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After an extraordinary, two-year battle to keep secret the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of ties to the 9/11 plot, the Justice Department accidentally disclosed the man’s name in a court filing.
The revelation of the Saudi official’s identity, in a federal court filing last week, did little to illuminate links between the Al Qaeda hijackers and the Saudi government, which is being sued for complicity in the 2001 attacks by survivors and families of the victims.
In fact, the diplomat’s identity only deepens a mystery about why the Trump administration has fought so aggressively to keep the information under wraps. The disclosure, in a partially redacted statement from a senior FBI official, was first reported on Tuesday by Yahoo News.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has twice argued in federal court statements that the Saudi diplomat’s name and other information from the FBI investigation of the plot constitute “state secrets” that would imperil the nation’s security if they became public. The FBI, the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence submitted a flurry of declarations endorsing that claim last month, at the Justice Department’s behest.
Yet the Saudi diplomat, Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, is an almost anonymous figure whose possible connections to the 9/11 plot were never solidly confirmed, several officials said, and were only a passing focus of the FBI’s long-running inquiry into the Saudi role.
“Our government has been fighting us tooth and nail to prevent the release of this name, and now — lo and behold — we know his name,” said a spokesman for the 9/11 families, Brett Eagleson. “What about this is a state secret? Why would our government go to such lengths to protect this guy? This proves it’s a giant cover-up to protect the Saudis.”
The Justice Department declined to comment on the release of Jarrah’s name, although an official confirmed that it was inadvertent.
A screenshot from a video of Musaed Ahmed al-Jarrah speaking at a book fair in Casablanca, Morocco, in his role as cultural attache for Saudi Arabia on Feb. 13, 2019. (SIEL Casablanca via YouTube)
Starting in the mid-1990s, Jarrah worked as the deputy chief of the Islamic affairs section of the Saudi Embassy in Washington. He left the United States in 2005, after coming under FBI scrutiny because of his suspected ties to other Saudis linked to Al Qaeda, former bureau officials said.
Jarrah continued to work until recently in the Saudi foreign service, apparently seconded from a major Islamic university in Riyadh that had long been his primary employer, news reports and court documents show. That institution, Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University, has been a center of the kingdom’s Wahhabi theology. It drew scrutiny from U.S. intelligence agencies after 9/11 because a number of Qaeda figures had studied there, including four of the hijackers.
Jarrah’s possible tie to the plot first came to light in a secret 2012 case summary that was prepared by an FBI-led counterterrorism task force examining the Saudi role in the attacks. Details of that investigation were first revealed this year in a report by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine.
The 2012 document asserted that “there is evidence” that Jarrah arranged for two other Saudis — another religious-affairs official based in Los Angeles and a suspected intelligence operative in San Diego — to help the first two Qaeda hijackers after they arrived in California in early 2000.
That document was released in 2016, with Jarrah’s name and other information redacted, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by an online news organization, the Florida Bulldog. The report does not describe what the evidence was or how strong it might have been. Nor does the redacted document give any indication that Jarrah was suspected of having advance knowledge of the attacks.
However, several former FBI officials familiar with the investigation of the Saudis said that the bureau’s information about Jarrah’s possible role in organizing support for the hijackers was always somewhat speculative.
Officials said they believed that Jarrah had been frequently in touch with Fahad al-Thumairy, the religious-affairs official at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles who was said by two key FBI witnesses to have helped find a place for the Qaeda hijackers to stay when they arrived in the city in January 2000.
FBI officials suspected that Jarrah may also have been in contact with Omar al-Bayoumi, a middle-aged Saudi graduate student in San Diego who was investigated by the FBI in 1998 as a possible Saudi spy. Bayoumi later became a key figure in the support network for the two Qaeda hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khaled al-Midhar, both Saudis in their mid-20s.
In early February of 2000, after a visit to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, Bayoumi had what he claimed was a chance meeting with Hazmi and Midhar at a nearby halal restaurant. Although Bayoumi said he didn’t know the two young Saudis, he promptly invited them to move to San Diego, arranged an apartment for them to rent and helped them open a bank account. He also introduced them to a circle of young Muslim men who became the core of their social support network for almost a year.
Jarrah was believed to have traveled to California at least once to meet with Thumairy and other Saudi officials, but only after 9/11. Investigators also found extensive records of telephone calls between both Thumairy and Bayoumi and Saudi religious officials at the kingdom’s diplomatic posts in Washington, although it was often not clear which Saudi diplomats were using the various embassy telephones.
In an affidavit that accompanied Barr’s first assertion of the state secrets privilege last September, the FBI’s senior counterterrorism official at the time, Michael C. McGarrity, minimized the significance of the 2012 document and its focus on Jarrah.
It would have been “more appropriate” for the authors of the report to have described their information on Jarrah as “an investigative theory being pursued by the FBI and not as objective statements of fact,” McGarrity wrote. He added that the decision to declassify Jarrah’s name “should not be taken as an affirmation or confirmation of the statements in the 2012 report about that individual.”
In Washington, Jarrah’s responsibilities appear to have included the promotion of Wahhabi theology in the United States, the distribution of Saudi funding to favored U.S. mosques and the supervision of religious officials in other parts of the country. Some former FBI officials said he was thought to have supervised Thumairy, although in a 2004 interview with investigators from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and the FBI, Thumairy claimed that he did not even know Jarrah. FBI and commission officials said that was a lie. The State Department revoked Thumairy’s U.S. visa in 2003 on the grounds that he was an extremist, officials said.
Former FBI officials said a special team of investigators began to examine Jarrah’s activities as part of a look at radical Islamists and possible Qaeda sympathizers within the Saudi kingdom’s large diplomatic operation in the United States.
Jarrah seemed to espouse hard-line Islamist views, the former officials said, although some suspected that he might have been doing so in order to inform on others, including Saudi exchange students in the United States, for the Saudi security services or the government’s religious-affairs apparatus.
Jarrah was not among 16 officials at a U.S. satellite center of the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University, the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America in Fairfax, Virginia, who were stripped of their diplomatic visas by the State Department in 2004. That action was part of a wider purge of the Saudi diplomatic corps that forced out officials who were spreading Wahabi Islamic doctrine in mosques around the United States.
A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the revelation of Jarrah’s identity. But the kingdom has worked assiduously to try to block the lawsuit by the 9/11 families, and it has largely done so with the backing of the Trump administration’s Justice Department.
Before he became president, Trump had expressed strong support for the 9/11 families and sharply criticized the Saudi government. In his 2011 book, “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again,” he called the Saudi kingdom “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism.”
Thalia Beaty contributed reporting.


Attorney General Barr Refuses to Release 9/11 Documents to Families of the Victims

The move comes after President Donald Trump promised to help families, who accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks. Barr says he cannot even explain why the material must stay secret without putting national security at risk.
 April 15, 12:35 p.m. EDT
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Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret.
In a series of filings just before a midnight court deadline on Monday, the attorney general, William Barr; the acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell; and other senior officials insisted to a federal judge in the civil case that further disclosures about Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot would imperil national security.
But the administration insisted in court filings that even its justification for that secrecy needed to remain secret. Four statements to the court by FBI and Justice Department officials were filed under seal so they could not be seen by the public. An additional five, including one from the CIA, were shared only with the judge and cannot be read even by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Barr insisted to the court that public discussion of the issue “would reveal information that could cause the very harms my assertion of the state secrets privilege is intended to prevent.”
What the various security agencies are trying to hide remains a mystery.
Since the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in federal district court in New York in 2017, their primary focus has been on the relationship between the hijackers and relatively low-level Saudi officials. Those include at least two Saudis who crossed paths in Southern California with the first two Al Qaeda operatives who were sent to the United States by Osama bin Laden in January 2000.
Yet the broad outlines of the hijackers’ connections to those two Saudi officials — a diplomat at the kingdom’s Los Angeles consulate and a suspected Saudi spy living as an exchange student in San Diego — have been publicly known for years. The FBI shared thousands of pages of its files on the plot with the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which explored them in its 2004 report.
“The extraordinary lengths that they’re going to here suggest that there must be some deep, dark secret that they’re still trying very hard to hide after almost 20 years,” said a lawyer for the families, Steven Pounian. “But who are they protecting? Something might be a Saudi government secret. But how can these be secrets that still need to be kept from the American people after all this time?”
The Justice Department has declassified some information about the Saudi role in 9/11 and shared it with lawyers for the plaintiffs under a protective order that allows them to read it but not make it public. But the department has not asked the lawyers to obtain security clearances to view other material, as is fairly common in national security cases involving American and foreign citizens whose constitutional rights are at issue.
The chorus of senior national security officials who wrote in support of the Trump administration’s secrets claim appeared to respond in part to Justice Department guidelines set down by the Obama administration in 2009. Those rules were intended to restrain overly aggressive use of the privilege, which the administration of George W. Bush had often cited after 9/11 to block legal challenges to its policies on torture, extraordinary rendition and warrantless surveillance.
Barr cited those more restrictive guidelines in his statement to the district court, noting that they prohibited the government from asserting a state secrets claim in order to conceal illegalities or potential embarrassment. He assured the magistrate judge in the case, Sarah Netburn, that those guidelines had been met.
At a ceremonial gathering at the White House last Sept. 11, representatives of the families of those killed in the attacks repeatedly asked Trump for fuller access to the FBI’s secret files in the case. According to more than a half-dozen people who were at the meeting, he assured several of them he would help.
“He looked us in the eye on 9/11, he shook our hands in the White House and said, ‘I’m going to help you — it’s done,’” recalled one of those present, Brett Eagleson, a banker whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “I think the 9/11 families have lost all hope that the president is going to step up and do the right thing. He’s too beholden to the Saudis.”

Operation Encore and the Saudi Connection: A Secret History of the 9/11 Investigation


Behind the scenes, a small team of FBI agents spent years trying to solve a stubborn mystery — whether officials from Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest allies, were involved in the worst terror attack in U.S. history.
The White House press office did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the families’ characterizations of the meeting. One day after that encounter, Justice Department officials agreed to release the name of one mid-level Saudi religious official who had been tied to the case in an FBI document that had been partially declassified earlier. At the same time, however, Barr asserted the state secrets privilege to protect other FBI documents sought by the families. The latest flurry of statements supporting that claim responded to challenges from the plaintiffs.
Although the close alliance between the United States and the Saudi kingdom has survived countless moments of tension, it has frayed in recent months in ways that could prove helpful to plaintiffs in the 9/11 lawsuit.
In recent weeks, Republican senators from states that have been hard hit by the collapse of world oil prices have criticized the Saudi government with growing intensity. On March 25, before the Trump administration negotiated a cut in Saudi oil production, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska cited the law under which the 9/11 families were allowed to sue the Saudi government as one of the levers of pressure that the United States could use if the kingdom did not take account of American concerns.
In a letter on Monday, three other influential senators asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine in depth why the FBI has refused to disclose more information about Saudi connections to the plot in response to a subpoena filed by the 9/11 families in 2018.
Those senators, Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and two Democrats, minority leader Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, cited a recent investigative report by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that raised new questions about the FBI’s inquiry into the Saudi role in the attacks.
“The September 11 attacks represent a singular and defining tragedy in the history of our Nation,” the senators wrote to the Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz. “Nearly 20 years later, the 9/11 families and the American public still have not received the full and transparent accounting of the potential sources of support for those attacks to which they are entitled.”

US sends 3,000 more troops to defend Saudi monarchy

 

The Pentagon confirmed Friday that 3,000 more US troops are being deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the blood-soaked monarchy led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and prepare for war against Iran.
The deployment includes two fighter squadrons, one Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW), two more Patriot missile batteries, and one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD).
According to a Pentagon statement Friday, the US Secretary of Defense phoned Crown Prince bin Salman (who also holds the post of Saudi minister of defense) to inform him of the coming reinforcements, which he said were meant “to assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia.”
The Pentagon also acknowledged that the latest escalation brings the number of additional troops sent into the Persian Gulf region since May to 14,000. They have been accompanied by an armada of US warships and a B-52-led bomber task force. The Pentagon has also announced that an aircraft carrier-led battle group will remain in the Persian Gulf.
US soldiers deployed in the Middle East (U.S. Army by 1st Lt. Jesse Glenn)
While initiated as a supposed response to unspecified threats from Iran, the US buildup in the Persian Gulf region has constituted from its outset a military provocation and preparation for a war of aggression. This military buildup has accompanied Washington’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign of sweeping economic sanctions that are tantamount to a state of war. The aim, as the Trump administration has stated publicly, is to drive Iranian oil exports down to zero. By depriving Iran of its principal source of export income, Washington hopes to starve the Iranian people into submission and pave the way to regime change, bringing to power a US puppet regime in Tehran.
The latest military buildup was announced in the immediate aftermath of an attack on an Iranian tanker in the Red Sea, about 60 miles from the Saudi port of Jeddah.
The National Iranian Tanker Co. reported that its oil tanker, the Sabiti, was struck twice by explosives early Friday morning, leaving two holes in the vessel and causing a brief oil spill into the Red Sea.
While Iranian state news media blamed the damage on missile attacks, a spokesman for the company told the Wall Street Journal that the company was not sure of the cause.
Some security analysts have suggested that the fairly minor damage to the vessel could have been caused by limpet mines. Such mines were apparently used last June when two tankers—one Japanese and one Norwegian-owned—were hit by explosions in the Sea of Oman. At the time, Washington blamed the attacks on Iran, without providing any evidence. Tehran denied the charge, saying that it sent teams to rescue crew member of the damaged tankers.
The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) quoted an unnamed Iranian government official as stating that the Iranian tanker had been the victim of a “terrorist attack.”
“Examination of the details and perpetrators of this dangerous action continues and will be announced after reaching the result,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said.
The National Iranian Tanker Co. issued a statement saying that there was no evidence that Saudi Arabia was behind the attack.
The incident raised the specter of an escalating tanker war that could disrupt shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows. News of the attack sent crude oil prices spiking by 2 percent.
In addition to the June attacks on the tankers in the Gulf of Oman, in July British commandos, acting on a request from Washington, stormed an Iranian super tanker, the Grace 1, in waters off the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. In apparent retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized the British-flagged Stena Impero for what Tehran charged were violations of international maritime regulations as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Both tankers were subsequently released.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement charging that the Iranian super tanker, renamed the Adrian Darya 1, had offloaded its oil in Syria in violation of European Union sanctions and a pledge made by Tehran to the UK at the time of the vessel’s release. He demanded provocatively that “EU members should condemn this action, uphold the rule of law, and hold Iran accountable.”

The Trump administration, which in May of last year unilaterally and illegally abrogated the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the major powers has been pressuring the European signatories to the deal—Germany, France and the UK—to follow suit.
While the respective governments of the three countries have insisted that they still support the nuclear agreement, they have repeatedly bowed to Washington’s war drive, while failing to take any significant actions to counter the effects of the US “maximum pressure” campaign and deliver to Tehran the sanctions relief and economic normalization that it was promised in exchange for curtailing its nuclear program.
Most recently, the three European governments backed Washington in blaming Iran for a September 14 attack on Saudi oil facilities that temporarily shut down half of the kingdom’s oil production and sent crude prices spiraling by 20 percent—again without providing a shred of proof.
Washington is seeking to topple the Iranian regime or bully it into accepting complete subordination to US imperialist predatory interests in the energy-rich and geostrategically vital Middle East.
The US sanctions regime and military buildup have placed the entire region on a hair trigger for the outbreak of a catastrophic war that could engulf not only the Middle East, but the entire planet.
All of the regimes involved in the escalating conflict are gripped by crises that make the drive to war all the more explosive.
The impact of the sanctions on Iran’s economy has been devastating. It is estimated that oil exports last month fell to just 400,000 barrels per day (b/d), compared to 1.95 million b/d in September 2018. Left with little means of combating spiraling inflation and growing unemployment, Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime is caught between intense pressure from imperialism on the one hand, and the growth of social opposition among Iranian workers and poor on the other.
The Saudi monarchy is confronting the debacle of its four-year-old and near genocidal war against the people of Yemen, made possible by the weapons and logistical aid provided by Washington, even as Prince bin Salman remains a global pariah for his ordering of the grisly assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year in Istanbul.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, incapable of forming a new government after two elections and confronting criminal indictments, has grown increasingly concerned over the apparent lack of appetite by the Persian Gulf Sunni monarchies for military confrontation with Iran and Washington’s failure to carry out military strikes after the downing of its drone in June and the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities last month. Clearly, Tel Aviv, which has cast Iran as its strategic enemy, would have a motive for attacking Iranian tankers in the hopes of provoking a response that could lead to US military action.
And then there is Trump. He has proclaimed his determination to halt the “endless wars” in the Middle East and provoked a political firestorm by pulling back a relative handful of US troops in Syria, allowing Turkey to launch a long-planned attack on the Pentagon’s erstwhile proxy force, the Kurdish-dominated YPG militia.
Faced with an escalating political crisis and growing social tensions within the US, along with an impeachment investigation by the Democrats in Congress that is focused entirely on the national security concerns of the CIA and the Pentagon, he has ample motive for launching a new war.
While the Democrats’ exclusive focus on Trump’s failure to pursue a sufficiently bellicose policy against Russia and prosecute the war for regime change in Syria has allowed the US president to absurdly posture as an opponent of war, the reality is that he has overseen a staggering increase in military spending designed to prepare for “great power” confrontations, particularly with China.
Meanwhile, whatever his political pretense, Trump has done nothing to end any of the wars in the Middle East. While he has ordered US troops to pull back, allowing the Turkish invasion, none of them have been withdrawn from Syria.

With the latest buildup of US forces in Saudi Arabia, Washington is preparing, behind the backs of the working class, to launch a catastrophic military conflict with Iran. The most urgent task posed by these developments is the building of a global antiwar movement led by the working class. This movement must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify working people in the United States, Europe and the Middle East in a common struggle against imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.


 TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their ar$es??


WHAT WILL TRUMP AND HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???

JUST ASK THE SAUDIS!


JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and 

Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy 

approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This 

is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---

- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster, tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators

THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other charities.”


Opinion: Trump And Pompeo Have Enabled A Saudi Cover-Up Of The Khashoggi Killing

October 2, 201911:45 AM ET
AARON DAVID MILLER
RICHARD SOKOLSKY
In the weeks following the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump spent more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally than he did reacting to the killing.
Hasan Jamali/AP
Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author most recently of the End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.
Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, worked in the State Department for six different administrations and was a member of the secretary of state's Office of Policy Planning from 2005 to 2015.

It has been a year since Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi entered Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul where he was slain and dismembered. There is still no objective or comprehensive Saudi or American accounting of what occurred, let alone any real accountability.
The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's admission in a recent CBS interview that he takes "full responsibility," while denying foreknowledge of the killing or that he ordered it, sweeps under the rug the lengths to which the Saudis have gone to obscure the truth about their involvement in the killing and cover-up.
The Saudi campaign of obfuscation, denial and cover-up would never have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Trump administration's support over the past year. The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not only refused to distance themselves from the crown prince, known by his initials MBS, but also actively worked to relegitimize him. The Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status. In short, without Trump, the attempted makeover — such as it is — would not have been possible.
The Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status.
Weak administration response
The administration's weak and feckless response to Khashoggi's killing was foreshadowed a year before it occurred. In May 2017, in an unusual break with precedent, Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his inaugural presidential trip; gave his son-in-law the authority to manage the MBS file, which he did with the utmost secrecy; and made it unmistakably clear that Saudi money, oil, arm purchases and support for the administration's anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli policies would elevate the U.S.-Saudi "special relationship" to a new level.
Predictably, therefore, the administration's reaction to Khashoggi's killing was shaped by a desire to manage the damage and preserve the relationship. In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did reacting to the killing. Trump vowed to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi killing but focused more on defending the crown prince, saying this was another example of being "guilty before being proven innocent."
Those pledges to investigate and impose accountability would continue to remain hollow. Over the past year, Trump and Pompeo have neither criticized nor repudiated Saudi actions that have harmed American interests in the Middle East. Two months after Khashoggi's death, the administration, in what Pompeo described as an "initial step," imposed sanctions on 17 Saudi individuals implicated in the killing. But no others have been forthcoming, and the visa restrictions that were imposed are meaningless because none of the sanctioned Saudis would be foolish enough to seek entry into the United States.
What's more, the administration virtually ignored a congressional resolution imposing sanctions on the Saudis for human rights abuses and vetoed another bipartisan resolution that would have ended U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia's inhumane military campaign in Yemen.
The Saudis opened a trial in January of 11 men implicated in the killing, but the proceedings have been slow and secretive, leading the United Nations' top human rights expert to declare that "the trial underway in Saudi Arabia will not deliver credible accountability." Despite accusations that the crown prince's key adviser Saud al-Qahtani was involved in the killing, he's still advising MBS, has not stood trial and will likely escape punishment. A year later, there are still no reports of convictions or serious punishment.
Legitimizing Mohammed bin Salman
The Trump administration has not only given the crown prince a pass on the Khashoggi killing, but it has also worked assiduously to remove his pariah status and rehabilitate his global image. Barely two months after the 2018 slaying, Trump was exchanging pleasantries with the crown prince at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires and holding out prospects of spending more time with him. Then this past June, at the G-20 in Osaka, Japan, Trump sang his praises while dodging questions about the killing. "It's an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia," Trump said.
And you can bet that when Saudi Arabia hosts the G-20, scheduled to be held in its capital of Riyadh in November 2020, the Trump administration will be smiling as its rehab project takes another step in its desired direction.
What the U.S. should have done
Trump has failed to impose any serious costs or constraints on Saudi Arabia for the killing of a U.S. newspaper columnist who resided in Virginia or for the kingdom's aggressive policies, from Yemen to Qatar. In the wake of the Khashoggi killing, the administration should have made it unmistakably clear, both publicly and privately, that it expected a comprehensive and credible accounting and investigation. It should have suspended high-level contacts and arms sales with the kingdom for a period of time. And to make the point, the administration should have supported at least one congressional resolution taking the Saudis to task, in addition to triggering the Magnitsky Act, which would have required a U.S. investigation; a report to Congress; and sanctions if warranted.
Back to business as usual
The dark stain of the crown prince's apparent involvement in Khashoggi's death will not fade easily. But for Trump and Pompeo, it pales before the great expectations they still maintain for the kingdom to confront and contain their common enemy, Iran, as well as support the White House's plan for Middle East peace, defeat jihadists in the region and keep the oil spigot open.
Most of these goals are illusory. Saudi Arabia is a weak, fearful and unreliable ally. The kingdom has introduced significant social and cultural reforms but has imposed new levels of repression and authoritarianism. Its reckless policies toward Yemen and Qatar have expanded, not contracted, opportunities for Iran, while the Saudi military has demonstrated that, even after spending billions to buy America's most sophisticated weapons, it still can't defend itself without American help.
Meanwhile, recent attacks on critical Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blames on Iran have helped rally more American and international support for the kingdom.
When it comes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the kingdom's callous reaction to Khashoggi's killing, the president and his secretary of state have been derelict in their duty: They have not only failed to advance American strategic interests but also undermined America's values in the process.


The U.S. Military is Sending Thousands of Troops and Even B-1 Bombers into Saudi Arabia (To Counter Iran)

The National InterestNovember 3, 2019
On October 6, around fifty U.S. commandos in northeastern Syria tasked with hunting down ISIS forces were withdrawn from territory near the Turkish border controlled by the Kurdish-Arab SDF faction.
The U.S. withdrawal was a prerequisite for a Turkish attack against the SDF which subsequently took place. The remaining hundreds of U.S. forces elsewhere in northeastern Syria were endangered in the crossfire and had to be withdrawn a few days later.
The U.S. withdrawal was post-hoc justified on the basis that they were no longer needed in the Middle East and it was time to “bring the troops home.” 
But in the weeks since, the United States has deployed over 3,000 more troops to the Middle East—including hundreds of National Guardsmen in Syria, and thousands of soldiers and airmen deployed to Saudi Arabia.
While a companion article looks at the deployment of a mechanized battalion to defend an oil field in southeastern Syria, this second part looks at the rapid buildup of U.S. forces in the wealthy Kingdom in response to intensifying clashes with Iran following the United State’s withdrawal from a nuclear deal with Tehran.
Return to the Kingdom
The deployments to Saudi Arabia marks a dramatic turn around from sixteen years earlier in 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pulled out thousands of U.S. troops. Their presence had long been cited as a factor radicalizing Muslims across the planet who objected to the presence of foreign troops so close to the holy city of Mecca.
Apparently, these concerns have since faded, despite political headwinds from a U.S. Congress angered by Saudi Arabia’s grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul.
The buildup has been prompted by Iranian harassment of shipping in the Persian Gulf, the shootdown of U.S. surveillance drone over the Persian Gulf in June, and a drone and missile attack on Saudi oil refineries in September that was almost certainly of Iranian origin but which Yemeni rebels took credit for.
First, following the loss of drones in June, that the Defense Department announced it was doubling troop deployment to the Kingdom from 500 to 1,000 personnel.

Saudi Slavery

An Islamically-sanctioned barbarity continues.
November 8, 2019 
Hugh Fitzgerald
As is well known, slavery was formally abolished in Saudi Arabia as late as 1962, and then only after terrific pressure had been applied to the Saudis by Western governments. And today, when we speak of slavery in the Muslim world, we think of Mauritania (with 600,000 slaves), as the report in the past hour discussed, Niger (600,000 slaves), Mali (200,000 slaves), and Libya (where slave markets have opened in nine sites during the last two years). Most of us assume that in Saudi Arabia, slavery is no longer tolerated.
But most of us are wrong.
Slavery may have been formally abolished, but the cruel and savage treatment of foreign domestic workers, their inability to free themselves from arduous work conditions because their employers keep their passports and other documents, amount to slavery in all but name.
A report on one group of domestic slaves — Vietnamese women — by reporter Yen Duong, who interviewed former workers who had made it back to Vietnam, was published last year in Al Jazeera here:
Overworked, abused, hungry: Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
Women say they are forced to work at least 18 hours a day, denied food, assaulted and refused the right to return home.
Pham Thi Dao, 46, says she worked more than 18 hours a day and was given the same one meal to live on – a slice of lamb and plain rice.
Dao, 46, was a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for more than seven months until she returned to Vietnam in April.
“I worked from 5am until 1am in the morning, and was allowed to eat once at 1pm,” Dao told Al Jazeera of her experience in the port city of Yanbu. “It was the same every day – a slice of lamb and a plate of plain rice. After nearly two months, I was like a mad person.”
According to statistics from Vietnam’s labor ministry, there are currently 20,000 Vietnamese workers in the kingdom, with nearly 7,000 working as domestic staff for Saudi families…
The same harsh conditions which Vietnamese have endured have also been reported by the Filipino, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan workers, in Saudi Arabia. And they have also been endured by domestic workers in the  the Emirates and Kuwait. In addition to the harsh working conditions, there is the persistent threat of sexual assault by their Arab masters. Some domestic workers have been raped and murdered by their Arab employers. Yet it has been almost impossible to bring employers to justice for such crimes.
Some who escaped have recounted slave-like working and living conditions.
“I understand that as [domestic] workers we need to get used to difficult working conditions,” said Dao, who is vocal on social media about her experience. “We didn’t ask for much, just no starvation, no beatings, and three meals per day. If we had that, we would not have begged for rescue.”…
“As soon as I arrived at the airport in Riyadh, they (employees from a Saudi company providing domestic workers) pushed me into a room with more than a hundred of others,” she said. “When my employer picked me up later, he took my passport and employment contract. Most women I’ve talked to here experience the same thing.”
By seizing the workers’ passports, the Saudi employers have complete control over them. They cannot leave the country, nor move about inside Saudi Arabia, nor go to work for another employer. And if they don’t have their employment contract, which has been seized by their employer, they have no way of knowing if the onerous conditions they endure violate the contract’s provisions. They are captives of their employer in every sense.
Like Dao, she said she was given one meal a day and worked 18-hour shifts.
Another domestic worker, who requested anonymity, showed Al Jazeera her contract stipulating a nine-hour working day – a standard given the contracts are composed by Vietnam’s labour ministry.
Dao shows notes from the Arabic lesson she took before her trip. Vietnamese domestic workers are entitled to classes on language, skills and culture but the sessions are poorly executed, say the workers.
When Linh asked to be moved to another family – a workers’ right according to their contracts – staff at the Vietnamese broker company shouted at her and tried to intimidate her.
She went on a hunger strike for three days until her employer agreed to take her back to the Saudi company…
Leaving an employment contract carries a hefty fine, plus the price of a ticket back to Vietnam, if the worker is unable to prove abuse at the hands of their employers.
The cost of quitting is usually between $2,500 and $3,500.
If workers get, at best, $388 per month, that means that if they manage to persuade their employer to give them back their passports and to let them leave, they will still have to come up with between seven and nine months of salary that must be paid back. And that assumes that they will be paid the highest amount ($388/month) and will have all other expenses, during that period of seven-to-nine months, paid by their employer.
Tuyet told her partner in Vietnam by phone that she is being abused by the family she works for in Riyadh.
Bui Van Sang’s partner, Tuyet, works in Riyadh.
He said she is being beaten and starved.
The Vietnamese broker company asked him for $2,155 for her return, but refused to put anything in writing, he claimed.
Her phone has been taken away and Sang is only able to contact her every two to three weeks, “when her employer feels like [allowing her]”.
These domestic workers are totally at the mercy of their Arab employers. They cannot even contact anyone in the outside world unless the employer “feels like [allowing her].” They are, essentially, prisoners whose brutal living and working conditions are set by the employer, who answers to no one. That constitutes slavery, whether or not it is called by that name.
By the time he had raised the $2,155, the Vietnamese broker company demanded double the payment, he said.
He travelled 1,500km from his southern Vietnamese home province of Tay Ninh to the capital, Hanoi, to beg the broker, but was turned away….
The Vietnamese brokers are akin to slave traders. They round up the “slaves” (domestic workers), hold out the promise of decent work and pay which, once those they traffic in arrive in Saudi Arabia, is simply ignored. The slaves have been delivered, the brokers paid by the  Saudi employers, and the living conditions, of 18-hour days, with one meal a day, are now the norm. For beatings and sexual assaults, there is no recourse for these Vietnamese domestics. Meanwhile, Saudi employers hold onto those passports without which these workers cannot leave the country.
There are no independent organisations in either Saudi Arabia or Vietnam which ensure the safety of domestic workers.
In the past few years, reports of abuse have prompted Saudi authorities to suggest amendments to existing labor regulations, but rights groups say they fall short.
Whatever regulations are talked about, Saudi employers still do pretty much what they want in setting the conditions of work for domestic helpers.
Workers and their relatives have to rely entirely on the Vietnamese broker companies for support.
Linh, the domestic helper in Riyadh, said when she contacted the Vietnamese company that brought her there, they told her the employment contract is only valid in Vietnam, not in Saudi Arabia.
In other words, the Vietnamese brokers, having been paid by the Saudi employers, have washed their hands of the Vietnamese workers sent to Saudi Arabia. The employment contracts on which these domestic workers were relying are, they now admit, worthless in Saudi Arabia. These women have no guarantee of any rights; whatever their Saudi employer wishes to impose is what they must accept. Hence the 18-hour days, seven days a week, and the single meal each day. How is this not akin to slavery?
“They [the Vietnamese companies] are supposed to protect our rights, but all they do is yell at us,” Linh said by phone. “Now I just want to leave the country. If I go to the police, at least they’d bring me to the detention centre, and I’d be deported and allowed to leave.”
She recently livestreamed a video detailing the treatment that she and many fellow Vietnamese domestic helpers face while working in Saudi Arabia.
The video has been viewed 113,000 times.
“Many women I know here just want the same thing – they just want to leave,” she said. “But they are afraid, threatened, and don’t even dare to speak out.”
Their fear is palpable. If they complain of their working conditions, will they be beaten by their employers? Will they be given even more unpleasant or difficult tasks? Will the 18-hour day become a 20-hour day, as one Vietnamese man reported his wife had had to endure, that is with only four hours of sleep allowed? Will even the one slice of meat they are now given be reduced still further, or will they perhaps not be given meat at all? Will they no longer be allowed to call home even twice a month? Not all Saudi employers are simon-legrees, but a great many appear to be. The point is that domestic workers ought to have rights enshrined in the Saudi law, but they do not. And the conditions which they endure are scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
The Saudis are not alone in such mistreatment of their domestic workers. The Kuwaitis and the Emiratis have been difficult masters, too, but the conditions of domestic workers appear to be especially harsh in Saudi Arabia. The mentality that lies behind this mistreatment rests on two things. First, there is the deep belief that slavery is legitimate, given that Muhammad himself owned slaves, and does not become illegitimate in Islamic societies just because Western pressure has led to its formal prohibition. The slave-owner mentality remains. Second, these domestic workers — Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Indonesian, Sri Lankan — are almost all non-Muslims, and the treatment they receive is commensurate with their description in the Qur’an, as  being “the most vile of creatures.” It would be interesting to compare the working conditions of the non-Muslim domestic workers in Saudi Arabia with those who, from Indonesia, are themselves Muslim. But that’s a subject for another occasion.

 

Tulsi Gabbard: U.S. Government ‘Is Hiding the Truth’ on 9/11 Terror Attacks

1 Nov 2019698
4:22
Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, reacted to the difficulties Chris Ganci and Brett Eagleson, two relatives of victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were having in their quest to obtain more information about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11.
Gabbard accused the federal government of undermining efforts of achieving more transparency, which she said was being done at the behest of Saudi Arabia.
Partial transcript as follows:
CARLSON: This is one of those issues I don’t think is partisan. It doesn’t need to be. It shouldn’t be partisan in any sense.
GABBARD: Absolutely not.
CARLSON: It’s an American issue. Why would the U.S. government ever side with the Saudi Kingdom of all countries against our citizens?
GABBARD: This is the real question that’s at stake. This story that we’re hearing from the families of those who were killed on 9/11 pushes this issue to the forefront where, for so long, leaders in our government have said, well, Saudi Arabia is our great ally. They’re a partner in counterterrorism, turning a blind eye or completely walking away from the reality that Saudi Arabia time and again, has proven to be the opposite.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: They’re undermining our National Security interests. They are — as you said, they are the number one exporter of this Wahhabi extremist ideology.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: They’re a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists, like al Qaeda and ISIS around the world. They’re directly providing arms and assistance to al Qaeda, in places like Yemen, and in Syria.
And as we are seeing here, it is our government, our own government that is hiding the truth from Chris and Brett and the many other families of those who were killed on 9/11. For what? Where do the loyalties really lie?
CARLSON: So I was thinking in the commercial break that of the number of people I know personally, not abstractly, but have had lunch with in this city who are taking currently money from the Saudi Kingdom or their allies in the Emirates, the Gulf States, and I wonder if that maybe play some role, like a lot of people on their payroll here.
GABBARD: Yes. We talk about the foreign policy establishment in Washington.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: We talk about the political elite, the military-industrial complex. We hear things from some of those people, well, you know, hey, we sell a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia. So you know, if we burn bridges with them, then who are we going to sell our weapons to? Where are we going to get that money from?
All of these excuses that have nothing to do with the interests of the American people, with our national security interests. And that’s — I’m proud and honored to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with these 9/11 families in demanding this truth because, yes, it is about truth and justice and closure for all of them now as we approach 20 years since that attack on 9/11. It’s also about our National Security.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: Safety and security of the American people.
CARLSON: I’ll never forget right after 9/11, living here in the City of Washington, our airports were closed. All airports were closed in this country.
GABBARD: Yes.
CARLSON: And learning that chartered flights of Saudi citizens had been allowed with U.S. government approval to take off and run back to Saudi Arabia without being questioned by authorities here and thinking you know, if I tried to do that, I’d be in prison. Why are we giving preference to Saudi citizens over our own citizens?
GABBARD: Exactly. It makes no sense if you think about what would happen if we actually had leaders who were putting the interests of our country above all else. You follow the money trail. It goes back to the military-industrial complex.
You look at how many of the think tanks here in Washington who send so-called experts to go and testify before Congress who are funded by Saudi Arabia to spout their talking points.
You saw how the legislation that we passed in Congress. I was proud to vote for legislation that allowed families like Chris and Brett’s to sue Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia trotted out all of their lobbyists to say why that would be so dangerous, so dangerous for our interests, for them to be allowed to seek justice for their families.
This is about standing up for our country. This is about standing up for our principles and our freedoms and for the truth.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

 

Obama-Clinton Fundraiser Imaad Zuberi Cops a Plea

Clinton foundation contributor was conduit for Saudi sugardaddy Mohammed Al Rahbani.
October 31, 2019 
Lloyd Billingsley
Since his election to the presidency in 2016, the Democrat-Deep State-Media axis has targeted Donald Trump for foreign entanglements they claim should remove him from office. Now comes news of foreign entanglements and foreign cash for the previous president.
“Middleman helped Saudi give to Obama inaugural,” proclaims the headline on the October 29 report by Alan Suderman and Jim Mustian, billed as an Associated Press exclusive. As the authors explain, U.S. election law prohibits foreign nationals from making contributions to the inaugural celebrations of American presidents. As it turns out, the law was violated.
A “Saudi tycoon,” Sheikh Mohammed Al Rahbani, routed hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Obama inaugural through an “intermediary,”  Imaad Zuberi. He, in turn, is a “jet-setting fundraiser and venture capitalist,” who has “raised millions of dollars for Democrats and Republicans alike over the years.” Despite the appearance of bipartisanship, Zuberi is more narrowly tailored.
Imaad Zuberi “served as a top fundraiser for both Obama and Hillary Clinton during their presidential runs, including stints on both of their campaign finance committees.” One campaign, not identified, took donations “in the name of one of Zuberi’s dead relatives” and a political committee, also unidentified, “took donations from a person Zuberi invented.” As the DOJ charged, Zuberi pleaded guilty to “falsifying records to conceal his work as a foreign agent while lobbying high-level U.S. government officials,” and it was hardly his first brush with the law.
“Elite Fundraiser for Obama and Clinton Linked to Justice Department Probe,” read the headline on Bill Allison’s August 28, 2015 exclusive in Foreign Policy. The calling card of the elite political fundraiser are photographs, “bumping fists with President Barack Obama in front of a Christmas tree at a White House reception. Sharing a belly laugh with Vice President Joe Biden at a formal luncheon,” and posing “cheek to cheek with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
Not only is Zuberi a major fundraiser for her campaign, notes Allison, “he also donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which has already come under fire for accepting money from donors — many of them foreign — with interests before the U.S. government while she was secretary of state.” And as Allison learned, Hillary’s 2008 campaign benefitted from “straw donors” set up by Sant Singh Chatwal and Norman Hsu, both convicted of election law violations.
Zuberi also used straw donors in more recent illegal activity. As to the affiliation of those mysterious campaigns and committees, the AP writers provide a hint.
Sheikh Mohammed Al Rahbani has “talked about his support of Obama. He posted pictures on his website of himself and his wife standing with Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden and their spouses at a 2013 inaugural event.” Alas, “the website was taken down shortly after Zuberi’s plea was made public.” 
As Paul Delacourt of the FBI’s Los Angeles office explains, “American influence is not for sale.” Mr. Zuberi “lured individuals who were seeking political influence in violation of U.S. law, and in the process, enriched himself by defrauding those with whom he interacted.” According to the DOJ, that “could send him to prison for a lengthy period of time.”
According to Suderman and Mustian, “Zuberi’s case raises questions about the degree to which political committees vet donors.” And as FEC boss Ellen Weintraub told the writers,  “I’m deeply concerned about foreigners trying to intervene in our elections, and I don’t think we’re doing enough to try to stop it.” They might start by looking in the right place.
Unconventional candidate Donald Trump, a man of considerable means, financed his own campaign. Trump had no need to consort with the likes of Zuberi or his dead relatives and those he invents. And because Trump financed his own campaign, he owes nothing to anybody, foreign or domestic.
Adam “sack of” Schiff, as Judge Jeanine Pirro respectfully calls him, claimed he had evidence in plain sight that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Two years and a Mueller investigation later, such evidence is nowhere in sight. Schiff’s current inquisition, perhaps more bogus than the Mueller probe, is best seen a diversion from John Durham’s criminal investigation of those who launched the Russia hoax. That is where DOJ and election officials should be looking.
Did Clinton Foundation donor Imaad Zerubi turn up on any of those 30,000 subpoenaed emails Hillary Clinton deleted? Did Zerubi see any classified material? Were there any texts from Zerubi and his foreign clients on the cell phones Hillary’s squad smashed up with hammers? Was Clinton grossly negligent, or just extremely careless? And so on. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton also enjoyed other foreign intervention, right out in the open.
Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard, a former mayor of Mexico City, had worked with voter-registration and participation groups in California, Arizona, Florida, Chicago, and elsewhere. As Ebrard told Francisco Goldman of the New Yorkerin 2016 he “decided to get more involved” by working on get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
A powerful foreign national openly interferes in an American election, and nobody calls him on it. Now that Clinton Foundation lackey Imaad Zuberi has copped a plea, the FEC and DOJ should look into it.


Congress overrides Obama veto of bill allowing 9/11 lawsuits
By Tom Carter

On Wednesday, the US Congress overturned President Obama’s veto of legislation that would permit victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks and their families to sue Saudi Arabia. Declassified documents released this year confirm the involvement of Saudi intelligence agents in the funding, organization, and planning of the attacks—facts which were covered up for years by the Bush and Obama administrations.

The vote, 97-1 in the Senate and 348-77 in the House of Representatives, represents the first and only congressional override of Obama’s presidency. Under the US Constitution, the president’s veto can be overturned only by a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress.
The Obama administration and the military and intelligence agencies, backed by sections of the media, including the New York Times, have vigorously denounced the legislation. Obama personally, together with Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford among others, have all publicly opposed the bill.
In a letter to Congress opposing the legislation, Obama warned that the bill would “threaten to erode sovereign principles that protect the United States, including our U.S. Armed Forces and other officials, overseas.”
In a lead editorial on Wednesday, the New York Times similarly warned that “if the bill becomes law, other countries could adopt similar legislation defining their own exemptions to sovereign immunity. Because no country is more engaged in the world than the United States—with military bases, drone operations, intelligence missions and training programs—the Obama administration fears that Americans could be subject to legal actions abroad.”
In other words, the bill would set a precedent for families of victims of American aggression abroad—such as the tens of thousands of victims of “targeted killings” ordered by Obama personally—to file lawsuits against US war criminal in their own countries’ courts.
Obama denounced the vote with unusual warmth on Wednesday. “It's an example of why sometimes you have to do what's hard. And, frankly, I wish Congress here had done what's hard,” Obama declared. “If you’re perceived as voting against 9/11 families right before an election, not surprisingly, that's a hard vote for people to take. But it would have been the right thing to do ... And it was, you know, basically a political vote.”
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, “When first we practice to deceive!” As the tangled web of lies surrounding the September 11 attacks continue to unravel, one senses that the American ruling class and its representatives do not see a clear way out of the dilemma.
Openly torpedoing the legislation is tantamount to an admission of guilt. Indeed, the Obama administration, the military and intelligence agencies, and theNew York Times are publicly working to cover up a crime perpetrated by Al Qaeda and its backers in Saudi Arabia, which in turn is an ally of the United States. The mere fact that Obama vetoed this bill constitutes an admission that the US government is hiding something with respect to the September 11 attacks.
The alternative, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, is also fraught with risks. Court proceedings initiated by the families of September 11 victims will inevitably expose the role played by the Saudi monarchy, an ally of both Al Qaeda and the United States, in the September 11 attacks. This, in turn, will highlight long and sordid history of American support for Islamic fundamentalism in the
Middle East, which continues to the present day in Syria and Libya.
Perhaps most dangerously of all, a full public accounting of  the roles of Saudi intelligence agents in the September 11  attacks will once again raise questions about the role of the American state in the attacks. Why did US intelligence
agencies ignore the activities of Saudi agents before the attacks, based on Saudi Arabia’s supposed status as a US ally?
Why did the US government deliberately cover up the Saudi connection after the fact, instead claiming that Afghanistan was a “state sponsor of terrorism” and that Iraq was developing “weapons of mass destruction?” Why was nobody
prosecuted?
The New York Times, for its part, simply lied about the evidence of Saudi complicity. “The legislation is motivated by a belief among the 9/11 families that Saudi Arabia played a role in the attacks, because 15 of the 19 hijackers, who were members of Al Qaeda, were Saudis,” the editors wrote. “But the independent American commission that investigated the attacks found no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials financed the terrorists.”
In fact, at least two of the hijackers received aid from Omar al-Bayoumi, who was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Saudi intelligence agent with “ties to terrorist elements.” Some of the hijackers were paid for work in fictitious jobs from companies affiliated with the Saudi Defense Ministry, with which Al-Bayoumi was in close contact. The night before the attacks, three of the hijackers stayed at the same hotel as Saleh al-Hussayen, a prominent Saudi government official.
These and other facts were confirmed by the infamous 28-page suppressed chapter of the 2002 report issued by the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. After 14 years of stalling, the document was finally released to the public this summer.
Yet the New York Times continues to describe the Saudi monarchy, the principal financier and sponsor of Islamic fundamentalist groups throughout the world, as “a partner in combating terrorism.”
The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, passed Wednesday, is a direct reaction to these revelations of Saudi complicity in the September 11 attacks, under pressure from organizations of survivors and families of victims. The law amends the federal judicial code to allow US courts “to hear cases involving claims against a foreign state for injuries, death, or damages that occur inside the United States as a result of. .. an act of terrorism, committed anywhere by a foreign state or official.”
Although the bill nowhere names Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government has threatened massive retaliation, including by moving $750 billion in assets out of  the country before they can be seized in American legal proceedings. This reaction alone confirms the monarchy’s guilt.
During Wednesday’s session, many of the statements on the floor of the Senate were nervous and apprehensive. Casting his vote in favor of the bill, Republican Senator Bob Corker declared, “I have tremendous concerns about the sovereign immunity procedures that would be set in place by the countries as a result of this vote.” More than one legislator noted that if the bill had unintended consequences, it would be modified or repealed.
The anxious comments of legislators and the crisscrossing denunciations within the ruling elite reflect the significance of this controversy for the entire American political establishment. For 15 years, the American population has been relentlessly told that the events of September 11, 2001 “changed everything,” warranting the elimination of democratic rights, the militarization of the police, renditions, torture, assassinations, totalitarian levels of spying, death and destruction across the Middle East, and trillions of dollars of expenditures.
The collapse of the official version of that day’s events shows that American politics for 15 years has been based on a lie.

Pollak: Everything Joe Biden Said About Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Actually Describes Barack Obama’s

Johannes Eisele / AFP Getty
12 Jul 20193
3:48

Everything former vice president Joe Biden said about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech on Thursday actually applies to the policy that Biden carried out together with former President Barack Obama — and not Trump.

In his speech, at City University of New York, Biden called Trump an “extreme” threat to the country’s national security. No one has yet taken Biden to task for describing the sitting commander-in-chief in such alarmist terms.
But that wasn’t even the most bizarre aspect of Biden’s speech. He said the main problem in Trump’s foreign policy was … Charlottesville, Virginia. Biden went on to recite a version of the debunked “very fine people” hoax, claiming that Trump had drawn a “moral equivalence between those who promoted hate and those who opposed it.” That, he said, was a threat to America’s mission of standing for democratic values in the world.
But in fact, Trump specifically condemned the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville on multiple occasions. The entire premise of Biden’s speech was a lie.
Biden went on to claim that Trump’s foreign policy rejects democratic values and favors the rise of authoritarianism worldwide. He cited Trump’s warmth to Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. And he claimed that Trump has undermined America’s alliances with democracies in favor of flattery from dictators.
Apparently Biden forgot that Obama literally bowed to the Saudi king; that he abandoned the pro-democracy protests during the Green Revolution in Iran; that he pushed for a “reset” with Russia and abandoned our Czech and Polish allies on missile defense; that he promised Putin he would be even more “flexible” after he won re-election; that he tried to normalize relations with the Cuban dictatorship without securing any democratic reforms there; that he gave the store away to the communist dictatorship in China; and that he abandoned Israel, a betrayal in which Biden himself played a direct and shameful role, condemning Israel for building apartments in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Trump praises dictators as a negotiating tactic; Obama praised them because he, too, thought America was a problem.
One of the few times the Obama administration embraced democratic change was during the Arab Spring, when “democracy” meant the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood — which had no interest in freedom, only in power.
In 2008, the Obama campaign cast Biden as a foreign policy guru, though he had been wrong on almost every foreign policy issue in his career. On Thursday, he mostly ignored his own record.
Astonishingly, Biden claimed credit for Trump’s success in crushing the so-called “Islamic State,” saying he worked with Obama “to craft the military and diplomatic campaign that ultimately defeated ISIS.” In fact, Biden was complicit in the rise of ISIS. He was Obama’s point man on Iraq when the U.S. suddenly pulled out of the country, leaving a vacuum that ISIS filled. He did not object when Obama called the terror group “junior varsity.”
Biden offered nothing new in terms of solutions to current foreign policy challenges. He claimed that the Iran nuclear deal had been a success — on the very day Iran was reportedto have been cheating all along. He said the U.S. should re-enter the deal once Iran did, offering no idea how to ensure that it did so. On North Korea, Biden promised he would “empower our negotiators,” whatever that means.
He said that he would get “tough” with China, which Trump is already doing (and which Biden previously suggested he would not do). And on immigration, he ridiculed the very idea of borders — literally: “I respect no borders.”
And this is the best Democrats have on foreign policy.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.


Sixteen years after 9/11: lies, hypocrisy and militarism
12 September 2017
The sixteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed more than 2,900 people in the United States were marked once again on Monday with ceremonies at the site of the World Trade Center’s demolished Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania where one of four hijacked planes crashed as passengers fought to regain control of the aircraft.
Thousands gathered in New York City for the solemn reading of the names of those who lost their lives to a criminal and reactionary terrorist attack that served only the interests of US and world imperialism, which ever since have exploited the events to justify wars of aggression and attacks on democratic rights the world over.
The genuine emotions of sorrow and remembrance shared by those who lost loved ones on 9/11 once again stood in sharp contrast to the banality and hypocrisy of the official commemorations staged by US officials.
This longstanding dichotomy reached a new level with the main speech of the day delivered by the fascistic billionaire con-man President Donald Trump at the Pentagon Monday. Trump, whose first reaction on the day of the attacks was to brag—falsely—that the toppling of the Twin Towers had made his own property at 40 Wall Street the tallest building in lower Manhattan, delivered remarks that consisted of barely warmed-over platitudes from previous addresses, repeated tributes to the American flag and a vow to “defend our country against barbaric forces of evil and destruction.”
Trump repeated the well-worn cliché that on September 11 “our whole world changed.” The phrase is meant to suggest that the unending wars, police state measures and sweeping changes in American political life over the past 16 years have all been carried out in response to the supposedly unforeseen and unforeseeable events of September 11, having nothing to do with anything that came before.
That this is a cynical and self-serving lie becomes clearer with every passing year.
On the eve of the anniversary, new revelations emerged linking Saudi Arabia, Washington’s closest ally in the Arab world, to the preparation of the September 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The corporate media, which published nothing of any significance on the anniversary, largely blacked out this new evidence. The New York Times marked the anniversary with an editorial detailing efforts by the New York City medical examiner to identify human remains.
A federal lawsuit on behalf of the families of some 1,400 of the 9/11 victims has presented evidence that the Saudi embassy in Washington financed what was apparently a “dry run” for the 9/11 attacks in 1999. Two Saudi agents posing as students boarded an America West flight from Phoenix to Washington, D.C. with tickets paid for by the Saudi embassy. The lawsuit states that both men had trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan with some of the 9/11 hijackers. While on the flight, the two asked flight attendants technical questions about the plane that raised suspicions and twice attempted to enter the cockpit, leading the pilot to carry out an emergency landing in Ohio. Both men were detained and questioned by the FBI, which decided not to pursue any prosecution.
This is only the latest in a long series of revelations that have made it abundantly clear that the events of 9/11 could never have taken place without substantial logistical support from high places. Despite the repeated claims that the attacks “changed everything,” there has never been an independent and objective investigations into how they were carried out. And, despite being what is ostensibly the most catastrophic intelligence failure in American history, no one was ever held accountable with so much as a firing or a demotion.
What evidence has emerged makes it clear that the 9/11 hijackers were able to freely enter the country and attend flight schools despite the fact that a number of those involved had been subjects of surveillance by the CIA and FBI for as long as two years before the attack. Two of them actually lived in the home of an FBI informant.
Twenty-eight pages of heavily redacted documents released in 2016 after being concealed from the public for 13 years established that Saudi intelligence officers funneled substantial amounts of money to the hijackers in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks, while assisting them with finding housing as well as flight schools to attend.
While Saudi Arabia was the government most active in carrying out the September 11 attacks, the involvement of Saudi intelligence really means the involvement of a section of the American state apparatus. This is not a matter of conspiracy theories, but established fact. It is bound up with very real conspiracies involving the CIA, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda going back to the Islamist group’s founding as an arm of Washington’s dirty war against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Far from the attacks having “changed everything,” they provided the pretext for acts of military aggression long in preparation. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, the ruling class initiated a policy developed to use US military might to offset the decline of American capitalism on the world arena. Afghanistan and Iraq were targeted to secure military dominance over two major oil- and gas-producing regions on the planet, the Caspian Basin and the Middle East.
This thoroughly criminal enterprise, justified in the name of 9/11’s victims, has claimed the lives of over 1 million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and unleashed the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
The invocation of a “war on terror”—passed down from Bush to Obama and now to Trump—to justify these crimes has become not only threadbare, but patently absurd. The results of 16 years of uninterrupted US wars of aggression have included an unprecedented growth of Al Qaeda and related Islamist militias, largely as a result of US imperialism’s utilization of these elements as proxy ground forces in wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.
Moreover, the multiple wars and interventions conducted by the Pentagon and the CIA, from North Africa to Central Asia, can quickly metastasize into a global conflagration, with Washington simultaneously threatening nuclear war against North Korea and pursuing increasingly dangerous confrontations with its principal geo-strategic rivals, Russia and China.
September 11 did not “change everything,” but it did mark the beginning of an escalation of what George W. Bush called the “wars of the twenty-first century,” that is, escalating imperialist aggression that is leading mankind toward a third world war.
Bill Van Auken





September 11, 2017
Were the Saudis Behind 9/11?
1. On September 9, 2017, Paul Sperry of the New York Post dropped the biggest headline hint so far that, Yes, the Saudis plotted, trained, funded, ordered, and covered up the assault on America on 9/11. 
The headline does not come out and actually say that the Saudis committed the greatest anti-American civilian atrocity 16 years ago. It just says that "the Saudis allegedly funded a "dry run" of the 9/11/01 attack two years before it was actually executed. But by now we know so much supportive evidence that we might as well tell the whole truth.
Two years before the airliner attacks, the Saudi Embassy paid for two Saudi nationals, living undercover in the US as students, to fly from Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks,” alleges the amended complaint filed on behalf of the families of some 1,400 victims who died in the terrorist attacks 16 years ago."
Well, if you're a bank robber, and you go through a "dry run" of the robbery two years before actually committing it, and "somebody" then carries out the outrageous crime, chances are that the dry runners and the perps are the same. 
We have plenty of evidence of Saudi guilt for 9/11. We know that the 17 Wahhabi (Saudi-indoctrinated) terrorists killed civilian cabin personnel and pilots in those four "American" and "United" airplanes, slitting their throats with utility knives, according to the ancient Koranic war command, "you shall cut them at the neck." 
We have seen plenty of actual beheadings on ISIS videos, and we know that the Wahhabi priesthood in Saudi Arabia has endorsed ISIS for its Nazilike murders, rapes, kidnappings, and sadistic treatment of innocent children, women, and men wherever ISIS operate. It is vital for Americans to understand that the war theology of "ISIS," "Al Qaida," "Al Nusrah", "Al Qaida in the Maghreb," on and on, are all the same. The hierarchy that runs it from the Sunni Gulf States is the same, the methodology is the same, the utter inhuman cruelty of killing innocents is the same, the religious rationale is the same, on and on and on. 
However, it should be understood that the Shi'ites of Iran run a separate chain of command, with separate murderers, etc. We have two fanatical enemies, both based in the war verses of the Koran,  but they hate each other to death. Donald Trump has just exploited that split between mass murderers hailing from Sunni Islam, and the mass murderers coming from Shi'te Islam. Trump is now in a formal alliance with the Saudis (and Israelis, and other Sunni Gulf States) against Iran, the Shiite head of the monster. 
During WW I the British brought the Saudis to power in order to drive out the Ottoman Turks. British agent "Lawrence of Arabia" (T.E. Lawrence) convinced the Arab speakers of the Arabia desert to rebel against the Turks, supplying them with British arms and advice. 
Lawrence of Arabia described the exact tribal war activities we see today in ISIS, including male rape. The Brits then brought the Saudi tribe to power.
Saudi Arabia is always on the edge of collapse, because it is not a modern nation, but a desert tribal federation. 
The war theology of desert Islam has been well-described by now, in excellent, scholarly sources freely available on the web.
In human tribal history, war theologies are not unusual. Japanese State Shinto, which led to WW II, was based on Bushido a debased version of the Samurai code. The Teutonic Knights were a similar war cult that eventually led to Bismarck's Prussia, which then forced the unification of the German-speaking provinces in the 19th century in a single, top-down controlled Reich. Hitler's war started as a revenge for losing World War I. Hitler came to power by peddling the "stab-in-the-back" myth to explain Austro-Hungarian defeat in WWI. 
Human tribal warfare is very common, as shown by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, based on his field work with the Yanamamo of South America. In human tribal history, up to 30% of adult males die in intergroup violence. So war cults and martyrdom cults are part of human history. The Kim dynasty in North Korea has always prepared for and encouraged war. Today, the Iranian Muslims (Shi'a) constantly chant, "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizb’allah also raise their children to kill any designated enemy, preferably through martyrdom. Successful killer-martyrs are promised life eternal in Heaven, with all the virgins and all that. 
American liberals keep telling the world that such things could not exist, because people are fundamentally good. They are utterly ignorant, and "none so blind as will not see." 
What happened on 9/11?
The attackers commandeered civilian passenger planes, and suicidally flew them into the Twin Towers in Manhattan; a third passenger plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth airplane crashed when its passengers heroically rebelled against the throat-cutting murderers and crashed in Pennsylvania. These assaults count as the biggest enemy attack on American civilians in history. In the Geneva Conventions, the politically motivated murder of civilians is treated even more seriously than surprise attacks on members of the military  in uniform. 
​These are the most likely hypotheses based on the evidence. But we will not know the full truth until the 28 censored pages from the 9/11 Report are published. The U.S. media, which evidently colluded in the greatest national security coverup, must now tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If any media outlet fails to cover this, American patriots must simply boycott them and their owners and sponsors. This is a question of national life or death. 
​2. Who did the coverup?
When the 9/11 attacks took place, none of our presidents, nor our enormous Deep Government, nor any major news outlets told the truth. 
As a result, even today, most Americans know little, except that fake "Islamophobia" is a terrible thing. Americans need to learn the truth and we must know the truth to understand that Jihad War that was launched against us on that second Day of Infamy. No nation can protect itself against future dangers if it only learns lies about previous acts of national aggression.  
​3. Who ran the coverup and why? 
The 9/11 attack was covered up. 
a. 9/11/ was not the first attack by Al Qaida and its militant networks against the Twin Towers. There was an amazingly similar truck bomb attack in 1993 by the same network, and some of the perps were caught and sentenced to jail terms. 
Andrew McCarthy of the National Review was the federal prosecutor in that case, and has written extensively about it. McCarthy has been one of the truth-tellers in a time of shameful lies and coverups. 
Bill and Hillary Clinton knew about the failed truck-bomb attack on the Twin Towers in 1993. We know that Bill was offered Bin Laden's head on a platter by four different Arab regimes, in secret, and that he refused four times. There is no question that the Clintons knew about the danger ahead of time, and utterly failed to pursue Bin Laden's AQ network when there was still time to knock them out. That abject cowardice is interpreted in war theologies like desert Islam as a plain and obvious sign of weakness, and it always increases the chance of more attacks. This is elementary logic about hyperaggressive regimes. 
​Instead of revealing and mobilizing American public opinion against a clear and obvious danger, the Clintons made money off it. The fact that Huma Abedin has become Hillary's closest friend and assistant over the last 20 years, and that Huma comes from a Muslim Brotherhood family that runs a "charity" in the UK to promote Jihad​, makes Huma, Hillary, and Bill criminally liable. They owe the American People an explanation, and instead, they have been taking tens of millions of dollars from known Jihad sources. 
We do not know whether Bush-Cheney knew about the danger of attack ahead of time, but it seems unlikely. The assault happened early in the Bush II administration, possibly before they were warned. 
We have to understand that after 9/11, every major intelligence agency in the world must have known who the perps were.
Former UCMC Commandant Jim Mattis has often said "There is always treachery." It is a basic rule of war in his lifelong teachings. The fact that Mattis is now SecDec shows where Trump is moving -- against Jihad, finally, after decades of Democrat and RINO betrayal of the American people in their greatest danger. 
If you do not believe we are in very great danger today, consider that Kim III now has ICBMs and nuclear weapons, and that Kim always works in collusion with Iranian Jihad. North Korea is thought to have gotten its latest mass murdering toy with cooperation from Tehran. Although Pakistan, which also follows a Jihadist war theology, is another candidate. 
On the honorable side, Admiral James Lyon (USN, Ret) has been publicly warning against the Jihad being obviously waged against the U.S. (and other "Christian" countries) by Jihad, both the Sunni and Shi'ite imperial aggressors. I believe Adm. Lyons risked his life to expose the truth, the last time at the Press Club in Washington, DC. 
I believe that Donald Trump guessed or knew the truth, as an international businessman, with his own intelligence sources. When Trump ran for office, the Deep State freaked out, in fear of exposure, along with the mass media, which also understood what was going on. The Democrats, the mass media, and the Deep State are basically one.
The Obama Administration was clearly penetrated by pro-Jihad, anti-American forces from the beginning. Obama all but publicly endorsed the Jihad against America. The flagrant use of an Arabic name, instead of his given name Barry Soetoro, is only one little sign. Another is the "disguised" Shahada ring he has worn ever since his trip to Pakistan as a college student with his Pakistani roommate. The Shahada is the oath of loyalty to Islam. Deception is a major war tactic in Islam. Yet a third sign of Obama's Jihad loyalties is his symbolically vital visit to a Muslim Mosque in the waning days of his presidency; the mosque had a prominent sign (shown in the New York Times) that "nothing is achieved without struggle." (The Arabic word for "struggle" is Jihad.) The Obama years constantly played in Muslim Jihadist hints, knowing that most Americans are utterly ignorant about all that. It is part of Obama's personality disorders.
Valerie Jarrett (Obama's "alter ego") was brought up in Iranian-style Islam (Shi'ite). She sold out U.S. and Western safety to Iran in the infamous nuclear agreement. 
OIL, OIL, OIL. 
The Saudis controlled OPEC, the oil cartel. That gave them worldwide price control, a sword hanging over the heads of all modern nations. Jimmy Carter's Arab oil embargo showed how much power the desert tribes of Arabia had. That is probably why they took the risk of assaulting the United States, and then serially Britain, France, Spain, on and on. 
Please note a few bottom lines: 
1. The U.S. was betrayed over and over and over again by our political class, by our Deep State, and by our media oligopoly. 
I think the Bushes are patriots, but they also have major oil connections. 
2. Donald Trump has been brilliant, and he certainly comes across as a genuine patriot. That is why the corrupt Deep State, and the even more corrupt Democrats and media, hate Trump. But slowly, slowly, the truth has been emerging in the Trump campaign, and then in the first Trump year. Without American leadership against evil, the world is full of cowards and traitors. 
3. Saudi Arabia has now lost control of the price of oil. Trump's vigorous opening up of U.S. energy has made a huge difference, because now we have the biggest clout over the world price. That was a very deliberate move, previously sabotaged by environmental fanatics who were probably bought off by both kinds of Muslim oil regimes. 
So yes, oil was a big part of the picture, but with the advent of shale exploitation around the world, plus the American resurgence in domestic energy production, we now have the upper hand. 
September 11, 2017

Who are our Real Enemies?

A good novel allows readers to learn and question, a gateway to world events. Such is the case with Vince Flynn’s Enemy Of The State by Kyle Mills. Flynn warned Americans on the dangers of Islamic terrorism in his first CIA operative Mitch Rapp book, Transfer of Power, published in 1999. This was two years before 9/11. Fast-forward eighteen years and Rapp books still discuss the dangers of jihadists. Mills took the torch from the late Vince Flynn, and has written a gripping novel about the Saudi involvement with terrorism. This is where fiction blends with reality.
Mills noted, “I thought about the redacted section from the 9/11 report that possibly showed the Saudi involvement. After reading the book people will understand I am not a big fan of the Saudis. Historically we have overlooked a lot of what they do in order to keep alive our strategic relationship. They not only support terrorism, but the schools that teach it. There is not much civil liberties and human rights there. I always wanted to see them slapped down and I enjoyed watching Mitch do it.”
It is rumored that this portion of the report details contacts between Saudi officials and some of the September 11 hijackers, checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers, and the discovery of a telephone number in an Al Qaeda militant’s phone book that was traced to a corporation managing an Aspen Colorado, home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The document is harsh in its criticism of Saudi efforts to undermine American attempts to dismantle Al Qaeda in the years before the September 11 attacks. Moreover, it portrays the F.B.I as generally in the dark about the maneuverings of Saudi officials inside the United States during that period.
In Enemy of The State, the CIA operative Mitch Rapp is quoted, “How many times are we going to have to go through this with them? We let them off the hook for the most deadly terrorist attack in US history and now here we go again.” It sure seemed that way when President Obama bowed before the Saudi King Abdullah at the opening of the G20 meeting in London in 2009.
Even President Trump seemed to be softening on his view of the Saudis. His speech in Saudi Arabia this May called them friends and allowed them to buy a $110-million-dollar defense purchase. This is a far cry when during the 2016 campaign he called on them to provide troops and funds to fight ISIS.
A powerful quote in the book shows the two sides of the Saudi regime, “It was a country with sufficient resources to provide prosperous lives for its citizens and to be a force of good throughout the region. Instead, these resources had been used to enrich a handful of monarchs and to promote the cycle of violence and misery that the Middle East was currently mired in.”
On the one hand it appears that they are now committed to fighting terrorism. Isobel Coleman, a Saudi expert for the Council on Foreign Relations, felt they had a change of heart. She noted, “For a long time the Saudi state encouraged Saudi men to fight Jihad. It was a heroic thing to do.  The Saudis had a profound change after they had to deal with internal terrorism.”
During the May speech, President Trump announced Saudi cooperation to fight terrorism, “Muslim nations must be willing to take on the burden if we are going to defeat terrorism and send its wicked ideology into oblivion. The first task in this joint effort is for your nations to deny all territory to the foot soldiers of evil. Every country in the region has an absolute duty to ensure that terrorists find no sanctuary on their soil… I am proud to announce that the nations here today will be signing an agreement to prevent the financing of terrorism called the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center, co-chaired by the United States and Saudi Arabia, and joined by every member of the Gulf Cooperation Council.”
Yet, on the other hand, Saudi Arabia is still denying any involvement in the September 11th attacks even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. They even threatened to sell off $750 billion in U.S. assets if Congress passes legislation allowing them to be sued for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a move that could destabilize the U.S. dollar.
Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, says ISIS "is a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money, and Saudi organizational support." Graham went on to say that ISIS represents a form of Wahhabi ideology, in which the monarchy has lost control. He believes it is a cancer that now threatens the kingdom, and that in order to stop ISIS the ideology must be dried up at the source.
Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, wrote, ”The Saudi government has given over its textbooks to the clerical Wahhabi extremists that it partners with to maintain control of the country.” She explained, each year, these textbooks speak of direct religious hatred, violence and indoctrinate a war mentality. Yet, their role in advancing Islamist extremist ideology has not been taken seriously as a U.S. national security concern. Since 9/11, regardless of which party is in power, the State Department has barely raised the issue and at times has even worked to cover up their toxic content.
As President Trump stated, "Muslim nations must be willing to take on terrorism and send its wicked ideology into oblivion… Terrorists do not worship God, they worship death.” Enemy Of The State shows how important it is for the U.S. to make sure the Saudis continue to hold up their end of the relationship by not promoting hatred against the West and stamping out the supporters of terrorism. In a sense the book is a reminder to Americans that September 11th should never be forgotten.
The author writes for American Thinker. She has done book reviews, author interviews, and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles.
OBAMA AND HIS SAUDIS PAYMASTERS… Did he serve them well?
Malia, Michelle, Barack and the College Admissions Scandal https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/03/malia-michelle-barack-and-college.html

Michelle was the next to attend Harvard, in her case Harvard Law School. “Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen in Barack and Michelle, “Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.”

GOOGLE WHAT THE OBOMB DID FOR HIS SAUDIS PAYMASTERS

Barack Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get Obama into Harvard.

“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years." MATTHEW VADUM

THE OBAMA MARXIST-MUSLIM BANKSTER-FUNDED THIRD TERM for life:

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html

 

"Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communist background in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview.  Another Kengor article describes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama.  Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power." Karin McQuillan
*
"We know that Obama and his inner circle have set up a war room in his D.C.

home to plan and execute resistance to the Trump administration and his legislative

agenda.  None of these people care about the American people, or the fact that

Trump won the election because millions of people voted for him."  

Patricia McCarthy / AMERICAN THINKER.com