Eric Zuesse

By now, it has been well documented that, as I documented on January 29th, "Al Qaeda Funded by Royal Sauds, U.S. Gov’t. Documents”. And, yet, despite the massive documentation which the U.S. Government itself possesses regarding this (and which has been suppressed by the U.S. ‘news’media but is linked-to in that article so that the public can get to see it), both President Barack Obama and now President Donald Trump were and are arrantly ignoring it, and are instead continuing to do the bidding of the royal Sauds, who individually donated (according to the court-testimony in 2014 by Osama bin Laden’s former bookkeeper and financial bagman prior to 9/11) over a million dollars in cash each, to Al Qaeda, leading up to 9/11; and, furthermore, out of these donations, the 9/11 terrorists received their “salaries,” and “without the money of the — of the Saudi, you will have nothing” of Al Qaeda: none of the training, none of the international transportation, none of the weapons, ‘nothing’ at all. That’s what he said, but how much was this incredibly important testimony (in a U.S. court-case) publicized in the U.S. press? And why wasn’t it? Will it now be?

The latest on this, is on September 9th this year, when the New York Times headlined "Trump’s Bid to End Saudi-Qatar Stalemate Ends in Recriminations”, and reported that though President Trump was trying to remain neutral in the Saudi embargo against Qatar, he seems to be siding with the Sauds, and no mention was made in that article, regarding the 9/11 attacks, which were almost entirely financed and perpetrated by Saudis — mainly funded by the royal Saud family, but using jihadists from the network of the Saudi aristocrat Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

For example, as I documented on 20 July 2016, headlining "9/11: Bush’s Guilt, And The '28 Pages’”:

What these 29 long-suppressed pages revealed was well summarized by one succinct reader who wrote: “The Inquiry discloses that there is a very direct chain of evidence about financing and logistics … [that] goes from the Saudi Royal family (Amb. Bandar's wife and Bandar's checking account) and Saudi consulate employees (al Thumiari) to the agent handlers (Basnan and al Bayoumi) to some of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi).” In other words: Prince Bandar bin-Sultan al-Saud, known in Washington as “Bandar Bush” (for his closeness to the Bush family), and who served at that time as Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States, paid tens of thousands of dollars to Saudi Arabia’s “handlers” who were directing two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Also, one of Bandar’s subordinates at the Embassy, named al-Thumiari, was likewise paying the person who was paying and managing those two jihadists.

The report said: “FBI files suggest that al-Bayoumi provided substantial assistance to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they arrived in San Diego in February 2000. … According to an October 14, 2002 FBI document, al-Bayoumi has ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’. … According to the FBI, al-Bayoumi was in frequent contact with the Emir at the Ministry of Defense, responsible for air traffic control. … Al-Bayoumi was receiving money from the Saudi Ministry of Defense. … Al-Bayoumi was known to have access to large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that he did not appear to hold a job. … Al-Bayoumi’s pay increased during the time that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in the United States.”

Also, an FBI agent testified on 9 October 2002 regarding al-Bayoumi, and said Bayoumi: “acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion. And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if he provided some sort of financing … then I would say that there’s a clear possibility that there might be a connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL [Usama bin Laden].”

Moreover: “The FBI has now confirmed that only Osama Bassnan’s wife received money directly from Prince Bandar’s wife, but that al-Bayoumi’s wife attempted to deposit three of the checks from Prince Bandar’s wife, which were payable to Bassnan’s wife, into her own accounts. … Bassnan was a very close associate of Omar al-Bayoumi’s and was in telephone contact with al-Bayoumi several times a day.”

Furthermore: “Bassnan’s wife received a monthly stipend from Princess Haifa.”

And: “On at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandar’s account. According to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $15,000. Bassnan’s wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar … for $10,000. … FBI Executive Assistant Director D’Amuro commented on this financing: ‘I believe that we do have money going from Bandar’s wife, $2,000 a month up to about $64,000.’”

Also: “On March 28, 2002, U.S. and coalition forces retrieved the telephone book of Abu Zubayda, whom the U.S. Government has identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operational coordinator. According to an FBI document, ‘a review of toll records has linked [to] ASPCOL Corporation in Aspen, Colorado. … ASPCOL is the umbrella corporation that manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador. … The U.S. Government also located another Virginia number at an Usama bin Laden safehouse in Pakistan … [where a person was] interviewed by the FBI in June 2002. He could not explain why his number ended up at a safehouse in Pakistan, but stated that he regularly provides services to a couple who are personal assistants to Prince Bandar.”

This has to be seen in the context of George W. Bush’s very close and longstanding personal friendship with Prince Bandar, and also in the context of Bandar’s career.

Bandar has long been involved, both officially and unofficially, in the intelligence operations of the Saud family (which own Saudi Arabia). During October 2005 through January 2015, he served as secretary general of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council, and he also was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. Furthermore the just-released report asserts:

“The FBI also received reports from individuals in the Muslim community alleging that Bassnan might be a Saudi intelligence agent. According to a CIA memo, Basnan 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. … A CIA report also indicates that Bassnan traveled to Houston in 2002 and … 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 a supporter of Usama bin Laden.”

Regarding Shaykh al-Thumairy, he was “an accredited diplomat at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and one of the ‘imams’ at the King Fahd Mosque … built in 1998 from funding provided by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdulaziz. The mosque … is widely recognized for its anti-Western views.”

The 29 pages also include lots more, but those facts give at least some solid indications of the links that Prince Bandar had to 9/11.

Thus, in addition to the detailed testimony of the former bagman, which I mentioned at the start, there was the FBI’s investigation that was presented in the redacted ‘28 pages’ and that finally was made public 14 years after the redacted and quiet publication on Friday night 15 July 2016, of those crucial pages from the 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton’s leaked communications included “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” and, more recently, “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” (But, of course, President Trump is focusing only against Qatar’s royals, not against Saudi Arabia’s.)

Though the U.S. Government has all this information connecting the 9/11 attacks to the royal Sauds as the chief financial backers of the operation, the U.S. Government has fined Iran’s Government $10.5 billion for it, on the flimsiest imaginable basis.

On June 7th, I took up the ‘evidence’ that Israel’s Government was, somehow, behind the 9/11 attacks, and found that everything that’s been presented along those lines is based upon ignoring the actual evidence (summarized above), and upon ignoring the reason why the FBI finally gave up on its investigations into Israel’s possibly having been behind 9/11: they gave up on the hypothesis because of such things as that the timelines presented by the proponents of that hypothesis are false. For example, regarding the “dancing Israelis,” they definitely started their dancing, and their filming of the attacks against the World Trade Towers, after the first plane had hit, not before (as is alleged by the proponents of that hypothesis). (The reader-comments to my article were in disbelief, but that’s what the FBI’s investigation of the matter had concluded, and I linked to that record, but those commenters simply continued to ignore it.)

Moreover, the Sauds have long been allied with Israel’s Government to serve them as their agents to propagandize in the United States for U.S. Government policies that the Sauds want but know they can’t as effectively as the Israelis (and U.S. supporters of Israel) propagandize directly to the U.S. public.

Iran and Israel aren’t the only two nations that are accused, on ridiculous grounds, as having financed and helped to plan the 9/11 attacks; there’s now also Qatar, which the Sauds recently decided needs a regime-change. After the Saud family (and their aristocratic and royal friends in UAE and some other Arab nations) started their blockade against Qatar, on June 23 of this year, the far-right Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News headlined in July their quickly-thrown-together 40-minute documentary “Road to Manhattan”, blaming Qatar for the 9/11 attacks, on the basis that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had lived several years in Qatar and had friends among Qatar’s royal family, who were the major funders of the Muslim Brotherhood, all of which is true, but hardly the caliber or quantity of relevant information that implicates the Sauds — it’s instead a few strands of guilt-by-association, plus the almost universal support that Islamists, including terrorist groups, have had from fundamentalist Sunnis, including from all of the royal families who run the Arab Gulf nations. Deflecting the blame for 9/11, away from themselves would be a natural tactic for the royal Sauds to employ. And certainly, Sunni fundamentalists in all countries (not only in Arabia) have been more supportive of the various jihadist groups that target the U.S. and EurAsia than should be the case. But there’s a big difference between that, and being the main country whose leaders were funding — providing the bulk of the funds that made possible — the 9/11 attacks.

Though the U.S. Government is determined to blame Iran for 9/11, and many in the public blame Israel for 9/11, and the royal Sauds blame the royals in Qatar for the 9/11 attacks, the evidence that has long been in possession of the FBI and of other U.S. federal offices, proves that at least some of the royal Sauds were financing the 9/11 attacks, and that Prince Bandar and his wife were particularly involved in it, and that George W. Bush had instructed Condoleezza Rice to block any top intelligence professional from gaining access privately to tell him anything actionable about the planned attacks until after they would already have occurred — so that there was a determination by him to retain plausible deniability regarding any involvement by himself in the matter.

Furthermore, there is a very extensive connection between Prince Bandar and Zbigniew Brzezinsky in their jointly having created in 1979 the group that soon thereafter came to be called Al Qaeda; and also between “Soros Capital” and “members of Saudi Arabia’s bin Laden family.” It didn’t start with 9/11. And, though most people think that the U.S. aristocracy wag the Saudi royal tail, the evidence as I see it is the exact opposite: that the royal Sauds have been wagging the U.S. tail. And things don’t seem to have changed with the recent change in the occupancy of the White House: Under Trump, the U.S seems to be even more subservient to the royal Sauds than before.

And, according to https://28pages.org/, which is the website that reports ongoing efforts by the U.S. Government to squash efforts by the 9/11 victim-families to pursue legal charges against the royal Sauds and others involved in the conspiracy to perpetrate 9/11, this U.S. Governmental obstructionism continues right up till now, with recent reports by that site being published both in August 2017 and in September 2017.

Ever since 9/11, there has been permanent war (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.), massive increases in federal spending to purchase weapons from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. weapons-makers, and a general transformation of the U.S. Government toward becoming an American police-state, which is very useful to the elite who are actually in control.

A phenomenally good investigative article was issued on 22 January 2015, by the great Nafeez Ahmed, about the role that Silicon Valley billionaires have been and are playing in this, titled “How the CIA Made Google”. One can’t correctly understand any international news without knowing what Ahmed disclosed there. It importantly fills in some of the many areas that have been previously in the dark about this entire decades-long emerging American police-state operation.

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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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