. Constitution and to the American people, veto a bill that Congress finally passed allowing the 9/11 families to sue the Saudi government — the Saudi royal family — for 9/11?

Whom was Obama protecting, and why? Did anyone publicly ask this question of him? Why not?

This same person, Obama, who protected the Sauds (like Bush did), said as follows about the non-sectarian, separation-of-church-and-state committed, anti-jihadist, leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, whom the U.S. and Saudi governments backed Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups in Syria in order to overthrow: As the Wall Street Journal headlined on 19 November 2015, “Obama Says Syrian Leader Bashar al-Assad Must Go”.

Under President Obama, Syria’s ally Iran (both countries being led by Shiites) was officially blamed for the 9/11 attacks. On 15 March 2016, I bannered “U.S. Government Blames 9/11 On Iran, Fines Iran $10.5 Billion; Iran Refuses To Pay”, and described the utter shoddiness of that court decision, which reflects the U.S. not as a democracy of any sort but as a dictatorship, however fooled its citizens might be about that. Obama vetoed a bill to allow the Saudi government (i.e., the Sauds) to be blamed for 9/11, and then he endorsed a U.S. court’s hefty fine against Iran’s government as having caused 9/11. This is American ‘justice’? It’s ‘justice’ for the 9/11 families? For whom is it ‘justice’?

Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite, not Sunni, and Syria is headed by a Shiite who is allied with Iran; but the rabidly anti-Shiite Saud family hate and want to overthrow both governments, and the U.S. government is allied with the Sauds in this. It’s a global internecine Islamic war that the U.S. is the biggest arms-supplier to, selling weapons not only to the Sauds — America’s biggest foreign weapons-buyer — but also to the Sauds’ friends, the other fundamentalist Sunni royal Arab families, who own Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. Collectively, they’re the Gulf Cooperation Council, and they’re basically run by the Saud family, just as the U.S. aristocracy basically run NATO.

And both the GCC and NATO are allied together as fighting against those Shiite nations (Syria being actually the only secular, non-sectarian, Middle Eastern nation, but headed by a Shiite). Back in 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Wahhab swore an eternal oath that founded Saudi Arabia as a fundamentalist Sunni kingdom ruled by descendants of Saud and clergy of Wahhab. Part of their oath was hatred against Shia. The Saud family feel that the takeover of Syria, and destruction of Iran, are more urgent now than ever, and the U.S. aristocracy back that. So, Iran is blamed for 9/11, even though it had nothing to do with it (nor with support for any Islamic terrorism, except, sometimes, against Israel; both Shiites and Sunnis have done anti-Israel terrorism — but never against the U.S. or Europe; Shiites don’t do that; only Sunnis do — such as in 9/11).

On 14 March 2017, Bloomberg News bannered “Saudi Prince Sees Trump as 'True Friend' to Muslims (Full Text)” and reported what Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud had said, following his private meeting that day with U.S. President Trump, whom the Prince repeatedly referred to only as “His Excellency,” which is a form of reference the U.S. Constitution bans in reference to any U.S. official, including the U.S. President (but this was not noticed in that news report). The Prince fawned all over “His Excellency.” Maybe he feared that Trump wouldn’t be as solid for warring against Shia, and their ally Russia, as the previous U.S. President had been.

How long has the U.S. been ruled from Riyadh? It’s not a crazy question. And its underlying presumption — that the U.S. has been ruled from Riyadh — is reasonable, given the evidence. So: why aren’t ‘historians’ doing research on this question? Might it be because there’s nobody who will pay them to do it?

For example, why is NATO — which was formed by the U.S. to be the anti-Soviet military alliance, and which on 24 February 1990 (as the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact military alliance were about to end) secretly became the anti-Russian military alliance — why is NATO so solidly pro-Saud, pro-Sunni, and anti-Shia, and utterly rabid against Iran — and allied with apartheid Israel (that apartheid regime which likewise is secretly allied with the Sauds)? Has Western geostrategy been taken over by an aristocratic international gang who control enormous oil-gas resources, mammoth weapons-manufacturers, and gigantic banks, and who also have taken over the national governments that are both their customers and their supposed ‘regulators’? How cozy is it, really, at the very top? And, if it’s ‘just business’ there, then what’s the deal? And what has happened to our Constitution, then?

Not only are NATO’s generals rabid against Iran, but NATO’s propaganda-arm, the Atlantic Council, also is. Both militarily and in propaganda, the U.S. and its European and Japanese vassal-aristocracies, are against not only Russia, but also Iran — and the ally of both, Syria. A good example of this is an article at the Atlantic Council’s website, on 3 April 2015, titled "Syria: An Opportunity in Idlib”, which praised the takeover from the Syrian government of the Syrian city of Idlib, by Al Qaeda and other Wahhabist-Salafist — meaning fundamentalist-Sunni — jihadist groups, and exulted that "The expulsion of regime forces from Idlib constitutes a major development on the Syrian battlefront. It constitutes a major defeat for the Assad regime.” Not only was the Obama regime arming and protecting Al Qaeda and its allied jihadist groups in Syria, but even The West’s propaganda was protecting them. Not a one of the people (such as Prince Bandar) behind 9/11 — not one of the funders of that bloody operation — has been investigated, much less convicted, for his/her enormous crime against the American public, and yet now we are here actually arming and (with the Sauds’ money) financing Al Qaeda and other jihadist Sunni groups to take down the Middle East’s only secular government. What kind of aristocratic gang is this? Why do the American people pay taxes to assist them with their gory dirty-works? They need to use our money, extracted from us coercively by the government that they control, to do that? This is ‘democracy’?

On March 14th, which was the day that Prince Salman slavered all over President Trump, Kirsten Breitweiser, the main public voice of the 9/11 victim-families, headlined, “America First, or Saudi Arabia First?” and posted an open letter to U.S. President Donald Trump, which said:

Unsurprisingly, the Saudis continue to wage war against the 9/11 Families and JASTA [the law allowing the Sauds to be investigated and prosecuted if they were involved in financing Al Qaeda] by paying millions to their 14 powerful, insider Washington DC lobbying firms, like the Podesta Group, to repeal JASTA and rob us of our day in court.
In addition, some of the Saudis’ key legislative supporters who threaten to repeal JASTA are Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain. Sadly, McCain and Graham choose to protect the Saudis rather than American victims of terrorism.

She urged the new American President not to do what his predecessors had done — they had put the royal Sauds first, not the American people first. It was published only at three alternative-news, online, sites: Consortium News (which distributes to virtually all U.S. newsmedia, but had only two takers), Zero Hedge, and Strategic Culture. It was rejected by all the other ’news’ media. So, if Donald Trump decides that, as the new U.S. President, he wants to do what his predecessors have done on this matter, then he’ll probably get no complaints about it from America’s ‘news’ media. It’ll just get buried. That is: it’ll stay buried.

In fact, how likely is it that Trump will ever even get to see that open letter? The press hound him about Russia, but not about Saudi Arabia. After all: Saudi Arabia is America’s ‘ally.’ That’s to say: they’re the biggest foreign buyer of American-made weaponry. If you’re a good customer of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc., then the U.S. government will call you an ‘ally’, and its press won’t slant its ‘reporting’ to suggest that you’re an ‘enemy’, much less “America’s number one geopolitical foe.” (That statement from Mitt Romney about Russia could be interpreted to have indicated: Russia is the biggest competitor against America’s weapons-firms. By contrast, Saudi Arabia is America’s weapons-makers’ best market, instead of their biggest competitor. So, Saudi Arabia is very much an ‘ally’ — notwithstanding Kirsten Breitweiser’s letter, and all the rest, to the contrary.)

It’s simply business, and the 9/11 families might not like it, but neither did the chickens on Frank Purdue’s farms like Frank Purdue. It’s just the way things are, in this ‘democracy’. Everything else is PR. We’re there for them; they’re not here for us (such as the PR says). That’s the reality of today’s America.

When Mitt Romney said “Russia, this is without question our number one geopolitical foe”, it wasn’t really because “they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors,” because we do that, for the Sauds and others; it was instead because, in some years, Russia sells even more weapons than we do; and, when you buy the bulk of your weapons from a certain country, you are also buying an ‘alliance’ with that country.

Not only does the American aristocracy, who control American armaments-firms and also American ‘news’ media and America’s politicians, not like the competition in the international-arms trade, but they want to have those markets — the competitor’s markets — for themselves. It’s not like President Obama said, that Russia is the world’s most aggressive country, because we’re that, and most of the world knows it; it’s like the only way for the U.S. to increase its market-share in this most geostrategically pivotal international market, the weapons-trade, is by taking it away from the other guy: removing his allies.

Unlike the United States, which has an entirely privatized weapons-manufacturing industry, Russia’s still remains almost entirely owned by the government, and so there are no corporate stocks, profits, and media-buying and politician-buying billionaires in the weapons-making and -selling industry; there is nothing comparable to what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower famously tabbed here “the military-industrial complex,” which constantly tries to take over and control the state. Russia’s alliances, consequently, tend to be more defensive, than offensive, in nature; and also their SVR equivalent of America’s CIA isn’t nearly as often perpetrating coups replacing foreign governments like America’s CIA does.

Russia also doesn’t use jihadists — Al Qaeda, ISIS, or any other — to overthrow foreign governments, like America does. In fact, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the born Polish nobleman who emigrated to the U.S. with a deep hatred of Russia, and who as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor in 1979 started the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan that with the Sauds’ Osama bin Laden morphed into Al Qaeda and drove the Soviets out, has never expressed regret about his having initiated modern jihadism; he even said “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” As wikipedia sums up, “Under CIA's Operation Cyclone from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahideen and ‘Afghan Arabs’ from forty Muslim countries through Pakistan's ISI.”

Using dirt-poor Islamic fundamentalist proxies to fight America’s wars is lots cheaper than sending in your own decently paid soldiers to do the job, and we’ve been doing it ever since 1979; America’s 9/11 victims are mere collateral damage in the U.S. aristocracy’s many wars. Russia doesn’t fight wars by using jihadists or any other such proxies; it uses its own soldiers; and, so, committing aggression is politically much more unacceptable to today’s Russian government than it is to today’s American government, where the domestic population aren’t even being informed that aggression of any sort is being perpetrated abroad by their (aristocracy’s) government. Americans don’t even know about it until it’s ancient history — if even then.

For example: even three years after the U.S. coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine in 2014, the American people still aren’t being informed that it was a coup instead of a ‘democratic revolution’ (the cover-story for it). The pattern for the operation was set by the U.S. coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953. It’s been worked down to a science, since.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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