Bush and Obama Joined at the Hip in Shameless Coverup of Anglo-Saudi 9/11- Part 1 | WPN World People News

Twelve years ago next month—on Sept. 11, 2001—four teams of hijackers commandeered large passenger jetliners on coast-to-coast flights, and flew three of those planes into targets in New York and Washington, D.C., killing almost 3,000 perons. Of the 19 men that made up the hijacking teams, 15 were Saudi Arabian. Many of them, particularly the pilots, had been living in the United States for a year or longer, and had been taking flying lessons at well-known flight schools.

As former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry, has repeatedly stated, there was in existence before 9/11 an extensive, state-sponsored support apparatus inside the U.S. which allowed the hijackers—most of whom had never been in the United States before—to live here and train, and to coordinate their attacks in an astoundingly successful manner, from their standpoint.

That support apparatus was first uncovered in San Diego by Senator Graham's investigators in 2002, when it was revealed how financial support for the hijackers had been funnelled through a Saudi intelligence agent, and the wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar.

The funds involved, as EIR has uniquely documented, were derived, at least in large part, from the British-Saudi Al-Yamamah slush fund, consisting of funds skimmed from the British-Saudi oil-for-aircraft deal exposed in the BAE scandal.

Despite the clear evidence of the state sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks by Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, the Bush-Cheney Administration launched military attacks on two nations which had only peripheral involvement (Afghanistan), or no involvement at all (Iraq).

And, as we shall show, the Bush Administration systemically suppressed the evidence of the British-Saudi role, most notably in the case of the still-classified 28-page section of the Congressional Joint Inquiry's final report, which is reliably reported to deal with the Saudi role.

When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, he promised to get the 28 pages released, but instead, has undertaken his own full-throated defense of the Saudis, and his own coverup of their role.

Moreover, when another important component of the Saudi hijacker-support network was discovered in 2011, centered in Sarasota, Fla., the Obama Administration went into full coverup mode to prevent any of this evidence from becoming public.

Twelve years is long enough! When one considers the human and financial cost of the "war on terror," which has left the true authors of the 9/11 attacks untouched, it is high time to break through the coverup, starting with the immediately release of the 28 pages.

Saudis Were Protected Pre-9/11

On Jan. 8, 2000, two known Saudi terrorists carrying U.S. visas, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived in Los Angeles, where they were readily admitted into the United States. A couple of weeks later, a known Saudi intelligence officer, Omar al-Bayoumi, brought them to San Diego, where he settled them, and introduced them to the Saudi community. As was later discovered in the course of the Congressional Joint Inquiry, both Bayoumi and a second Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, conduited large sums of money from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar, to Hamzi and Mihdhar.

In May, the two new arrivals began taking flying lessons. At the local mosque, they met Prof. Abdussattar Shaikh, who was on the payroll of the San Diego FBI office, assigned to monitor the Saudi community. In June 2000, when Mihdhar temporarily left the U.S., Hamzi moved into the home of FBI informant Shaikh.

Al-Mihdhar spent the next year abroad, recruiting the "muscle" for the hijacker teams. In June 2001, he easily obtained a new multiple-entry visa from the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah.

Although Mihdhar personally seems to have visited the U.S. Consulate, he didn't need to. By this time, the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia had instituted new procedures—called "Visa Express"—which allowed any Saudi to obtain a visa for entry into the United States without personally appearing at the consulate! (One official called this "an open-door policy for terrorists.")

And, it wasn't just the State Department that gave the Saudis special treatment. Graham recounts how he learned in the course of his investigation, that U.S. Customs officials were taught in their training, that "Saudis are different." One Customs agent, who had risked his job by questioning and denying entry to Mohammed al-Qantani, a Saudi who, unbeknownst to the agent, was being met at the airport by hijacker-to-be Mohammad Atta, later told Graham that, in Graham's words, "a Saudi encountered in the course of duty is to be treated with deference and special respect." His fellow agents told him he was "crazy" to deny entrance to a Saudi.

The case of Hamzi and Mihdhar illustates one facet of—to put it mildly—the blind spot that was endemic among large sections of the U.S. political establishment and the intelligence community toward the Saudis and their sponsorship of what became known as al-Qaeda. The Bush Administration's resistance to taking seriously the body of intelligence about al-Qaeda and the impending attacks on the United States, has been documented by, among others, former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke and former CIA Director George Tenet. In the White House, this blindness toward al-Qaeda and its Saudi sponsors was centered on Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and in the Pentagon, on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, and Doug Feith.

These officials all viewed the Saudis as important allies of the United States and Britain. This went back most immediately to the post-1979 war against the Soviets in Afghanistan—in which the U.S., Britain, and the Saudi Arabia were the primary backers and funders of the mujaheddin fighters; and then, the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, in which the policy of the British, and of many in the U.S., was to let both sides bleed each other to death. On the British side, the Saudi alliance was underscored by the 1985 Al-Yamamah oil-for-aircraft deal, of which one critical component was a multi-billion-dollar terrorist slush fund administered in part by Prince Bandar (see box).

'Clean Break'

Saudi Arabia and other (Sunni) Arab Gulf states were integral to the 1996 "Clean Break" strategy cooked up by U.S. neo-cons such as Richard Perle and Doug Feith, and Israeli right-wing Likudniks. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," issued by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem, called for Israel to ally with Turkey and Jordan, in targetting Iraq and Syria, and to a lesser degree, Iran. (Later, in 2006, Cheney and Condi Rice were calling for an anti-Shi'ite, anti-Iran alliance to be composed of Israel and the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf, including, notably, Saudi Arabia.)

In the pre-9/11 period, Rumsfeld and his neo-con advisors were particularly dismissive of warnings, derived largely from NSA intercepts, about impending al-Qaeda attacks. Journalist Bob Woodward, in his State of Denial account, reports that in June 2001, Rumsfeld challenged the CIA's assessment of Osama bin Laden's plans, asking if this were some kind of grand deception. Tenet, in his memoir At the Center of the Storm, reports that he was approached by Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, in July 2001, with the same question: Were al-Qaeda's threats a deception, intended to tie up our resources and expend our energies on a phantom threat? Tenet says that Wolfowitz, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was raising the same question. To the extent that Rumsfeld's Pentagon was focussed on threats, and not just management issues, their attention was on the neo-cons' favorite "axis of evil" targets, Iraq and North Korea.

The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz mindset continued right up through the 9/11 attacks. For a couple of days after Sept. 11, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz refused to accept that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, insisting instead that Saddam Hussein was responsible. On the afternoon of 9/11, Rumsfeld actually ordered the Pentagon to begin making plans for retaliatory air strikes against Iraq.

Despite the close relationship between the Saudi royal family and the Bush crowd in Texas, tensions between the Saudis and the new President George W. Bush were on the rise during the Summer of 2001, as the younger Bush unequivocally backed the Israelis, and blamed the Palestinians, for the violence in the West Bank and Gaza. After Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah turned down an invitation to visit the White House, the President's father, George H.W. Bush, personally intervened to assure the Saudis that his son's "heart is in the right place."

On Aug. 23, after President Bush had backed a particularly brutal Israeli operation on the West Bank, Abdullah ordered Bandar to confront the White House. Bandar took the message to the Administration in a meeting with Rice on Aug. 27, in which he threatened to break the longstanding alliance with the United States. Bush quickly backtracked, assuring Bandar that his Administration would support the creation of a Palestinian state. Bandar flew to Riyadh with a personal message for Crown Prince Abdullah from Bush. When Bandar returned to Washington, he went to the White House and met personally with Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, on Friday, Sept. 7. Discussions continued over the weekend of Sept. 8-9, and Bush invited Bandar to return to the White House the following Thursday, Sept. 13.

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, with 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudis, did nothing to disrupt Bush's and Bandar's plans. Incredibly, two days later, on Sept. 13, Bandar—who had financed and controlled the 9/11 hijackers—was indeed back at the White House, smoking a cigar with Bush on the secluded Truman Balcony.

Over the previous 48 hours, Bandar had been in constant contact with the White House, arranging for the flight of at least 140 Saudis—members of the royal family, and of the extended bin Laden family—out of the United States. Despite the fact that all commercial aircraft in the United States were grounded, special chartered flights began picking up Saudis around the country on Sept. 13. Although both the White House and the FBI initially denied authorizing the flights, Bandar and other Saudi diplomats had no such reticence: They declared that the evacuation had been approved at "the highest level of the U.S. government."

Astoundingly, at the time when a thousand Arabs and Muslims across the U.S. were being arrested and detained on the slightest suspicion of terrorist links, privileged members of the Saudi royal family and of the bin Laden family were allowed to flee the United States, without the FBI or anyone else being allowed to interview them!

The Congressional Joint Inquiry

Meanwhile, by the end of September, Graham, as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, had arrived at an agreement with Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to pool their resources and to conduct a joint investigation, rather than the House and Senate each doing their own probe. They met with Bush, Cheney, and other Administration officials, who all promised full cooperation.

In February 2002, after the second session of the 107th Congress had convened, Graham and Goss formally announced the creation of the Joint Inquiry. But within days, Graham learned that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were no longer the Administration's priority: Military and intelligence resources were being shifted to prepare for a war in Iraq. Graham, while at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa for a briefing from the military's Central Command, was stunned, and then furious: All the Administration's promises about rooting out terrorism, and destroying al-Qaeda, were being scrapped.

During the Summer of 2002, the Joint Inquiry, and its specially hired professional staff, proceeded on its investigations and preparation for public hearings, with an end-of-the-year deadline, when the 107th Congress would end. When Mike Jacobson, a former FBI counterintelligence analyst working on the committee staff, came across an FBI informant's report on Hamzi, the staff asked the FBI what else they had; weeks went by with no response. While Jacobson and another investigator for the Joint Inquiry were preparing for a visit to the FBI's San Diego field office, staff director Eleanor Hill was summoned to meet with top FBI officials about "a very sensitive issue," which turned out to be that of the FBI informant who, it was admitted, had indeed known Mihdhar and Hamzi quite well. The FBI, on direct instructions from the White House, delayed, stalled, and obstructed the Joint Inquiry; the informant was relocated, and was never produced for questioning.

In November 2002, the FBI disclosed to Graham and Goss in a letter, that it was the Bush Administration that was behind the stonewalling. "We were seeing in writing what we had suspected for some time," Graham wrote; "the White House was directing the coverup."

In San Diego, the Inquiry's investigators discovered the Saudi money trails to the hijackers Mihdhar and Hamzi. One trail led from Saudi government agencies, through the Saudi spy in San Diego, Bayoumi, who passed funds on to the hijackers; the second trail began with Princess Haifa (the wife of Prince Bandar), and continued through a second Saudi intelligence agent, Osama Bassnan, to the hijackers. Princess Haifa was also a sister of Prince Turki bin-Faisal, then the head of Saudi intelligence agency GID.

9/11? What Was That?

As the Joint Inquiry moved toward public hearings in September 2002, the Bush Adminstration's stonewalling increased. This included stalling on declassification of documents, and resistance to providing witnesses. As Graham put it, "The more we learned, the less curious the Administration seemed about what had happened on September 11."

After the public hearings concluded on Oct. 2, the Joint Inquiry spent the next two months preparing its Final Report, which contained findings of fact, and recommendations for improving the collection, sharing, and use of intelligence. The Report, in its full, classified version, was filed on Dec. 20, 2002. Then followed many months of battle to get sufficient portions of the Report declassified, so that the public could see some version of it.

Finally, on July 24, 2003, a heavily redacted version of the Report was released to the public. Graham says he agreed that several of the censored sections were properly withheld in the interests of national security. But, he says, "there was one area that did not need to be kept secret, and it was the one area where the White House refused to relent," explaining: "This was, not surprisingly, the section of the report related to the Saudi government and the assistance that government gave to some and possibly all of the September 11 terrorists."

This was the now-famous 28 pages, which begin on page 395 of the Report. This section begins by referring to information concerning "specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States."

Both Graham and Richard Shelby (Ala.), the Republican co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reviewed the 28 pages, and said that 95% of the information in those pages could be released without harm to the national security.

Graham attributed the suppression of the 28 pages to the White House, not the CIA or the FBI, and he later said that this, in itself, was sufficient grounds to impeach President Bush.

The 9/11 Commission

From the outset, Bush and Cheney were opposed to any investigation, and particularly to any public airing of the intelligence failures prior to 9/11. Already in January 2002, Cheney had called Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to demand that he shut down any public airing of pre-9//1 intelligence. During the course of 2002, under heavy pressure from the families of 9/11 victims, the White House was forced to agree to the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission to conduct a full investigation of the 9/11 attacks. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11 Commission") was estabished by an act of Congress in November 2002—while the Congressional Joint Inquiry was still finishing up its work. While intended to be independent of the White House, it was in fact surreptitiously controlled from the outset by the Bush-Cheney White House, which blocked any investigation of the real state sponsor of terrorism—Saudi Arabia—and instead used the Commission to try to rally support for an attack on Iraq.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove oversaw the White House's choice to chair the Commission. The first choice was Henry Kissinger, a selection which alarmed many, including families of 9/11 victims.

In mid-December a delegation of 9/11 family members met with Kissinger in the Manhattan offices of Kissinger Associates, to demand that he make public his client list. When he explained why he could never do this, 9/11 widow Lorie van Auken got right to the point: "Do you have any Saudi clients?" Startled by the question, Kissinger lost his balance, spilled his coffee, and abruptly called the meeting to a close.

The next morning, Kissinger called the White House and resigned. The following day, Rove called the patrician former Governor of New Jersey, Thomas Kean, to ask if Kean would consider taking the position vacated by Kissinger. When Kean accepted, and came to the White House to meet with Rove, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, and National Security Advisor Rice, he got the same, uniform message from all of them: "We don't want a runaway commission. We want you to stand up."

Over time, a baffled Kean realized that what they meant, was that he should "stand up" for the President, i.e., protect the President at all costs.

The primary means by which the White House controlled the 9/11 Commission was through the insertion of Philip Zelikow as the Commission's executive director. The ambitious and arrogant Zelikow had served on Condi Rice's transition team in December 2000-January 2001, and had been instrumental in the demotion of White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke—who was later to expose how utterly unconcerned Rice and Bush were about the threat of al-Qaeda terrorism when they came into office, and indeed, up until the very moment of the 9/11 attacks.

Unbeknownst to any of the 9/11 Commissioners, Zelikow had, at Rice's request, secretly authored the Administration's National Security Strategy doctrine which, in its advocacy of pre-emptive war, overturned the nation's entire military and diplomatic history.

At the Commission, Zelikow immediately centralized everything with himself, forbidding any direct contact between the staff and the ten Commissioners—reducing the latter almost to the status of figureheads.

Worse, Zelikow was later found to be maintaining a secret back channel to the White House, with frequent calls with Rove and Rice.

Source: Executive Intelligence Review