HAVE LOOTED THE COUNTRY AS MUCH AS THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/bush-family-mourns-hw-bush-man-who-did.html
The perilous ramifications of the September 11 attacks on the United States are only now beginning to unfold. They will undoubtedly be felt for generations to come. This is one of many sad conclusions readers will draw from Craig Unger's exceptional book House of Bush House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. As Unger claims in this incisive study, the seeds for the "Age of Terrorism" and September 11 were planted nearly 30 years ago in what, at the time, appeared to be savvy business transactions that subsequently translated into political currency and the union between the Saudi royal family and the extended political family of George H. W. Bush.
Scores killed in Saudi-led airstrikes, highlighting US-Saudi war crimes
The last few days have seen a sharp escalation in the number of airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition against its impoverished, southern neighbour Yemen, with a series of horrific attacks on civilian infrastructure and buildings that have played no part in the seven-year-long war. The attacks amount to crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
On Friday, a Saudi airstrike on a detention center in Saada, northern Yemen, housing African migrant workers transiting through Yemen to Saudi Arabia, killed at least 82 people and wounded 266 more, with the number of casualties expected to climb as paramedics dig through the rubble.
A separate attack on a telecommunications center in the port city of Hodeidah shut down the country’s internet and killed three children playing nearby. Netblocks, which monitors internet blockages, described Yemen as experiencing “a nation-scale collapse of internet connectivity,” while the aid agency, the Norwegian Refugee Council, described the strike as “a blatant attack on civilian infrastructure that will also impact our aid delivery.”
Earlier this week, the UN said that this month’s violence could soon surpass that witnessed in December, when 358 civilians were killed or injured, as a result of an alarming number of airstrikes, drones and rockets used against civilians and non-military targets. According to the humanitarian aid organization Save The Children, the last three months of 2021 witnessed a 60 percent increase in civilian casualties.
There has been ferocious fighting in the Marib and Shabwa districts in southern Yemen, the last regional stronghold of the Saudi-backed government and location of most of the country’s oil reserves, as the Houthis reached the outskirts of Marib city. Its fall would signify the definitive end of the regime headed by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who long ago fled to Riyadh. In the last few days, pro-Hadi fighters, aided by scores of Saudi airstrikes and UAE-funded and trained proxies, including the Giants Brigade, have pushed back the Houthis, killing hundreds of Houthi fighters. This in turn prompted the Houthis to launch a drone attack on Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), on Monday that killed three people and wounded six.
On Tuesday, Saudi air strikes killed 20 people, including several civilians, in the capital and largest city Sanaa, where Houthi websites show horrifying scenes of women, children and the elderly alongside ruined homes, hospitals and clinics without medication and operating theaters lit by flashlights because there is no electricity. Other strikes on water treatment facilities have left more than 120,000 people in the capital without access to clean drinking water.
None of these atrocities could have been carried out without the fighter jets, bombs, weaponry, materiel, training, maintenance and logistical support, including targeting intelligence and aerial refuelling for Saudi planes, supplied by the US and UK. Washington and London have backed the Saudi-led coalition in its onslaught which began in 2015, providing it with political and diplomatic cover at the UN.
While President Joe Biden lifted the Houthis’ designation as a “foreign terrorist organization” and made a vague declaration shortly after taking office last year that he would end “American support for offensive operations in the war,” US support for Riyadh and the war has continued unabated. The Biden administration refused to order any sanctions whatsoever against Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the savage assassination and butchering of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018, despite possessing conclusive evidence of his role. Last November, Biden approved a $650 million weapons sale to Riyadh that included 280 AIM-120C air-to-air missiles for use by Saudi Arabian fighter jets.
On Wednesday, Biden said that ending the seven-year war was “going to be very difficult,” which was as good as saying that he would back Riyadh and Abu Dhabi come what may. He went further, adding that he was considering re-designating the Houthis as an international terrorist organization, an act tantamount to starving the people of Yemen into submission, most of whom live in Houthi-controlled areas, since it would make it almost impossible for humanitarian aid to reach the country.
On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister to emphasize “the US commitment to help Gulf partners improve their capabilities to defend against threats from Yemen.”
Saudi Arabia—with the help of its regional allies—launched an air, land and sea assault on Yemen in March 2015, following an uprising by rebels led by the Ansar Allah/Houthi movement that toppled the Hadi government, to restore its puppet to power. The ongoing war is part of the House of Saud’s efforts to maintain the rule of the Gulf despots and their allies across the peninsula amid seething social tensions that came to a head in the Arab Spring of 2011.
Since then, Yemen has fragmented amid fighting by numerous competing militias, whose alliance and loyalties have repeatedly changed: the north and parts of the south are controlled by the Houthis; the southwest is under the control of the UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC); and the south and east are under the control of the Saudi-backed government, leading to open warfare between the local allies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Saudi-led war had by the end of 2021 killed 377,000 people both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease, according to the UN. Four million people have been forced to flee their homes. At least 75,000 children under the age of five have died of starvation, while the world’s worst cholera epidemic in modern times has infected 2.5 million and killed more than 4,000.
The war has crippled Yemen’s economy, with the central bank split between the rival authorities in Sanaa and Aden, as the rival powers struggle for control over trade flows and fuel taxation. The collapse of the riyal’s value in nominally government-controlled areas has pushed the price of imported goods such as food and fuel beyond the reach of most people. As a result, the UN has described the war as causing the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
The naval blockade mounted by the UAE with US naval support with the aim of starving the Yemeni population into submission has compounded the devastating impact of the hundreds of thousands of Saudi airstrikes. Nearly 80 percent of Yemen’s 30 million population are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance or protection for their survival.
Last November, the UN said that five million people are on the brink of famine, with almost 50,000 already experiencing famine-like conditions. Nearly 2.3 million children under age five, the highest number ever recorded, are at risk of acute malnutrition. Four out of five children are in need of humanitarian assistance, 400,000 are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and two million are out of school. Last month, the World Food Programme said it was “forced” to cut aid to Yemen due to a lack of funds and warned there would be a surge in hunger in the coming months.
It is clear that the recent US-backed airstrikes are but the prelude to a total all-out war without even a passing nod to international law prohibiting attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and crimes against humanity to regain control of Yemen. Yet the response—or to be more precise the silence—of the major powers is striking. No government will call what has happened by its rightful name: a war crime. There is at best merely some tut-tutting over the dreadful scenes of mass carnage and suffering.
While Blinken had condemned the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Monday, there was no comment from the State Department about Friday’s Saudi-led attacks on Yemen.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, simply issued a bland statement in response to Friday’s attacks, saying “The escalation needs to stop.” He added that the airstrikes, as well as others in different parts of the country, had resulted in child casualties and pointed out that “attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, are prohibited by international humanitarian law.”
The media’s hypocrisy and cynicism know no bounds. The filthy pro-imperialist press remains silent about the crimes committed by US and UK allies in Yemen, as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—while raising a furor over US and UK reports, without a shred of evidence, that Moscow is planning to stage a “false-flag” operation that will then be used to justify invading Ukraine. In reality, this is just a cover for precisely such an operation by Ukrainian special forces, trained by US military advisers working inside the country, for an attack on Russia.
The reasons the House of Saud gets a free pass are clear. It is a key market for US arms and plays a vital role on behalf of US imperialism in suppressing the working class in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region and supporting Washington’s domination in the resource-rich Middle East. It has allied with Tel Aviv in an anti-Iranian axis that threatens to push the region into another catastrophic war. The only answer to this is for the working class to unite across borders in a struggle to take power and disarm the purveyors of death and destruction by means of socialist revolution.
Saudi monarchy executes 81 men in one day: Medieval barbarism from top US ally in Mideast
In a brutal act of mass murder, the US-backed Saudi monarchy executed 81 men Saturday, the largest such massacre in the history of the kingdom. The Saudi government did not say how the executions were carried out, but beheading is the method it usually employs against its victims. Seven of those executed were Yemenis, one was Syrian, and the rest were Saudi citizens.
The barbaric action received only perfunctory attention in the American media, in sharp contrast to the saturation coverage of every alleged atrocity carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine. The White House and State Department did not issue any public statements.
While the Saudi Ministry of Interior claimed that the capital crimes for which the 81 had been executed included terrorism and “multiple heinous crimes that left a large number of civilians and law enforcement officers dead,” it gave no details of the alleged offenses or name any of the supposed victims killed by those executed.
The death toll was largest in a single day of executions since the bloodstained kingdom was founded by Ibn Saud in 1932, when he united the Arabian Peninsula in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I by British and French imperialism.
The largest previous mass execution came in 1980, when 63 men were put to death after Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in an effort to overthrow the regime. In 2016, the monarchy executed 47 people, including the Shi’ite Muslim leader Nimr al-Nimr, to suppress political opposition in the eastern provinces, largely populated by the Shi’ite minority.
Similar political considerations were apparently involved in Saturday’s bloodbath, as Shi’ite young men were the majority of those executed. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the real ruler of Saudi Arabia under the nominal reign of his senile, 85-year-old father King Salman—has focused internal repressive measures on Shi’ite opposition, portraying all dissidents as agents of Iran.
The regime dropped the death penalty for drug offenses in 2019, resulting in a sharp fall in state killings in 2020. This underscores the fact that Saturday’s mass execution, which produced a greater death toll in a single day than during all of 2020 or 2021, was for political offenses.
The Ministry of Interior issued a lurid statement portraying the victims as linked to foreign terrorist groups, including ISIS and Al Qaeda (both of them past beneficiaries of Saudi government support), who targeted government officials and “vital economic sites,” killed police and planted land mines, all without any evidence. The ministry did not even bother to present “confessions” extracted from the prisoners.
Some prisoners were said to be linked to the Houthis, the Yemeni group that overthrew a Saudi-backed regime and has been fighting a protracted war against Saudi military intervention in that country since 2015.
Human rights groups, including those formed by Saudi dissidents in exile, condemned the executions and said that the majority of the victims were from the brutally oppressed Shi’ite minority in the eastern region.
Reprieve, an advocacy group that tracks Saudi executions, said in a statement, “The world should know by now that when Mohammed bin Salman promises reform, bloodshed is bound to follow,” adding, “We fear for every [prisoner] following this brutal display of impunity.”
The statement noted the upcoming visit of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Riyadh, “to beg for Saudi oil to replace Russian gas,” and pointed to the contrast between US and European denunciation of Russian actions in Ukraine and “rewarding those of the crown prince.”
The Iran-based Shi’ite news aggregator Ahlul Bayt News Agency (ABNA) reported that those killed in the mass executions included “41 from the peace protest movement in Al-Ahsa and Qatif [eastern Saudi Arabia], under the false accusation of committing ‘terrorist’ acts,” and accused the Saudi regime of “committing more crimes against innocent people, exploiting the so-called war on terror and making use of the current international situation, where the world is preoccupied with what is happening in Ukraine, to carry out a horrific massacre against a group of young people who only exercised their legitimate right of expressing their right to freedom.”
The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights said that in the cases it had been able to document, the charges involved “not a drop of blood,” even under the rules laid down by the Saudi monarchy to establish criteria justifying executions. The nature of the charges in many of the cases could not be determined because of judicial secrecy and intimidation of family members of those put to death.
The group said it had documented cases in which prisoners had been tortured, held incommunicado and denied access to lawyers, despite the official claims that all the victims had full access to legal defense.
Ali Adubusi, the head of the group, said in a statement: “These executions are the opposite of justice. Some of these men were tortured, most trials were carried out in secret. This horrific massacre took place days after Mohammed bin Salman declared executions would be limited. It is the third such mass killing in the seven-year reign of King Salman and his son.”
Adubusi was referring to the long interview with the crown prince published in The Atlantic last week, one of the most shameful efforts to glorify the Saudi butcher. Bin Salman is portrayed in the article as an autocratic but liberal reformer who seeks to put an end to mass executions.
Such groveling—once the province of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and other admirers of brute force—has been out of favor in the American corporate press since the crown prince was publicly linked to the killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a regular op-ed contributor of the Washington Post. Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018, by a hit squad dispatched by bin Salman.
The Saudi regime has been emboldened by the US-led war hysteria over Ukraine, not only to intensify its internal repression, but also to step up its near-genocidal war in Yemen. The assault on Yemen which began in 2015 has driven millions to the brink of starvation, creating what international agencies have characterized as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 377,000 dead. The US government has been the principal enabler of these attacks, providing targeting information and replenishing Saudi weapons stockpiles.
According to a report Sunday in the Wall Street Journal, Saudi-led forces in Yemen carried out more than 700 airstrikes in February, the most since 2018, killing hundreds of Yemeni civilians. Most of the bombing raids have been focused on the oil-rich Marib area, where a Houthi offensive threatens to take the last significant portion of northern Yemen still under control of the Saudi puppet regime of ousted president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-murdering-muslims-saudis-and-george.html
BEHIND THE SAUDIS INVASION IS THE BUSH FAMILY'S HALF-CENTURY AND TWO WAR DEALS WITH THE SAUDIS.
FOLLOW SAUDIS MONEY INTO THE BUILDING OF THE PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES OF BUSH, CLINTON AND OBAMA AND THE FUNDING OF THE FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.
HAVE LOOTED THE COUNTRY AS MUCH AS THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/bush-family-mourns-hw-bush-man-who-did.html
The perilous ramifications of the September 11 attacks on the United States are only now beginning to unfold. They will undoubtedly be felt for generations to come. This is one of many sad conclusions readers will draw from Craig Unger's exceptional book House of Bush House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. As Unger claims in this incisive study, the seeds for the "Age of Terrorism" and September 11 were planted nearly 30 years ago in what, at the time, appeared to be savvy business transactions that subsequently translated into political currency and the union between the Saudi royal family and the extended political family of George H. W. Bush.
Saudis and UAE Won’t Lower Oil Prices Until Biden Helps Them With This Problem
Biden’s America is in free fall and the whole world knows it.
Mon Mar 14, 2022
America, in these halcyon days of Old Joe Biden’s foundering regime, is in free fall, and the whole world knows it. As PJM’s inimitable Stephen Green put it recently, “The alleged American president’s response to the Ukraine War has been so detrimental to America’s own interests that everyone sees him as weak. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that two of the Middle East’s richest petrostates wouldn’t even take Biden’s call,” that is, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The reasons for the unprecedented snub are clear: the Saudis and the UAE know that Biden is not a serious character, and they also know that his handlers are not likely to give him the one thing they want most from the United States: help against Iran.
Old Joe was trying to get in touch with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, both of whom are the de facto rulers of their respective countries, to try to get some relief for skyrocketing gas prices. The UK’s Daily Mail reported that “as oil prices push over $130 a barrel for the first time in almost 14 years, the two Gulf countries are the only major oil producers that can pump millions more barrels of more oil to calm the crude market at a time when American gasoline prices are at high levels.”
They’re the only major oil producers who can help, but they won’t, at least not until they get some assistance from Old Joe regarding Yemen. In Yemen, the Iran-backed Shi’ite Houthis are waging jihad against the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Biden’s handlers, anxious to replicate Barack Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal, are making concession after concession to the Iranian mullahs. The Saudis and the UAE have noticed and want Biden to play ball with them before they will consider lowering oil prices.
Saudi Arabia can hardly be classified as a totally reliable ally of the United States, particularly given lingering questions about the extent of its involvement at the highest levels in the 9/11 jihad attacks. However, it is a notable bulwark against Iran in the region, and so many on both sides of the aisle see the utility of the American alliance with the kingdom. That group, however, apparently does not include Biden’s handlers. In September 2021, they quietly removed an advanced missile defense system from Saudi Arabia, heedless of the fact that the Saudis were suffering ongoing air attacks from the Houthis in Yemen.
This was yet another attempt to appease the mullahs in Tehran. The Saudi Defense Ministry shrugged it off, saying its relationship with the U.S. was “strong, longstanding and historic,” and adding: “The redeployment of some defense capabilities of the friendly United States of America from the region is carried out through common understanding and realignment of defense strategies as an attribute of operational deployment and disposition.” However, the former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services, Prince Turki al-Faisal, sounded a dissenting note, saying: “I think we need to be reassured about American commitment. That looks like, for example, not withdrawing Patriot missiles from Saudi Arabia at a time when Saudi Arabia is the victim of missile attacks and drone attacks — not just from Yemen, but from Iran.”
In the context of all this, it is important to remember what Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on November 5, 2020: that “the next U.S. administration will surrender to the Iranian nation.” This wasn’t just tough talk. In light of Biden’s handlers’ apparent willingness to give the mullahs all they want and more, it was a sober assessment of the geopolitical situation.
And now it is bearing bitter fruit. Biden and the U.S. are in this bind all because Biden’s handlers wanted to vindicate Obama and discredit Trump. Obama’s ridiculously weak Iran nuclear deal was his cornerstone foreign policy achievement, but then Trump skewered it — correctly — as the worst deal any American administration has ever concluded, and got us out of it. Now Biden’s handlers are so desperate to shore up Obama’s sagging legacy that they’re willing to turn their backs on our allies and empower an enemy rogue state that chants “Death to America” to do it. When you’re taking out a second mortgage to pay for a tank of gas, you can thank Old Joe for doing everything he had to do to get his Iran deal.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Those terrorists who overstayed their visas include:
· Hani Hasan Hanjour from Saudi Arabia
· Nawaf al-Hamzi from Saudi Arabia
· Mohamed Atta from Egypt
· Satam al-Suqami from Saudi Arabia
· Waleed al-Shehri from Saudi Arabia
· Marwan al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates
· Ahmed al-Ghamdi from Saudi Arabia
Images of 9/11: A Visual Remembrance
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/11/images-911-visual-remembrance/
Judge orders testimony from Saudi officials in suit over involvement in 9/11 attacks
Chief Investigative Correspondent,
On the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a federal judge directed the Saudi Arabian government to make as many as 24 current and former officials available for depositions about their possible knowledge of events leading up to the airplane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans. Those officials include Prince Bandar, the former ambassador to the United States, and his longtime chief of staff.
The order was immediately hailed by families of the 9/11 victims as a milestone in their years-long effort to prove that some Saudi officials were either complicit in the attacks or aware of the kingdom’s support for some of the hijackers in the months before they hijacked four American airliners and crashed three of them into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.
A fourth plane, whose presumed target was the U.S. Capitol, was commandeered by passengers and crashed in Shanksville, Pa., where President Trump and possibly Joe Biden are expected at memorial ceremonies Friday .
“This is a game changer,” Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Towers and who serves as a spokesman for the families, said of the ruling by Federal Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in New York. “This is the most significant ruling we’ve had to date in this lawsuit. And to have this on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, you couldn’t script this any better. The families are elated.”
The effect of the ruling may depend on the willingness of the Saudi government to make its citizens available for testimony — especially since it includes some high-ranking figures who no longer hold official positions and therefore cannot be compelled to testify. But any open defiance of the court ruling by the Saudis, or resistance from some of the figures named, could further exacerbate a relationship that has already been strained by the 2018 Saudi assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi — an act the CIA has concluded was likely ordered by the country’s de factor ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The question is especially fraught for Bandar, a member of the Saudi royal family who for years maintained a close relationship with senior U.S. government officials (earning him the nickname “Bandar Bush” because of his ties to the Bush family) and whose daughter, Princess Reema bint Bandar, serves as the current Saudi ambassador in Washington. “If he chooses to thumb his nose at a U.S. court, you better believe there will be political fallout from that,” said Eagleson.
A lawyer for the Saudis did not respond to a request for comment Thursday night, and no evidence has surfaced in the case that establishes Bandar had personal knowledge of what the Saudi hijackers were up to. But during his tenure in Washington, from 1983 to 2005, he oversaw a sprawling embassy staff including some, especially those with responsibilities for Islamic affairs, who have been identified in recently surfaced FBI documents as suspects who may have helped provide support for the hijackers in the United States.
The question of possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks by Saudi officials has been a subject of intense debate for years, dividing officials within the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community. The Saudis have consistently denied any connection to the 9/11 hijackers, telling the New York Times and ProPublica in January: “Saudi Arabia is and has always been a close and critical ally of the U.S. in the fight against terrorism.”
But lawyers for the families of the 9/11 victims have been conducting a painstaking investigation that has developed a circumstantial case that two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, received financial and other support from individuals associated with the Saudi government after they arrived in the U.S. after attending an al-Qaida planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
As reported by Yahoo News last May, previously undisclosed FBI documents show that a foreign ministry official within the Saudi Embassy, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who had duties overseeing the activities of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, had repeated contacts with two figures at the heart of the case and was even suspected of directing them to assist the hijackers. One was Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi Islamic Affairs official and radical cleric who served as the imam of the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles and met with the two hijackers there. The other was Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent who directly helped the hijackers, finding them an apartment, lending them money and setting them up with bank accounts, after they flew into Los Angeles airport on Jan. 15, 2000.
Al-Jarrah, who until last year served in the Saudi Embassy in Morocco, is among the current and former officials named in the order by Netburn, directing the Saudis to make available for testimony. Al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi were also cited.
But significantly, the list includes other high-ranking royals who still serve in the government, including Saleh bin Abdulaziz, who served as Minister of Islamic Affairs at the time and, according to the judge’s ruling, extended al-Thuimairy’s time in the United States and promoted him.
In her discussion of Bandar, Judge Netburn noted that lawyers for the Saudi government had persuasively argued that no documents show that he directly oversaw the work of al-Jarrah and al-Thumairy in the United States. But, she added, court documents obtained during the course of discovery — much of which remain under seal — “indicates that Prince Bandar likely has firsthand knowledge … [of] the role that al-Thumairy was assigned by the Kingdom and the diplomatic cover” provided to him.
The judge also authorized the deposition of Ahmed al-Qattan, Bandar’s longtime chief of staff, noting that court documents show that he “likely has unique firsthand knowledge of al-Jarrah and al-Thumairy’s relevant pre-9/11 activity and any post-9/11 ratification of their conduct.”
Video: Helping Saudis Slip Away
The highly disturbing facts about an eerie evacuation right after 9/11.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/video-helping-saudis-slip-away-frontpagemagcom/
Wed Sep 16, 2020
Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram: @JamieGlazov, Parler: @JamieGlazov and Twitter: @JamieGlazov.
With the 19th anniversary of 9/11 having just passed, Frontpage Mag editors have deemed it vital to run the special Glazov Gang episode in which Clare Lopez discusses Helping Saudis Slip Away, unveiling the highly disturbing facts about an eerie evacuation right after 9/11.
Don’t miss it!
And make sure to watch our 2-Part-Special with Clare on Post-9/11: 9/11 Came From Riyadh & Tehran and Osama’s Post-9/11 Safe Haven in Iran.
[1] 9/11 Came From Riyadh & Tehran.
[2] Revealed: Osama’s Post-9/11 Safe Haven in Iran.
Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram: @JamieGlazov, Parler: @JamieGlazov and Twitter: @JamieGlazov.
Saudi Arabia puts 81 to death in its largest mass execution
https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-arabia-says-executed-81-133114120.html
JON GAMBRELL
Sat, March 12, 2022, 5:31 AM·5 min read
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history.
The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam's holiest site.
It wasn't clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world's attention remained focused on Russia's war on Ukraine — and as the U.S. hopes to lower record-high gasoline prices as energy prices spike worldwide. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly plans a trip to Saudi Arabia next week over oil prices as well.
The number of death penalty cases being carried out in Saudi Arabia had dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, though the kingdom continued to behead convicts under King Salman and his assertive son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Related video: British PM to visit Saudi Arabia after kingdom executes 81 people
Saudi Arabia: Boris Johnson to visit for talks on oil - as kingdom announces execution of 81 people
Boris Johnson is poised to travel to Saudi Arabia next week for talks on oil as he attempts to move the UK away from dependence on energy supplies from Russia.
The state-run Saudi Press Agency announced Saturday's executions, saying they included those “convicted of various crimes, including the murdering of innocent men, women and children.”
The kingdom also said some of those executed were members of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and also backers of Yemen's Houthi rebels. A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Iran-backed Houthis since 2015 in neighboring Yemen in an effort to restore the internationally recognized government to power.
Those executed included 73 Saudis, seven Yemenis and one Syrian. The report did not say where the executions took place.
“The accused were provided with the right to an attorney and were guaranteed their full rights under Saudi law during the judicial process, which found them guilty of committing multiple heinous crimes that left a large number of civilians and law enforcement officers dead,” the Saudi Press Agency said.
“The kingdom will continue to take a strict and unwavering stance against terrorism and extremist ideologies that threaten the stability of the entire world,” the report added. It did not say how the prisoners were executed, though death-row inmates typically are beheaded in Saudi Arabia.
An announcement by Saudi state television described those executed as having “followed the footsteps of Satan” in carrying out their crimes.
The executions drew immediate international criticism.
“The world should know by now that when Mohammed bin Salman promises reform, bloodshed is bound to follow,” said Soraya Bauwens, the deputy director of Reprieve, a London-based advocacy group.
Ali Adubusi, the director of the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, alleged that some of those executed had been tortured and faced trials “carried out in secret.”
“These executions are the opposite of justice,” he said.
The kingdom's last mass execution came in January 2016, when the kingdom executed 47 people, including a prominent opposition Shiite cleric who had rallied demonstrations in the kingdom.
In 2019, the kingdom beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, most of them minority Shiites, in a mass execution across the country for alleged terrorism-related crimes. It also publicly nailed the severed body and head of a convicted extremist to a pole as a warning to others. Such crucifixions after execution, while rare, do occur in the kingdom.
Activists, including Ali al-Ahmed of the U.S.-based Institute for Gulf Affairs, and the group Democracy for the Arab World Now said they believe that over three dozen of those executed Saturday also were Shiites. The Saudi statement, however, did not identify the faiths of those killed.
Shiites, who live primarily in the kingdom's oil-rich east, have long complained of being treated as second-class citizens. Executions of Shiites in the past have stirred regional unrest. Saudi Arabia meanwhile remains engaged in diplomatic talks with its Shiite regional rival Iran to try to ease yearslong tensions.
Sporadic protests erupted Saturday night in the island kingdom of Bahrain — which has a majority Shiite population but is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, a Saudi ally — over the mass execution.
The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque remains a crucial moment in the history of the oil-rich kingdom.
A band of ultraconservative Saudi Sunni militants took the Grand Mosque, home to the cube-shaped Kaaba that Muslims pray toward five times a day, demanding the Al Saud royal family abdicate. A two-week siege that followed ended with an official death toll of 229 killed. The kingdom’s rulers soon further embraced Wahhabism, an ultraconservative Islamic doctrine.
Since taking power, Crown Prince Mohammed under his father has increasingly liberalized life in the kingdom, opening movie theaters, allowing women to drive and defanging the country's once-feared religious police.
However, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the crown prince also ordered the slaying and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, while overseeing airstrikes in Yemen that killed hundreds of civilians.
In excerpts of an interview with The Atlantic magazine, the crown prince discussed the death penalty, saying a “high percentage” of executions had been halted through the payment of so-called “blood money” settlements to grieving families.
“Well about the death penalty, we got rid of all of it, except for one category, and this one is written in the Quran, and we cannot do anything about it, even if we wished to do something, because it is clear teaching in the Quran,” the prince said, according to a transcript later published by the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al-Arabiya.
“If someone killed someone, another person, the family of that person has the right, after going to the court, to apply capital punishment, unless they forgive him. Or if someone threatens the life of many people, that means he has to be punished by the death penalty.”
He added: “Regardless if I like it or not, I don’t have the power to change it.”
___
Associated Press writer Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
___
Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.
Ethical Alternative? Boris May Beg Saudis to Boost Oil Supply Despite Mass Beheadings on Saturday
AYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images
13 Mar 20220
3:56
Prime Minister Boris Johnson may travel to Saudi Arabia next week to beg for increased oil production as sanctions restrict Russian exports, despite the dictatorship executing 81 people en masse on Saturday.
As governments across Europe struggle to secure supplies of oil and natural gas, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson is looking to the Islamic kingdom to replace oil supplies previously sourced from Russia.
This is despite the fact that the Saudis executed 81 people in a mass execution on Saturday.
People can be publicly executed for “crimes” including apostasy and sorcery under Islamic law in Saudi Arabia by medieval and even pre-medieval methods such as stoning, although the preferred method of execution is beheading with a scimitar.
According to Sky News, Prime Minister Johnson looks set to personally appeal to Saudi authorities for more oil sometime next week, and although Downing Street has apparently stressed that the trip is not yet confirmed, Conservative Party members have supposedly urged Johnson to push for increased supply.
Britain is currently facing a spiralling fuel crisis, with Sky reporting the price of petrol topping £1.60 a litre, or $7.87 a gallon, mainly as a result of ongoing international tensions with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia over the war in Ukraine.
While the United Kingdom is no doubt in need of alternative fuel sources to ease the burden on the British taxpayer, Johnson’s potential trip to Saudi Arabia is somewhat undermined by the sudden surge in executions within the country.
Saudia Arabia executed 81 people on Saturday for a variety of different alleged offences, ranging from murder to terrorism.
It marks the single biggest mass execution in modern Saudi history. It is likely most had their necks severed with a traditional sword, although execution by firing squad is also becoming popular in the kingdom due to a shortage of trained swordsmen to carry out the bloody work.
“These individuals, totalling 81, were convicted of various crimes including murdering innocent men, women and children,” the dictatorship’s interior ministry asserted when announcing the killings.
“Crimes committed by these individuals also include pledging allegiance to foreign terrorist organisations, such as ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Houthis.”
The Telegraph reports one expert as saying that the Saudis will use Johnson’s request for more oil to wring out concessions from Western nations.
“It is going to drag, drag the West along and use the high oil prices to extract some concessions and build leverage,” the publication reports Dr Sanam Vakil of Chatham House’s Middle East programme as saying.
Despite this, the fact Boris Johnson may be able to get an in-person audience with Saudi officials means he is doing far better than U.S. President Joe Biden, who has reportedly had his phone calls completely ignored by senior government members of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Biden had criticised both countries in the past over their human rights abuses, and — unlike Britain — suspended arms sales to them, in part because of reported war crimes in Yemen.
“Can you imagine? He phones them, and they don’t pick up,” said America talk show host Trevor Noah of the matter. “And you know what, you can say what you want, but this would have never happened to Donald Trump. Never.”
“No one was ever ignoring Donald Trump’s calls… because if you ignored Donald Trump’s calls, you didn’t know how he would respond,” Noah observed.
“Maybe he’d send an angry tweet, or maybe he’d just, like, ban your country from everything. You don’t know.”
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London
No comments:
Post a Comment