Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Re: The tea party is so over! The Koch brothers will move to Germany!

selfish
---
non-socialist

racist
---
those who call people racist are usually either black, jewish, or some
other minority
which one are you?

police state
---
our law is what separates us from the rest of the animals on the
planet

your republitard
----
non-socialist Americans
unlike your socialist sluggards and losers


On Jul 13, 1:35 pm, studio <tl...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 13, 11:57 am, Keith In Köln <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > LOL!
>
> > Hey Studio!
>
> > It's actually good to see ya!  I missed ya!
>
> > I see you are still on that "March To Utopia" that all of you and your
> > communist brethren are still looking for!  Keep up the good fight!   It's a
> > loser, and Americans hate losers, but I admire you for it anyway!
>
> Keith, the only one that will be losing their utopia is your selfish
> racist police state republitard friends come next election cycle.
> Losers?
> Maybe that's why you lost the Presidency last time, and will lose
> again by even wider margins next time?
>
> Your republitard friends are writing a new book on Losers as we speak.
> That's why I don't find it necessary to come here that much anymore...
> I just sit back and watch the tards bury themselves.

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Re: The tea party is so over! The Koch brothers will move to Germany!

You tardos don't cite facts not do you know how to analyze them or think in general

For example, if during a non-election season viewers switch from news to non-news channels, so that FOX viewership drops when there is no election, that doesn't mean much unless CNN and MSNBC etc are gaining in the same period.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 10:16 PM, studio <tlack@hotmail.com> wrote:
On Jul 10, 4:06 pm, Less Lee <not4ud...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Less it dosen't matter how many facts you cite here, Republitards will
continue to hold on to their most prized possession... their ignorance.

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Re: The tea party is so over! The Koch brothers will move to Germany!

On Jul 13, 11:57 am, Keith In Köln <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> LOL!
>
> Hey Studio!
>
> It's actually good to see ya!  I missed ya!
>
> I see you are still on that "March To Utopia" that all of you and your
> communist brethren are still looking for!  Keep up the good fight!   It's a
> loser, and Americans hate losers, but I admire you for it anyway!

Keith, the only one that will be losing their utopia is your selfish
racist police state republitard friends come next election cycle.
Losers?
Maybe that's why you lost the Presidency last time, and will lose
again by even wider margins next time?

Your republitard friends are writing a new book on Losers as we speak.
That's why I don't find it necessary to come here that much anymore...
I just sit back and watch the tards bury themselves.

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**JP** Letter to Editor - Shuja to Washington

Dear Join Pakistan

 

LETTER TO EDITOR

July 13th, 2011

 

Shuja to Washington

 

It is not known whether Gen Shuja – DG ISI is visiting Washington on the behest of the  GOP or has been ‘summoned’ there  by the CIA and US administration.  Whatever the case, hope he does not ask for the resumption of the stopped military aid. Neither does he yield to any threats as gone are the days of reducing Pakistan to stone age.   Anyone even thinking of any action against Pakistan in ANY manner would invite the wrath of Pakistan which what all could entail should not be too difficult for them to envisage.  Enough is enough.  If at all US wants to negotiate something it HAS to be on our terms and not theirs. Shuja the entire nation is behind you and watching.  Hope you will not disappoint us.  God be with you, ameen.

 

Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)

Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)
30 Westridge 1
Rawalpindi 46000
Pakistan
Tel: (051) 5158033
E.mail: jafri@rifiela.com

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**JP** WRITE UP ON ALLAMA IQBAL BOOK JAVED NAMA

Dear All 

Kindly Click the Link for my latest Column 

http://www.zeeshannews.com/emirates/301.htm   

 Best Regards   

Tariq Hussain Butt

Chairman

http://www.zeeshannews.com

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Re: PROGRESSIVE INSURANCE is owned by Peter Lewis

Geez........I was not aware of this......I see that I am now going to have to change insurance carriers....What a pain in the ass.....
 


 
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 6:56 PM, plainolamerican <plainolamerican@gmail.com> wrote:
Chairman of Progressive is Peter Lewis, one of the major funders of
leftist
causes in America . Between 2001 and 2003, Lewis funneled $15 million
to the
ACLU, the group most responsible for destroying what's left of
Americas
Judeo-Christian heritage.
----
and you would expect anything different from a jew?

On Jul 13, 11:29 am, JSM <ekrub...@gmail.com> wrote:
> PROGRESSIVE AUTO INSURANCE
>
> You know their TV commercials, the ones featuring the
> ditsy actress all dressed in white. What you might not know is that the
> Chairman of Progressive is Peter Lewis, one of the major funders of leftist
> causes in America . Between 2001 and 2003, Lewis funneled $15 million to the
> ACLU, the group most responsible for destroying what's left of Americas
> Judeo-Christian
> heritage.  Lewis also gave $12.5 million to MoveOn.org <http://moveon.org/>
> and America Coming Together, two key propaganda arms of the socialist left.
> His funding for these groups was conditional on matching contributions from
> George Soros, the America-hating socialist who is the chief
> financier of the Obama political machine.
> Lewis made a fortune as a result of capitalism, but now finances a
> progressive movement that threatens to destroy the American free enterprise
> system that is
> targeting television shows on Fox News.
>
> Peter Lewis is making a fortune off of conservative Americans (who buy his
> auto insurance) that he applies
> to dismantle the very system that made him wealthy. He's banking on no one
> finding out who he is, so, STOP buying Progressive Insurance and pass this
> information on to all your friends.
>
> Verify at Snopeshttp://www.snopes.com/politics/business/peterlewis.asphttp://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/a/aclu-lewis.htm
>
> --
> When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying
> the cross.
>
> Sinclair Lewis

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Re: Calif. Governor Tells Conservatives to Leave the State

CA liberals suck and everybody knows it.

We should push their liberal population into the Pacific and replace
them with real Americans.

On Jul 13, 9:39 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> **
>     <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Calif. Governor
> Tells Conservatives to Leave the
> State<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/calif-governor-tell...>
> *Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>* | July 13,
> 2011 at 5:05 am | Tags: Gil
> Duran<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=gil-duran>,
> Jeff Stone <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=jeff-stone>, Jerry
> Brown <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=jerry-brown>,
> Secession<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=secession>|
> Categories: Crazy
> Politicians <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=232565>, Culture
> War <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=20812>,
> Liberals<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=35711271>,
> United States <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=5850> | URL:http://wp.me/pKuKY-862
>
> A member of California's Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Republican
> Jeff Stone, has
> proposed<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/13-southern-califor...>that
> 13 counties in Southern California secede to form their own state.
>
> Those counties are in the largely rural, Republican-leaning southeast of the
> state, and include Riverside, Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino,
> Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono counties. That
> would leave Los Angeles to remain with the liberal coast and northern part
> of the state.
>
> <http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/3wil5-gil-duran-...>
>
> Gil Duran, California governor's press secretary
>
> RedState.com reports
> <http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/07/11/gov-browns-office-t...>that
> the response by a spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown, 34-year-old press
> secretary Gil Duran, is:
>
> "If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing
> laws, then there's a place called Arizona."
>
> In effect, California's governor is telling conservatives to leave the
> state!
>
> Already, California's unemployment rate is 11.7% compared to 9.1% for the
> nation as a whole <http://www.edd.ca.gov/About_EDD/pdf/urate201106.pdf>. Even
> the NY Times says California's budget crisis may be the worst in the
> nation<http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/can-brown-cure-californ...>,
> with a $26.6 billion budget deficit comprising nearly a third of the state's
> budget<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Jerry-t.html?_r=2&re...>.
> California owes $2,362 in debt per resident of the state, and pays a 20%
> premium to borrow money compared to better-run
> states<http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/26/local/la-me-state-debt-20110226>;
> its A- credit rating from Standard & Poor's is the worst in the nation. All
> of which would only worsen if conservatives really leave or secede from
> California.
>
> Liberals are such warm and fuzzy and tolerant people! Way to go, Governor
> Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown!
>
> H/t beloved fellow Tina.
>
> *~Eowyn*
>
> Add a comment to this
> post<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/calif-governor-tell...>
>
>   [image: WordPress]
>
> WordPress.com <http://wordpress.com/> | Thanks for flying with WordPress!
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The Kingdom and the Towers









 

The Kingdom and the Towers

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-2011-201108?printable=true

 

 

Was there a foreign government behind the 9/11 attacks? A decade later,

Americans still haven't been given the whole story, while a key 28-page

section of Congress's Joint Inquiry report remains censored. Gathering years

of leaks and leads, in an adaptation from their new book, Anthony Summers

and Robbyn Swan examine the connections between Saudi Arabia and the

hijackers (15 of whom were Saudi), the Bush White House's decision to ignore

or bury evidence, and the frustration of lead investigators—including

9/11-commission staffers, counterterrorism officials, and senators on both

sides of the aisle.

By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

August 2011

 

TROUBLING LINKS From left: King Abdullah, Prince Naif, Osama bin Laden,

Prince Bandar, and Prince Turki—Saudis all, as were 15 of the 19 hijackers

of 9/11. Large photograph by Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris; bottom, from left, by

Ludovic/REA/Redux, by Li Zhen/Xinhua/Landov, from Getty Images, by Hassan

Ammar/AFP/Getty Images, by Hasan Jamali/A.P. Images.

 

Adapted from The Eleventh Day by Anthony Summers and Robynn Swan to be

published this month by Ballantine Books; © 2011 by the authors.

 

For 10 years now, a major question about 9/11 has remained unresolved. It

was, as 9/11-commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, "Had

the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?" There was

information that pointed to the answer, but the commissioners apparently

deemed it too disquieting to share in full with the public.

 

The idea that al-Qaeda had not acted alone was there from the start. "The

terrorists do not function in a vacuum," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

told reporters the week after 9/11. "I know a lot, and what I have said, as

clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people." Pressed

to elaborate, Rumsfeld was silent for a long moment. Then, saying it was a

sensitive matter, he changed the subject.

 

Three years later, the commission would consider whether any of three

foreign countries in particular might have had a role in the attacks. Two

were avowed foes of the United States: Iraq and Iran. The third had long

been billed as a close friend: Saudi Arabia.

 

In its report, the commission stated that it had seen no "evidence

indicating that Iraq cooperated with al-Qaeda in developing or carrying out

any attacks against the United States."

 

Iran, the commission found, had long had contacts with al-Qaeda and had

allowed its operatives—including a number of the future hijackers—to travel

freely through its airports. Though there was no evidence that Iran "was

aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack," the

commissioners called on the government to investigate further.

 

This year, in late May, attorneys for bereaved 9/11 family members said

there was revealing new testimony from three Iranian defectors. Former

senior commission counsel Dietrich Snell was quoted as saying in an

affidavit that there was now "convincing evidence the government of Iran

provided material support to al-Qaeda in the planning and execution of the

9/11 attack." That evidence, however, has yet to surface.

 

As for Saudi Arabia, America's purported friend, you would have thought from

the reaction of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that the

commission had found nothing dubious in his country's role. "The clear

statements by this independent, bipartisan commission," he declared, "have

debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia." Yet no

finding in the report categorically exonerated Saudi Arabia.

 

The commission's decision as to what to say on the subject had been made

amid discord and tension. Late one night in 2004, as last-minute changes to

the report were being made, investigators who had worked on the Saudi angle

received alarming news. Their team leader, Dietrich Snell, was at the

office, closeted with executive director Philip Zelikow, making major

changes to their material and removing key elements.

 

The investigators, Michael Jacobson and Rajesh De, hurried to the office to

confront Snell. With lawyerly caution, he said he thought there was

insufficient substance to their case against the Saudis. They considered the

possibility of resigning, then settled for a compromise. Much of the telling

information they had collected would survive in the report, but only in tiny

print, hidden in the endnotes.

 

The commissioners did say in the body of the report that the long official

friendship of the United States and Saudi Arabia could not be unconditional.

The relationship had to be about more than oil, had to include—and this in

bold type—"a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred."

 

It had been far from clear, and for the longest time, that the Saudis were

thus committed. More than seven years before 9/11, the first secretary at

the Saudi mission to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Khilewi, had defected

to the United States, bringing with him thousands of pages of documents

that, he said, showed the regime's corruption, abuse of human rights, and

support for terrorism. At the same time, he addressed a letter to then crown

prince Abdullah, calling for "a move towards democracy." The Saudi royals,

Khilewi said, responded by threatening his life. The U.S. government, for

its part, offered him little protection. F.B.I. officials, moreover,

declined to accept the documents the defecting diplomat had brought with

him.

 

In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke

of an episode relevant to the first, 1993, attempt to bring down the World

Trade Center's Twin Towers. "A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic

passport," he said, "gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the

World Trade Center bombing," when the al-Qaeda terrorist was in the

Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Yousef, the defector claimed, "is

secret and goes through Saudi intelligence."

 

The reference to a Saudi citizen having funded Yousef closely fit the part

played by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa. He was active in

the Philippines, fronted as a charity organizer at the relevant time, and

founded a charity that gave money to Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the

chief al-Qaeda planner of 9/11, during the initial plotting to destroy U.S.

airliners.

 

When Khalifa returned to Saudi Arabia, in 1995—following detention in the

United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he

was, according to C.I.A. bin Laden chief Michael Scheuer, met by a limousine

and a welcome home from "a high-ranking official." A Philippine newspaper

would suggest that the official had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime

minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi

throne.

 

In June 1996, according to published reports, while in Paris for the

biennial international weapons bazaar, a group including a Saudi prince and

Saudi financiers gathered at the Royal Monceau hotel, near the Saudi

Embassy. The subject was bin Laden and what to do about him. After two

recent bombings of American targets in Saudi Arabia, one of them just that

month, the fear was that the Saudi elite itself would soon be targeted. At

the meeting at the Monceau, French intelligence reportedly learned, it was

decided that bin Laden was to be kept at bay by payment of huge sums in

protection money.

 

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed

Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia's General

Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed

not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and

material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden's extradition, and

not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses,

meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.

Special Relationships

 

After 9/11, Prince Turki would deny that any such deal was done with bin

Laden. Other Saudi royals, however, may have been involved in payoff

arrangements. A former Clinton administration official has claimed—and U.S.

intelligence sources concurred—that at least two Saudi princes had been

paying, on behalf of the kingdom, what amounted to protection money since

1995. The former official added, "The deal was, they would turn a blind eye

to what he was doing elsewhere. 'You don't conduct operations here, and we

won't disrupt them elsewhere.' "

 

American and British official sources, speaking later with Simon Henderson,

Baker Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, named the two

princes in question. They were, Henderson told the authors, Prince Naif, the

interior minister, and Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged

payments, according to Henderson's sources, had amounted to "hundreds of

millions of dollars." It had been "Saudi official money—not their own."

 

Before 9/11, American officials visiting Riyadh usually discovered that it

was futile to ask the Saudis for help in fighting terrorism. George Tenet,

who became C.I.A. director during Bill Clinton's second term, vividly

recalled an audience he was granted by Prince Naif, the crown prince's

brother. Naif, who oversaw domestic intelligence, began the exchange with

"an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi

'special' relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep

security-related information from their U.S. allies."

 

There came a moment when Tenet had had enough. Breaching royal etiquette, he

placed his hand on the prince's knee and said, "Your Royal Highness, what do

you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post

that you held out data that might have helped us track down al-Qaeda

murderers?" Naif's reaction, Tenet thought, was what looked "like a

prolonged state of shock."

 

On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, F.B.I. director Louis

Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O'Neill that he thought the Saudi

officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. "You've got to be

kidding," retorted O'Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words.

"They didn't give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass."

 

Several years later, in two long conversations with Jean-Charles Brisard,

author of a study on terrorist financing for a French intelligence agency,

O'Neill was still venting his frustration. "All the answers, all the clues

that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization," he said,

"are in Saudi Arabia." The answers and the clues, however, remained out of

reach, in part, O'Neill told Brisard, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil

meant that Saudi Arabia had "much more leverage on us than we have on the

kingdom." And, he added, because "high-ranking personalities and families in

the Saudi kingdom" had close ties to bin Laden.

 

These conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.

 

At his residence outside Washington on the morning of September 11, Prince

Bandar rushed out an embassy statement. The kingdom, it read, "condemned the

regrettable and inhuman bombings and acts which took place today. . . .

Saudi Arabia strongly condemns such acts, which contravene all religious

values and human civilized concepts; and extends sincere condolences."

 

Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel,

relations between Riyadh and Washington had recently become unprecedentedly

shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America's apparent

complacency over the plight of the Palestinians. That spring he had

pointedly declined an invitation to the White House. Three weeks before

9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot

on the head of a Palestinian woman, he had snapped. Bandar, the crown

prince's nephew, was told to deliver an uncompromising message to President

Bush.

 

"I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias whereby the blood of an

Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian

child. . . . A time comes when peoples and nations part. . . . Starting

today, you go your way and we will go our way. From now on, we will protect

our national interests, regardless of where America's interests lie in the

region." There was more, much more, and it rocked the Bush administration.

The president responded with a placatory letter that seemed to go far toward

the Saudi position of endorsing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

 

Then came the shattering events of Tuesday the 11th. In Riyadh within 24

hours—himself now in turn placatory—Abdullah pulled the lever that gave his

nation its only real power, the economic sword it could draw or sheathe at

will. He ordered that nine million barrels of oil be dispatched to the

United States over the next two weeks. The certainty of supply had the

effect, it is said, of averting what had otherwise been a possibility at

that time—an oil shortage that would have pushed prices through the roof and

caused, on top of the economic effects of the 9/11 calamity, a major

financial crisis.

 

Into the mix, on Wednesday the 12th, came troubling news. In a phone call

that night, a C.I.A. official told Ambassador Bandar that 15 of the

hijackers had been Saudis. As Bandar recalled it, he felt the world

collapsing around him. "That was a disaster," Crown Prince Abdullah's

foreign-affairs adviser Adel al-Jubeir has said, "because bin Laden, at that

moment, had made in the minds of Americans Saudi Arabia into an enemy."

 

Royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and return

home. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at Caesars Palace

hotel and casino in Las Vegas, decamped within hours of the attacks to the

Four Seasons. They felt "extremely concerned for their personal safety,"

they explained to the local F.B.I. field office, and bodyguards apparently

deemed the Four Seasons more secure.

 

In Washington, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden

family. One of Osama's brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called

the Saudi Embassy wanting to know where he could best go to be safe. He was

installed in a room at the Watergate Hotel and told to stay there until

advised that transportation was available. Across the country, more than 20

bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.

 

In Lexington, Kentucky, the mecca of Thoroughbred racing in America, Prince

Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd's, had been attending the annual

yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed quickly began to round up members

of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his son and a couple

of friends, who were in Florida, to charter a plane and get themselves to

Lexington to connect with the plane he was taking home. They managed it, one

of them told the security man hired for the flight, because "his father or

his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr."

 

Late on the night of the 13th, Prince Bandar's assistant called the F.B.I.'s

assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the

assistant said, in getting bin Laden "family members" out of the country.

Watson said Saudi officials should call the White House or the State

Department. The request found its way to counterterrorism coordinator

Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the

flights. He has said he has "no recollection" of having cleared it with

anyone more senior in the administration.

 

An F.B.I. memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge

that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the

investigation. Asked on CNN the same year whether he could say unequivocally

that no one on the evacuation flights had been involved in 9/11, Saudi

Embassy information officer Nail al-Jubeir responded by saying he was sure

of only two things, that "there is the existence of God, and then we will

die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don't know."

Saudis in Denial

 

In spite of the fact that it had almost immediately become known that 15 of

those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush

did not hold Saudi Arabia's official representative in Washington at arm's

length. As early as the evening of September 13, he kept a scheduled

appointment to receive Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men had

known each other for years. They reportedly greeted each other with a

friendly embrace, smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, and conversed with

Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

 

There is a photograph of the meeting, which has been published in the past.

This year, however, when the authors asked the George W. Bush presidential

library for a copy, the library responded in an e-mail that the former

president's office was "not inclined to release the image from the balcony

at this time."

 

It would soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush

administration wanted rapprochement. The president would invite Crown Prince

Abdullah to visit the United States, press him to come when he hesitated,

and—when he accepted—welcome him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Dick

Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were there, along with Secretary of State Colin

Powell and First Lady Laura Bush.

 

It seems that 9/11 barely came up during the discussions. Speaking with the

press afterward, the president cut off one reporter when he began to raise

the subject.

 

Official Saudi Arabia was tortoise-slow in acknowledging even the fact that

almost all of the hijackers had been Saudi citizens. Two days after Bandar

was given that information, his spokesman said the terrorists had probably

used stolen identities.

 

"There is no proof or evidence," claimed Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, minister of

Islamic affairs, "that Saudis carried out these attacks." Prince Sultan

doubted whether only bin Laden and his followers were responsible, and

hinted that "another power with advanced technical expertise" must have been

behind 9/11. As of December 2001, Prince Naif was saying he still did not

believe 15 hijackers had been Saudis.

 

Not until February 2002 did Naif acknowledge the truth. "The names we have

got confirmed [it]," he then conceded. "Their families have been notified. .

. . I believe they were taken advantage of in the name of religion, and

regarding certain issues pertaining to the Arab nation, especially the issue

of Palestine."

 

Even after that admission, Sultan and Naif were not done. They began

pointing to a familiar enemy. "It is enough to see a number of [U.S.]

congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes," Sultan said, "to explain the

allegations against us." In late 2002, Naif blamed the "Zionists," saying,

"We put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11

and who benefited from them I think [the Zionists] are behind these events."

 

As the months passed, leading Saudis would suggest publicly that their

nation had been entirely open with the United States on the security front

all along—even claim that they had alerted Washington in advance to possible

calamity.

 

A year after 9/11, Prince Turki expounded at length on the relationship the

G.I.D. had had with the C.I.A. From about 1996, he wrote, "at the

instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we

had collected on bin Laden and al-Qaeda with the C.I.A. And in 1997 the

Saudi minister of defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence

committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in

general and on bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) in particular."

 

There was a core of truth to this. The G.I.D. and U.S. services had had a

long, if uneasy, understanding on sharing intelligence. Other Saudi claims

were far more startling.

 

Bandar had hinted right after 9/11 that both the U.S. and Saudi intelligence

services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were

publicly admitting. In 2007, however, by which time he had risen to become

national-security adviser to former crown prince—now king—Abdullah, Bandar

produced a bombshell. "Saudi security," he asserted, "had been actively

following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision. . . . If

U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious

and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened."

 

Though there was no official U.S. reaction to that claim, Michael Scheuer,

the former chief of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, later dismissed it in his

book Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq as a "fabrication."

 

Prince Turki had long since come out with an allegation similar to Bandar's,

but far more specific. He said that in late 1999 and early 2000—just before

the first two future 9/11 hijackers reached the United States—his staff had

informed the C.I.A. that both men were terrorists. "What we told them," he

said, "was these people were on our watch list from previous activities of

al-Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle

arms into the Kingdom in 1997."

 

C.I.A. spokesman Bill Harlow dismissed Turki's claim as being supported by

"not a shred of evidence." Harlow said information on the two

hijackers-to-be had been passed on only a month after the attacks. What the

9/11 commission thought of Turki's assertion has not been made public. The

National Archives told the authors that it was not permissible even to say

whether commission files contain a record of an interview with the former

head of the G.I.D. Information on the intelligence background to 9/11

apparently remains highly sensitive.

The Hijackers' Helpers

 

Saudi Arabia long remained a black hole for American official investigators

probing 9/11. They were not, for example, allowed access to the families of

those believed to have carried out the attacks. "We're getting zero

cooperation," former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro said

a month after the attacks.

 

Within the United States, however, the probe proceeded intensively and over

several years. And some of the most significant information gleaned, it

turned out, concerned the same two terrorists to whom Prince Turki had

alluded. They are said to have been handpicked by Osama bin Laden to be

first to enter the United States, and they would eventually be part of the

group that seized American Airlines flight 77, the plane used in the strike

against the Pentagon.

 

They were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both Saudis, both

experienced jihadis—holy warriors—though still in their mid-20s. They

entered the country through Los Angeles International Airport as early as

January 15, 2000, with scant knowledge of the English language and zero

experience of life in the West. The 9/11-commission report declared it

"unlikely" that the pair "would have come to the United States without

arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in

advance of their arrival."

 

The investigation identified individuals who helped or may have helped

Mihdhar and Hazmi following their arrival in California—whether by

happenstance or because of foreknowledge.

 

An imam named Fahad al-Thumairy, an accredited diplomat appointed by the

Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs to liaise with the huge nearby mosque,

served at the time at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. According to one

witness, Thumairy had at the relevant time arranged for two men—whom the

witness first identified from photographs as having been the two

terrorists—to be given a tour of the area by car.

 

A fellow Saudi, a San Diego resident named Omar al-Bayoumi, said by

individuals interviewed to have had frequent contact with Thumairy,

acknowledged that he met Mihdhar and Hazmi during a visit to Los Angeles on

February 1, two weeks after their arrival.

 

According to a person interviewed by the F.B.I., Bayoumi said before the

trip that he was going to "pick up visitors." What is agreed by all is that

he made the journey by car, accompanied by an American Muslim named Caysan

bin Don. On the way, bin Don said, Bayoumi mentioned that he was accustomed

to going to the consulate to obtain religious materials. They did stop at

the consulate, where, according to bin Don, a man in a Western business

suit, with a full beard, greeted Bayoumi and took him off to talk in an

office. Bayoumi emerged some time later, carrying a box of Korans. He would

describe the encounter differently, saying he was "uncertain" with whom he

had met and "didn't really know people in [the Saudi ministry of] Islamic

Affairs."

 

Both men agreed, however, that they proceeded to a restaurant and while

there—this is the crucial moment in their story—met and talked with future

hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, who had just arrived in the country. Bayoumi

and bin Don were to tell the F.B.I. the encounter occurred merely by chance.

 

Bayoumi urged Mihdhar and Hazmi to come south to San Diego, assisted them in

finding accommodations, and stayed in touch. On the day the two terrorists

moved into the apartment they first used, next door to Bayoumi's, there were

four calls between his phone and that of the local imam, New Mexico-born

Anwar Aulaqi—later to be characterized in the congressional report on 9/11

as having served as "spiritual adviser" to Mihdhar and Hazmi.

 

Bayoumi's income, which was paid by Ercan, a subsidiary of a contractor for

the Saudi Civil Aviation Administration—though, according to a fellow

employee, he did no known work—reportedly increased hugely following the

future hijackers' arrival. Another Saudi living in San Diego, Osama Basnan,

was also of interest to 9/11 investigators probing the money flow.

 

A three-page section of Congress's Joint Inquiry report (the product of

joint hearings on the 9/11 attacks by the House and Senate intelligence

committees), containing more lines withheld than released, tells us only

that Basnan was a close associate of Bayoumi in San Diego. According to

former U.S. senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the inquiry, and to press

reports, regular checks flowed in 2000 from Basnan to Bayoumi's wife. The

payments, ostensibly made to help cover medical treatment, had originated

with the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

 

There are separate reasons to question the activity of Thumairy, Bayoumi,

and Basnan. Thumairy, who had a reputation as a fundamentalist, was later

refused re-entry into the United States—well after 9/11—on the ground that

he "might be connected with terrorist activity." Bayoumi had first attracted

the interest of the F.B.I. years earlier, and the bureau later learned he

had "connections to terrorist elements." He left the country two months

before the attacks.

 

As for Basnan, his name had come up in a counterterrorism inquiry a decade

earlier. He had reportedly hosted a party for Omar Abdel Rahman—today

notorious as the "Blind Sheikh," serving life for his part in plotting to

blow up the World Trade Center and other New York City landmarks in

1993—when he visited the United States, and had once claimed he did more for

Islam than Bayoumi ever did. A partially censored commission document

suggests that—after Mihdhar, Hazmi, and fellow future 9/11 terrorists

arrived in the United States to learn to fly—a Basnan associate was in

e-mail and phone contact with accused key 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh.

A year after 9/11, Basnan was arrested for visa fraud and deported.

 

Available information suggests that two of the trio were employed by or had

links to the Saudi regime—Thumairy through his accreditation by the Ministry

of Islamic Affairs and Bayoumi through his employment by the company linked

to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. At least five people told the F.B.I.

they considered Bayoumi to be some sort of government agent. The C.I.A., Bob

Graham has said, thought Basnan was also an agent. Graham also cited an

agency memo that referred to "incontrovertible evidence" of support for the

terrorists within the Saudi government.

Problematic Interviews

 

In 2003 and 2004, but only following a high-level request from the White

House, 9/11-commission staff were able to make two visits to Saudi Arabia to

interview Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan.

 

The questioners, a recently released commission memo notes, believed

Thumairy "was deceptive during both interviews. . . . His answers were

either inconsistent or at times in direct conflict with information we have

from other sources." Most significantly, he denied knowing Bayoumi, let

alone Mihdhar and Hazmi. Shown a photograph of Bayoumi, he did not budge. He

knew no one of that name, he said. Then, prompted by a whispered

interjection from one of the Saudi officials present, he said he had heard

of Bayoumi—but only from 9/11 news coverage.

 

At a second interview, told by commission staff that witnesses had spoken of

seeing him with Bayoumi, Thumairy said perhaps they had taken someone else

for him. Told that telephone records showed numerous calls between his

phones and Bayoumi's phones, just before the arrival of Mihdhar and Hazmi in

the United States, Thumairy was stumped. Perhaps, he ventured, his phone

number had been assigned to somebody else after he had it? Perhaps the calls

had been made by someone else using Bayoumi's phone? Everything Thumairy

came up with, his questioners noted, was "implausible."

 

Bayoumi, interviewed earlier, made a more favorable impression. He stuck to

his story about having met Mihdhar and Hazmi by chance. He said that he had

rarely seen them after they came to San Diego, that they had been his

neighbors for only a few days. Bayoumi said he had then decided he did not

want to have much to do with them. Philip Zelikow, who was present during

the interview, did not think Bayoumi had been a Saudi agent.

 

The commission report, however, was to note that Bayoumi's passport

contained a distinguishing mark that may be acquired by "especially devout

Muslims"—or be associated with "adherence to al-Qaeda." Investigators had

also turned up something else. Bayoumi's salary had been approved by a Saudi

official whose son's photograph was later found on a computer disk in

Pakistan that also contained photographs of three of the hijackers. The son,

Saud al-Rashid, was produced for an interview in Saudi Arabia. He admitted

having been in Afghanistan and having "cleansed" his passport of the

evidence that he had traveled there. He said, though, that he had known

nothing of the 9/11 plot. Commission staff who questioned Rashid thought he

had been "deceptive."

 

Finally, there was Basnan. The commission's interview with him, Dietrich

Snell wrote afterward, established only "the witness' utter lack of

credibility on virtually every material subject." His demeanor "engendered a

combination of confrontation, evasiveness, and speechmaking … his

repudiation of statements made by him on prior occasions," and the "inherent

incredibility of many of his assertions when viewed in light of the totality

of the available evidence."

 

Two men did not face questioning by commission investigators. One of them, a

Saudi religious official named Saleh al-Hussayen, certainly should have,

although his name does not appear in the commission report. Hussayen, who

was involved in the administration of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina,

had been in the States for some three weeks before 9/11. For four days

before the attacks, he had stayed at a hotel in Virginia.

 

Then, on September 10, he had made an unexplained move. With his wife, he

checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia—the hotel at

which 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi were spending their last night alive.

 

Commission memos state that F.B.I. agents arrived at Hussayen's room at the

Marriott after midnight on the 11th. The Saudi official began "muttering and

drooping his head," sweating and drooling. Then he fell out of his chair and

appeared to lose consciousness for a few moments. Paramedics summoned to the

room were puzzled. Could the patient be "faking"?, they asked the agents.

Doctors who examined Hussayen at a local hospital, moreover, found nothing

wrong with him. An F.B.I. agent said later that the interview had been cut

short because—the agent suggested—Hussayen "feigned a seizure."

 

Asked by an F.B.I. agent why they had moved to the Marriott, Hussayen's wife

said it was because they had wanted a room with a kitchenette. There was no

sign, however, that the kitchenette in the room had been used. Asked whether

she thought her husband could have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in any

way, she replied, "I don't know." Agents never did obtain an adequate

interview with Saleh al-Hussayen. Instead of continuing with his tour of the

United States, he flew back to Saudi Arabia—and went on to head the

administration of the two holy mosques. It remains unknown whether he had

contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of 9/11, or whether his presence

at the Marriott that night was, as Bayoumi claimed of his meeting with the

two terrorists, just a matter of chance.

 

As Hussayen left Virginia for home, other F.B.I. agents in the state were

interviewing former San Diego-area imam Anwar Aulaqi. He did not deny having

had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi in California and later—with Hazmi—in

Virginia. He could not deny that he had transferred from San Diego to the

East Coast in a time frame that paralleled theirs. He made nothing of it,

however, and U.S. authorities apparently pursued the matter no further.

 

Aulaqi had reportedly preached in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol shortly

before 9/11. Not long afterward, he lunched at the Pentagon—in an area

undamaged by the strike in which his acquaintances Mihdhar and Hazmi had

played such a leading role. The reason for the lunch? An outreach effort to

ease tensions between Muslim Americans and non-Muslims.

 

Though American-born, Aulaqi is the son of a former minister of agriculture

in Yemen. He remained on and off in the United States after 9/11, apparently

unimpeded, before departing first for Britain and eventually for Yemen.

Suspicion that he may have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot is fueled by

the fact that the phone number of his Virginia mosque turned up among items

found in an apartment used by accused conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh, who now

languishes in Guantánamo.

 

Only seven years later, starting in 2009, did Aulaqi begin to gain world

notoriety. His name has been associated with: the multiple shootings by a

U.S. Army major at Fort Hood, the almost successful attempt to explode a

bomb on an airliner en route to Detroit, the major car-bomb scare in Times

Square, and the last-minute discovery of concealed explosives aboard cargo

planes destined for the United States.

 

When Aulaqi's name began to feature in the Western press, Yemen's foreign

minister cautioned that, pending real evidence, he should be considered not

a terrorist but a preacher. President Obama took a different view. By early

2010 he had authorized the C.I.A. and the U.S. military to seek out,

capture, or kill the Yemeni—assigning Aulaqi essentially the same status as

that assigned at the time to Osama bin Laden. Aulaqi remains, as Zelikow

noted when his name finally hit the headlines, "a 9/11 loose end."

 

Taken together, the roles and activities of Thumairy, Bayoumi, Basnan,

Hussayen, and Aulaqi—and the dubious accounts some of them have given of

themselves—heightened suspicion that the perpetrators of 9/11 had support

and sponsorship from backers never clearly identified.

Trouble on the Home Front

 

Congress's Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had

found evidence "that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the

hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to

most if not all of the hijackers. . . . It's my opinion that 9/11 could not

have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within

the United States. By 'the Saudis,' I mean the Saudi government and

individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the

government—which includes all of the elite in the country."

 

Those involved, in Graham's view, "included the royal family" and "some

groups that were close to the royal family." Was it credible that members of

the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation?

"I think," the former senator said, "that they did in fact take actions that

were complicit with the hijackers."

 

At page 396 of the Joint Inquiry's report, in the final section of the body

of the report, a yawning gap appears. All 28 pages of Part Four, entitled

"Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National

Security Matters," have been redacted. The pages are there, but—with the

rare exception of an occasional surviving word or fragmentary, meaningless

clause—they are entirely blank. The decision to censor that entire section

caused a furor in 2003.

 

Inquiries established that, while the withholdings were technically the

responsibility of the C.I.A., the agency would not have obstructed release

of most of the pages. The order that they must remain secret had come from

President Bush.

 

Bob Graham and his Republican co-chairman, former senator Richard Shelby,

felt strongly that the bulk of the withheld material could and should have

been made public. So did Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat

in the House. Shelby said, "My judgment is that 95 percent of that

information should be declassified, become uncensored, so the American

people would know."

 

Know what? "I can't tell you what's in those pages," the Joint Inquiry's

staff director, Eleanor Hill, said. "I can tell you that the chapter deals

with information that our committee found in the F.B.I. and C.I.A. files

that was very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for

the hijackers." The focus of the material, leaks to the press soon

established, had been Saudi Arabia.

 

There were, sources said, additional details about Bayoumi, who had helped

Mihdhar and Hazmi in California, and about his associate Basnan. The

censored portion of the report had stated that Anwar Aulaqi, the San Diego

imam, had been a "central figure" in a support network for the future

hijackers.

 

A U.S. official who had read the censored section told the Los Angeles Times

that it described "very direct, very specific links" with Saudi officials,

links that "cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental." The

New York Times journalist Philip Shenon has written that Senator Graham and

his investigators became "convinced that a number of sympathetic Saudi

officials, possibly within the sprawling Islamic Affairs Ministry, had known

that al-Qaeda terrorists were entering the United States beginning in 2000

in preparation for some sort of attack. Graham believed the Saudi officials

had directed spies operating in the United States to assist them."

 

Most serious of all, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reported that the

information uncovered by the investigation had drawn "apparent connections

between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers." Absent

release of the censored pages, one can only surmise what the connections may

have been.

 

There may be a clue, however, in the first corroboration—arising from the

authors' interview with a former C.I.A. officer—of an allegation relating to

the capture in Pakistan, while the Joint Inquiry was at work, of senior bin

Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. Many months of interrogation followed, including,

from about June or July 2002, no fewer than 83 sessions of waterboarding.

Zubaydah was the first al-Qaeda prisoner on whom that controversial

"enhanced technique" was used.

 

John Kiriakou, then a C.I.A. operative serving in Pakistan, had played a

leading part in the operation that led to the capture of Zubaydah—gravely

wounded—in late March that year. Back in Washington early that fall,

Kiriakou informed the authors, he was told by colleagues that cables on the

interrogation reported that Zubaydah had come up with the names of several

Saudi princes. He "raised their names in sort of a mocking fashion,

[indicating] he had the support of the Saudi government." The C.I.A.

followed up by running name traces, Kiriakou said.

 

Zubaydah had named three princes, but by late July all three had died—within

a week of one another. First to go was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, the leading

figure in the international horse-racing community who was mentioned

earlier, in our account of Saudis hastening to get out of the United States

after 9/11. Ahmed, a nephew of both King Fahd's and Prince Sultan's, died of

a heart attack following abdominal surgery at the age of 43, according to

the Saudis.

 

Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, also a nephew of

King Fahd's and Prince Sultan's, reportedly died in a car accident. A third

prince, Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, whose father was a cousin of

Fahd's and Sultan's, was said to have died "of thirst."

 

Former C.I.A. officer Kiriakou later said his colleagues had told him they

believed that what Zubaydah had told them about the princes was true. "We

had known for years," he told the authors, "that Saudi royals—I should say

elements of the royal family—were funding al-Qaeda."

 

In 2003, during the brouhaha about the redacted chapter in the Joint Inquiry

report, Crown Prince Abdullah's spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, made a cryptic

comment that has never been further explained. The Saudi regime's own probe,

he said, had uncovered "wrongdoing by some." He noted, though, that the

royal family had thousands of members, and insisted that the regime itself

had no connection to the 9/11 plot.

 

More than 40 U.S. senators clamored for the release of the censored section

of the report. They included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Sam

Brownback, Olympia Snowe, and Pat Roberts.

 

Nothing happened.

 

Bob Graham, with his long experience in the field as a member and chair not

only of the Joint Inquiry but also of the Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence, has continued to voice his anger over the censorship even in

retirement. President Bush, he wrote in his book Intelligence Matters in

2004, had "engaged in a cover-up . . . to protect not only the agencies that

failed but also America's relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. . .

. He has done so by misclassifying information on national security data.

While the information may be embarrassing or politically damaging, its

revelation would not damage national security." Richard Shelby concluded

independently that virtually all the censored pages were "being kept secret

for reasons other than national security."

 

"It was," Graham wrote, "as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi

Arabia than with America's safety." In Graham's view, Bush's role in

suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other

transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office.

 

Within weeks of his inauguration, in 2009, Bush's successor, Barack Obama,

made a point of receiving relatives of those bereaved on 9/11. The widow of

one of those who died at the World Trade Center, Kristen Breitweiser, has

said that she brought the new president's attention to the infamous censored

section of the Joint Inquiry report. Obama told her, she said afterward,

that he was willing to get the suppressed material released. Two years

later, the chapter remains classified—and the White House will not say why.

"If the 28 pages were to be made public," said one of the officials who was

privy to them before President Bush ordered their removal, "I have no

question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change

overnight."

Blame It on Iraq

 

The 9/11-commission report certainly blurred the truth about the Saudi role.

By the time it was published, in July 2004, more than a year had passed

since the invasion of Iraq, a country that—the report said—had nothing to do

with 9/11.

 

In the 18 months before the invasion, however, the Bush administration had

persistently seeded the notion that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11.

While never alleging a direct Iraqi role, President Bush had linked Saddam

Hussein's name to that of Osama bin Laden. Vice President Cheney had gone

further, suggesting repeatedly that there had been Iraqi involvement in the

attacks.

 

Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq's supposed involvement affected

the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving

retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent

of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four

percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression

that "most" or "some" of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were.

In the wake of the invasion, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of

Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally

involved in 9/11.

 

None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved

out. "We went back 10 years," said Michael Scheuer, who looked into the

matter at the request of director Tenet. "We examined about 20,000

documents, probably something along the lines of 75,000 pages of

information, and there was no connection between [al-Qaeda] and Saddam."

What About Pakistan?

 

In the years during which the conflict in Iraq had the world's attention,

the real evidence that linked other nations to Osama bin Laden and 9/11

faded from the public consciousness. This was in part the fault of the 9/11

commission, which failed to highlight and fully detail the evidence. It was,

ironically, a former deputy homeland-security adviser to President Bush,

Richard Falkenrath, who loudly expressed that uncomfortable truth. The

commission's report, Falkenrath wrote, had produced only superficial

coverage of the fact that al-Qaeda was "led and financed largely by Saudis,

with extensive support from Pakistani intelligence."

 

Pakistan has a strong Islamic-fundamentalist movement. It was, with Saudi

Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one of only three nations that

recognized the Taliban. Osama bin Laden had operated there as early as 1979,

with the blessing of Saudi intelligence, in the first phase of the struggle

to oust the Soviets from neighboring Afghanistan. The contacts he made were

durable.

 

What bin Laden himself had said about Pakistan two years before 9/11 seemed

to speak volumes. "Pakistani people have great love for Islam," he observed

in 1998 after the late-summer U.S. missile attack on his camps, in which

seven Pakistanis were killed. "And they always have offered sacrifices for

the cause of religion." Later, in another interview, he explained how he

himself had managed to avoid the attack. "We found a sympathetic and

generous people in Pakistan … receive[d] information from our beloved ones

and helpers of jihad."

 

Pakistan sees Afghanistan as strategically crucial, not least on account of

an issue of which many members of the public in the West have minimal

knowledge or none at all. Pakistan and India have fought three wars in the

past half-century over Kashmir, a large, disputed territory over which each

nation has claims and which each partially controls, and where there is also

a homegrown insurgency. Having leverage over Afghanistan, given its

geographical position, enabled Pakistan to recruit Afghan and Arab

volunteers to join the Kashmir insurgency—and tie down a large part of the

Indian army.

 

The insurgents inserted into Kashmir have been by and large mujahideen,

committed to a cause they see as holy. Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who in

1989 headed the ISI—the Pakistani equivalent of the C.I.A.—himself saw the

conflict as jihad. Bin Laden, for his part, made common cause with Gul and,

in the years that followed, with like-minded figures in the ISI. Many ISI

recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. He would

still be saying, as late as 2000, "Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of

Kashmir, we support it."

 

So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter

Tomsen told the 9/11 commission, that the Taliban "actually were the junior

partners in an unholy alliance" of ISI, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it

grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence, and the

Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with cash.

The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive

political influence within Pakistan, so much so that some came to

characterize it as "the most influential body in Pakistan," a "shadow

government."

 

While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of

the 9/11 attacks, two days later Washington issued a blunt warning as it

prepared to retaliate against the bin Laden organization and its hosts in

Afghanistan. It was then—according to ISI director Mahmoud Ahmed, who was

visiting Washington at the time—that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard

Armitage said the U.S. would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" should it

fail to go along with American demands for assistance. (Armitage has denied

having used that extreme language.)

 

The former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad Robert Grenier recently

confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al-Qaeda did improve vastly

after 9/11. The arrests of three of the best-known top al-Qaeda

operatives—Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—were,

it seems, made by Pakistani intelligence agents and police, in some if not

all cases working in collaboration with the C.I.A.

 

From the time America routed al-Qaeda, however, incoming information

indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or was

aware of his location. ISI officials, Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 commission,

were "still visiting [bin Laden] as late as December 2001"—and continued to

know his location thereafter. In 2007, Kathleen McFarland, a former senior

Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden's presence in Pakistan as a

fact. "I'm convinced," military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010,

"that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it's impossible after all

this time to not know where he is."

 

Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, "We will kill bin

Laden. . . . That has to be our biggest national-security priority." In

office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden,

meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high priority.

Looking back, though, there was a trickle of fresh information that

suggested otherwise.

 

General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan,

was asked on Meet the Press in 2010 whether it was now less necessary to

capture bin Laden. "I think," he replied, "capturing or killing Osama bin

Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged

in counterterrorism around the world."

 

For those who doubted that bin Laden was still alive, late fall 2010 brought

two new bin Laden audio messages. There had been intercepts of al-Qaeda

communications, U.S. officials told The New York Times, indicating that he

still shaped strategy. Then, within weeks, CNN quoted a "senior NATO

official" as saying bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were

believed to be hiding not far from each other in northwestern Pakistan, and

not "in a cave." The same day, the New York Daily News cited a source with

"access to all reporting on bin Laden" as having spoken of two "sightings

considered credible" in recent years—even "a grainy photo of bin Laden

inside a truck."

The End of bin Laden

 

Then, at 11:35 p.m. on the night of Sunday, May 1, President Obama appeared

on television screens across the globe to say: "Tonight I can report to the

American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an

operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and a

terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men,

women, and children."

 

Killed he was, and in Pakistan. It looked to many as though Pakistan had

been knowingly harboring him. For the world's most wanted terrorist had been

living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in

not just any Pakistani city, but in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where

many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting

distance of the nation's most prestigious military academy, the equivalent

of America's West Point. The ISI also has a presence there.

 

Officials in Washington were scathingly critical when these facts became

public. The Pakistanis, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta reportedly told

lawmakers, had been either "involved or incompetent." The president's

counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, thought it "inconceivable" that bin

Laden had not had a "support system" in Abbottabad. On 60 Minutes, Obama

himself speculated "whether there might have been some people inside of

government, people outside of government [supporting bin Laden], and that's

something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani

government has to investigate."

 

Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources later revealed,

thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his

fellow terrorists. Unmentioned were facts about the link between Abbottabad

and al-Qaeda that former president Pervez Musharraf had made public in his

2006 memoir. Pakistan's 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another

very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj

al-Libbi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit

by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to

Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libbi used no less than three

safe houses—all in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not

expect to find a top terrorist hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track

record for being exactly that.

 

A week after the strike against bin Laden, the correspondent for The

Guardian in Islamabad reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush

struck a deal with Musharraf: should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan's

borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid. "There

was an agreement," a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, "that

if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The

Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us." Musharraf

has denied that such a deal was made. According to The Guardian, however, an

unnamed Pakistani official offered corroboration for the story. "As far as

our American friends are concerned," he said, "they have just implemented

the agreement."

 

We cannot yet know the full background to how the U.S. tracked down bin

Laden. We do have a better sense, a decade on, as to whether powerful

players in foreign nations had a hand in 9/11.

 

Keywords

    Osama bin Laden,

    Saudi Arabia,

    9/11,

    United States

 

 

Read More

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-2011-201108?printab

le=true#ixzz1RvASH1uz

 

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