U.S. considers declassifying report on Saudi funding of al Qaeda
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
When the 9/11 report came out several people (not conspiracy theorists) had legitimate questions regarding why we're bombing Afghanistan when Saudi Arabia had significantly stronger links to the events than Afghanistan did.
For example most of the money, most of the people, and many of the organisations were Saudi based, and while Afghanistan's now famed "training camps" did exist, a vast majority were in Pakistan.
Even Osama bin Laden (who's a Saudi national, by the way) initially denied the attack until after the US "credited" him by name (and then he just went with it). You can find videos of him denying responsibility on YT (and later accepting responsibility).
I'm not seriously suggesting we should have bombed Saudi Arabia, that's bonkers, I am just saying that it seems like Saudi Arabian national's punched the US in the face while Pakistan distracted, and the US then turned around and beat up Afghanistan in "revenge."
The 9/11 is pretty lacking in on crete information. I'd love to hear what historians think of it in retrospect in twenty or more years, when all the dust has settled. It raises more questions than it answers (not in the "false flag!!!" sense, but in the "so who was actually behind this???" sense).
Honestly a much more believable conspiracy theory is that reputed Saudis funded it and the US and Saudi Arabia covered it up to save face while Saudi cleaned house quietly. That's totally believable and in-line with the 9/11 report, leaks, and other information.
Meanwhile our relationship to Saudi Arabia has always reminded me of an addict resorting to sexually servicing their dealer to get their fix. SA is every bit as bad as, say, Iran, but we have a "special relationship."
(Yes I'm aware that most of our oil does not physically come from SA or the Middle East, but it's the price that matters and SA has more influence over that than any other country.)
The biggest thing that disgusts me is how our government responded to 9/11 by essentially telling us to be more afraid-- in other words helping deliver precisely the emotional message that the terrorists intended. I started to picture the planes hitting the towers with a voice-over of President Bush saying "my name is George Bush and I endorse this message." It viscerally disgusts me, and yes it also disgusts me when Obama more or less does the same thing. If a president today said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," I'd fall out of my chair.
Our politicians care more about their pet projects and hobby horses than they do about the country. We seem to be entering the late stages of imperial decadence in a lot of ways.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/02/01/obama_we_s...
I live and work in Manhattan. I'm aware of the non-zero chance that I'll be a victim. I don't "fear" this enough to move away but I'd be a fool to believe it could never happen.
I would like to see America's leadership tell us to be a strong nation, not to constantly harp on how vulnerable and weak we supposedly are so they can pass pet legislation. After 9/11 I feel like the only thing my government did was encourage us to cower in terror before bin Laden (and Iraq, etc.) so they could avoid debating otherwise dubious policies like the Iraq invasion.
Kooky conspiracy theories are things like the queen of England is a shape shifting reptile or commercial airliners are spraying us with "chemtrails." But more commonly the phrase is used as a guilt-by-association tactic to tar anyone who does not take every single official pronouncement or mainstream media story at absolute face value. Any attempt to dig deeper into realms like ideology, long-term political agendas, intelligence activities (ours or others), corruption, or financial "old boy networks" is instantly dismissed: "ooh you're a conspiracy theorist!"
I'd say that the first one to use this phrase in a debate to refer to anything that is not obviously nutty/illucid or totally implausible loses the debate.
It is in no way kooky to suggest that some public officials may be corrupt, that shady deals happen behind closed doors, or that governments lie. All of those things are established historical fact not to mention obvious manifestations of human nature. Conspiracies are a completely normal part of life.
Hell this site is full of tech startup people... every single early stage startup with any kind of secret technology, strategy, or long-term agenda is a conspiracy, as is every private equity transaction. What do you do when you close a round folks? You meet in secret with deep pocketed people and discuss secret plans and then sign confidential documents. You expect me to believe that such meetings never take place at the scale of international relations, finance, military/intelligence activities, etc.?
[1]: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:s.00390:
[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/arrest-bill-clinton/2...
The relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is quite strong and close, for all the obvious reasons: the US needs SA's oil, and SA benefit greatly from US military support. The fact that Saudi Arabia is paid in US dollars also gives the country a substantive interest in how well the US and its financial system do. It's a relationship which dates to FDR and King Saud at Great Bitter Lake:
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-08-09/news/mn-388_1_king-sa...
This doesn't mean that there aren't elements either within Saudi Arabia or originating from it which don't look kindly on the US. I suspect you could find similar qualities within the US itself.
It's also helpful to keep in mind that in his 1998 fatwa against the U.S., one of bin Laden's points was "support of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan". That is, bin Laden was aligned against the Saudi government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
And yes, what the Saudi government and the Saudi street felt was somewhat at odds. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan cover this in their Vanity Fair article "The Kingdom and the Towers"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/08/9-11-201...
What did happen in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and I remember this, was that the US contacted the Afghan government, then the Taliban, and effectively requested bin Laden's head. The Taliban refused. The US attacked.
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/
http://web.archive.org/web/20010922035810/http://www.pbs.org...
Pakistan, while yes, supporting the Taliban in many ways (and still), did lend government support to the US aim of rooting out bin Laden. How sincere that was (particularly given where bin Laden turned up) is open to question. But Muscharraf didn't pull the same move the government of Afghanistan had in refusing the US's requests.
So, no, actually, most of what you've claimed here is extremely mushy-headed bogosity.
Is it possible that there was significant Saudi financial support for bin Laden? It wouldn't surprise me. Could it have included members of the Saudi royal family? Again, quite possibly. The Saudi royal family is comprised of thousands of members. Around 15,000 according to the BBC. This isn't some small nuclear household.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud
Are the contents of such a report likely to be both contentious and yet more conspiracy fodder? Yeah, probably.
You didn't de-link the Saudi money, the people, or the organisations to the events (and you'd struggle as it is in the 9/11 report!). In fact you failed to make a single correction to my post.
But yet it is still "bogus." Ok, how nice.
As an aside, I didn't bring up the Saudi royals or the Saudi government. I said well reputed individuals, of which there are many, I was more talking about the Saudi elite, who have known links to terrorism and have funded it before (some of which are literally in jail now for doing such).
"[W]hy we're bombing Afghanistan when Saudi Arabia had significantly stronger links to the events than Afghanistan did."
Again, this confuses individual citizens and the official stance of the government.
I'm not up on all the particulars of what support Saudi Arabia (and since this thread seems to be swarming with pedants, yes, I'm referring to the government) provided in terms of turning over suspects to the U.S., but my understanding is that it generally cooperated.
As I noted, bin Laden was opposed to the Saudi government, hence his supporters within Saudi Arabia would also have been enemies of the regime.
"Bombing Saudi Arabia" wasn't done because it made no sense whatsoever to do so.
(Though sadly I can't say the same for Iraq.)
I'll note that the US did and is conducting targeted specific attacks within countries it's otherwise allied, notably Pakistan and Yemen. Those are not aimed at the regime or its infrastructure, but at specific insurgents identified by U.S. intelligence (modulo collateral damage). Those strikes are happening with the overt or tacit support of the regimes in question.
Should read:
The relationship between the U.S. Government and Saudi Arabian Government/Royal Family is quite strong and close
Bin Laden would actually arguably be considered a liberal in the U.S. At least according the government, the two reasons he attacked us were our support for Israel and our lack of action on climate change.
> the US contacted the Afghan government, then the Taliban, and effectively requested bin Laden's head. The Taliban refused. The US attacked.
That's not true. The Taliban said they would give up Bin Laden if the U.S. presented evidence that he was behind the attacks, and the U.S. refused: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.ter...
It is not just the elements. You know the imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who started the wahabism. This imam aligned with the great grandfather of the present royal saud family, in many ways: fighting against ottomans, through marriage. At one point, Ottoman empire through its proxy Egypt fought wahabi and al-saud, even excecuted one of the great grand fathers of the current royal saudi family.
In other words, the elements that are against USA are not tiny: they constitute the half of the foundation of current Saudi state. Royal Saudi family is the product of Al-Wahhab and Al-Saud; and they have married into tribes that scattered around Saudi, when they reclaimed Saudi.
Just saying that fringe elements of Saudi royal family are against USA is bullshit.
You know, who support USA in the saudi family? Only those billionaire types. The founder of Saudi Arabia had ~ 25 kids, each producing another 25, producing another 25. So, there are about 16000 royal family members. Majority of them are not wealthy. The kids of founder get $3M per annum, his grandsons get $300K per annum, his great grand sons get $30K per annum.
There is another reason why these princes breed 20 kids: just to get that monthly stipend, as the welfare starts right at birth.
The people who support USA are the king, crown prince, and interior minister, etc. So, basically 5 to 10 princes!! Even if you add 10 more, you have the support of 20 princes off of 16000 of all princes.
Umm, no ... that is not how it happened with Afghanistan.
Rather than argue here or be an armchair analyst, all I will do is point to a couple of books by Ahmed Rashid - "Taliban" and "Descent into Chaos" that include a pretty good historical commentary on the US action in Afghanistan.
Out of curiosity, what exactly would you need to believe that it was a false flag attack? Given the facts that:
- On the morning of 9/11, the two folks the Bush administration chose to lead the investigation were watching the attacks over breakfast with the guy who ordered 100k to be wired to the lead hijacker to pay for the attacks.
- Multiple top FBI officials have said they could have stopped the attacks but were prevented from doing so.
- The secretary of transportation said he overheard what he interpreted as Cheney giving the order to shoot down one of the planes.
- The Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden if the U.S. presented evidence that he was involved in the attacks, and the Bush administration declined to do so.
- The Bush administration prevented an independent investigation into the attacks for over a year, and when they finally allowed one they gave it almost no money and completely stonewalled it.
- Members of the commission said they were lied to by people at every level of government but were prevented from doing anything about it.
- Large portions of the report are still classified, and IIRC 2/3rds of the notes and transcripts of the commission are still classified.
- The testimony of several whistleblowers was not included in the report, or they were not allowed to testify. Several whistleblowers were given gag orders.
- The majority of the trial testimony of the gitmo detainees has been has been classified. And that's where the government didn't prevent them from testifying on certain subjects entirely in the first place.
- One of the two main pieces of evidence linking Bin Laden to 9/11 was a video tape of someone confessing under torture, which was later destroyed. The second was a video of a short fat guy the government claimed was Bin Laden confessing to supporting the attacks, even though he looked nothing like Bin Laden, and Obama then refused to release pics of Bin Laden after his death to show the public whether or not his appearance really had actually been radically altered since his younger days.
I mean short of jesus himself coming down and saying the government was involved in 9/11, I don't see what better evidence you could get. And those are only the most well verified facts, not including anything that is disputed or conspiracy-theorish, of which there are plenty more claims at varying levels of credibility. I'm not saying it's not possible that there wasn't a conspiracy, and I could see how other reasonable people could disagree, but I really don't see how anyone can look at the evidence and say that the 'conspiracy-theory' stuff is clearly nonsense.
Nice, you choose to single out a section of people who've been reliably wrong, and excluded them from the people that have historically been correct. Good job, you tool.
Basically the Saudis have been waging a proxy war again Iran through the US and various "terror" groups. There is a school of thought that IS were initially funded via the Saudis.
The blood bath in Syria is also partly funded by the Saudis. (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/18/john-mccain-s... partial source.)
I wish to steer clear of the whole conspiracy theory bollocks. Its much better to view the situation in the same way the previous Afghan war was waged against Russia.
Also useful to read the meta news behind the news, ie. why are we reading this headline today?
It's entirely possible that Saudis supported it before it became a case of full-blown ISIS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_al-Baghdadi#Expansion_...
The affiliations sound like they were achieved organically, though who knows what's really going on behind closed doors.
It's an intrinsically relevant part of this conversation (especially considering Saudi Arabia's adherence to and history of practicing wahhabism) and I'd encourage others to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXcpDO8_3qU
Oh holy hell you've got the whole thing online? Thanks!
"The Century of the Self" is also on my list.
H. RES. 428: Urging the President to Release Information Regarding the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks upon the United States: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolutio...
Co-sponsor Thomas Massie speaks at a press conference in support of the bill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEOF7wCIudA
I've invested siginificant time researching this subject. From my perspective the most important thing that folks need to know is how disinformation works. It's designed to offend. You can prevent people from looking at reliable, sourced, fact based information by attaching bad information to it.