DID WE LEARN ANYTHING FROM 9/11?
Or are we still sleeping?
September 11, 2019
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Two things happened in 2001.
Islamic terrorists carried out their most successful attack on America with the murder of 2,977 people. And the number of immigrants obtaining permanent residency passed a million for the first time in a decade. Before 2001, a million plus was a streak that might linger for a few years before falling back.
These days it’s the new normal. Aside from one blip, we’ve been riding the million plus train for over a decade. The resistance to that trend is currently the one thing we seem to have learned from 9/11.
After decades of being massacred by terrorists who have come here as tourists, refugees and immigrants, we are finally trying to close the door on travelers from Islamic terrorist states.
And it only took 16 years.
That’s because learning nothing from the past has been our specialty.
"A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah,” The New York Times reported in 1997.
Four years earlier, Muslim terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center in an unsuccessful effort to bring down the towers. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh at the center of the terror plot, had urged, “We . . . have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The Koran says ‘to strike terror.’”
Mohammed T. Mehdi, the Muslim activist responsible for the flag of Islam flying at what would become Ground Zero, had been an adviser to Rahman. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had listed Mehdi as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the blind terror sheikh. And nevertheless, the flag flew.
Imam Sirraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the bombing, who had testified as a character witness for Rahman, had already become the first Muslim cleric to present an invocation prayer to the House of Representatives. He was introduced by Rep. Nick Rahall who had proposed the idea. The invocation included a Koranic curse aimed at Christians and Jews.
That same year, President George H.W. Bush had taped his own Eid message for Muslims.
In 1996, Hillary Clinton inaugurated the first Eid event at the White House. Capitol Hill politicos held their own Iftar event that year. Regular Islamic prayers began to be held on Capitol Hill in 1998. The State Department hosted its first Iftar event in 1999. So did the Pentagon. All of this is still going on.
Not only haven’t things gotten better since then, they’ve gotten much worse.
The height of our counterterrorism efforts took place after September 11 with Operation Green Quest. That was our last serious effort at cracking the infrastructure of Islamist terrorism in this country. These days counterterrorism mainly consists of informants and undercover operatives catching lone ISIS supporters before they carry out an attack. Going beyond that was unacceptable even before Obama.
Under Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood was in the White House and Hezbollah had a free hand.
The War on Terror also reached its height in the creative and relentless attacks on Al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11. But, before long, that campaign degenerated into nation-building, endless legal proceedings for captured terrorists in the Bush era, and feeding thousands of soldiers into a meat-grinder with restrictive rules of engagement and negotiations with the Taliban in the Obama era.
By 2003, our response to Islamic terrorism had reached its peak. It’s been downhill from there.
It took 4 years for the lessons of the World Trade Center bombing to be so thoroughly forgotten that an unindicted co-conspirator was able to get the flag of Islam flown at the site of the twin skyscrapers.
It took even less time for the lessons of 9/11 to fly away leaving behind hollow memorials.
After Qari Yasin, a top Al Qaeda terrorist, whose terror plots had killed U.S. Air Force Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez and Navy Cryptologic Technician Third Class Petty Officer Matthew J. O’Bryant, was taken out in an airstrike, there was no mention of the fallen American military personnel killed by his attacks.
Instead Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the point man for the tough bombing campaign against ISIS, declared, "The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice."
That was in 2017.
20 years after the flag of Islam flew at the World Trade Center, we were no longer killing Islamic terrorists to avenge our dead or even to defend ourselves, but to punish those who “defame Islam.”
Meanwhile, Kris Bauman, who had argued that, “the Obama Administration must find creative (but legal) ways to include Hamas in a solution” held down the position of Senior Director for Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian Affairs from 2017 to 2018 until John Bolton took over the National Security Council. These days, Bauman heads the Eisenhower Center at the Air Force Academy.
The problem is structural.
Our national security infrastructure and our entire strategic apparatus is run by people who think like Mattis and Bauman. It’s run by them under Democrat and Republican administrations. Their views represent the consensus that terrorism can’t be defeated, it can only be defused or appeased.
There’s been some debate over whether we should be negotiating with the Taliban.
We’ve been officially negotiating with the Taliban since at least 2013. That’s a long time to be holding talks when there’s nothing to actually talk about. We will eventually withdraw from Afghanistan. The Taliban will eventually take over Afghanistan. What then is there to talk to the Taliban about?
And yet our foreign policy apparatus insists that we can’t pull out until we get the Taliban to commit to respecting Afghanistan’s constitution. Why do we care about the Afghan constitution anyway? Did thousands of Americans really die in Afghanistan to uphold a constitution that upholds Islamic law?
Or did we begin this war to avenge our dead and to punish the perpetrators and their allies?
The debate over interventionism and appeasement has left September 11 behind. The interventionists insist that we have an obligation to spread democracy and the appeasers claim that we’re warmongers
Neither side likes this country very much. And neither side cares about what happened on this day.
If we are to have a meaningful strategy, it has to begin on a fall Tuesday. It has to start in the cockpit of one of the hijacked planes. It has to start with a prayer from a terrorist and from one of his victims.
“In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate,” a terrorist declares on the Flight 93 cockpit recording. That’s followed by the sounds of the terrorists assaulting a passenger.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “Oh God.”
Flight 93 is a reminder that we are a brave and courageous people. But that we have to wake up first.
And to wake up, we have to understand what it is we’re facing. On September 11, 2001, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and eventually millions of Americans were forced to wake up.
Some died. Most went back to sleep. And some still remember.
9/11 was neither a beginning nor an ending. The war we are in has gone on for over a thousand years. It might go on for another thousand making a mockery of the appeasers who lecture about “endless war.”
Wars go on for as long as one side is willing to fight them. The nightmarish reality is that the other side is willing to fight forever. That is a truth too troubling for most people to come to terms with.
But until we understand that, we will have learned absolutely nothing from September 11, 2001.
This is not WW2. It’s not the Cold War. It’s a clash of civilizations. Technology, jet planes and the internet, have allowed our civilizations to overlap each other. War is the inevitable result.
Immigration, not bullets and bombs, is the main weapon of a clash not between armies, but civilizations.
16 years later, we have only begun, not to fight, but to defend ourselves against a clash of civilizations.
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.”
*
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.
Target: New York
Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, Islamist extremism doesn’t make much news—but it’s not for lack of trying.September 10, 2019
New York
Public safety
Eighteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many Americans believe that the threat of Islamist terror is played out—but that’s only because our counterterrorism efforts have been so successful. Attempted terror attacks no longer make front-page headlines, but the list of foiled plots to kill American citizens is long and chilling. This past summer saw arrests of potential terrorists who would have killed dozens or hundreds of people if successful. On September 3, for example, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, also known as Suleiman Al-Amriki, with providing material support to ISIS. Asainov is accused of having been an ISIS sniper and weapons instructor. A naturalized U.S. citizen (he was born in Kazakhstan) who lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, Asainov traveled in late 2013 to Istanbul, a common entry point to Syria. There, he joined ISIS and rose through the ranks to become an “emir” in charge of weapons training. He tried to recruit other Americans to fight for ISIS in Syria. Asainov messaged a government informant, exclaiming in reference to ISIS, “We are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed!” He still yearned to die on the battlefield for jihad, Asainov told the informant.
Last month, Awais Chudhary was charged with plotting to stab New Yorkers in Queens. A 19-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan and raised in a middle-class neighborhood, Chudhary planned to attack pedestrians on a bridge over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade or at the World’s Fair Marina, both of which he had visited repeatedly to scout where he could kill the most people. He planned to record his attack to inspire others. He intended to use a knife, he told an agent, unless the agent could show him how to bomb a “mini-bridge over a busy road with many cars.” He was arrested en route to retrieve items he had ordered online for the assault—a tactical knife, a mask, gloves, and a cellphone with a chest and head strap to enable him to record his slaughter hands-free.
Also last month, prosecutors charged two women from Queens with planning to build bombs similar to those used in earlier terrorist attacks. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, both U.S. citizens and Queens residents, pleaded guilty to distributing information about how to make and use explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction. Between 2013 and 2015, the complaint states, they planned to build a bomb themselves, teaching each other chemistry and the electrical skills needed to create and detonate a deadly device. They also explored how to make plastic explosives and assemble a car bomb, bought and stored in their homes materials required for an explosive device—including propane gas tanks, soldering tools, car-bomb instructions, machetes, and several knives—and discussed similar devices used in past terrorist incidents, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. They researched potential targets, focusing on law enforcement and military installations. Velentzas favored attacks on government targets. In terrorist attacks, she said, “You go for the head.”
August also saw Azizjon Rakhmatov, a citizen of Uzbekistan and a New Haven resident, plead guilty to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS codefendants Abdurasul Juraboev and Akhror Saidakhmetov, who planned to travel to Syria to fight for the caliphate. Rakhmatov and another codefendant discussed providing their own money and raising more to cover Saidakhmetov’s travel expenses and to buy a weapon for him once he arrived in Syria. The day before Saidakhmetov’s scheduled departure, Rakhmatov transferred $400 into codefendant Akmal Zakirov’s bank account. Saidakhmetov and three accomplices have previously pled guilty to charges of material support for terrorism; all have been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
In July, officials arrested Delowar Mohammed Hossain at JFK Airport in Queens as he tried to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban. The complaint states that Hossain wanted to kill Americans, particularly members of the military stationed overseas.
In June, Mohamed Rafik Naji, having pled guilty in federal court in Brooklyn in February, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for trying to provide material support to ISIS by distributing its propaganda and messages on social media. By late 2014, Naji was a committed ISIS supporter, and in 2015 he traveled from New York to Yemen to join ISIS. After returning to the U.S., he continued praising ISIS and violent jihad. In July 2016, after the ISIS-inspired truck attack in Nice, France that killed scores of civilians, Naji told an informant that it would be easy to carry out a similar attack in Times Square: “[ISIS] want an operation in Times Square,” he said, “If there is a truck, I mean a garbage truck and one drives it there to Times Square and crushes them . . . Times Square day.”
Also in June, Ashiqul Alam, an assistant teacher in Queens and part-time IT expert at the Queens public library, was charged with “knowingly receiving two firearms with obliterated serial numbers in Brooklyn” as part of a plan to kill cops and civilians in Times Square. According to NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, Alam discussed guns, suicide vests, and hand grenades, and surveilled potential targets in New York. Between August 2018 and June of this year, he talked about buying firearms and explosives for an attack and conducted “recon” trips to Times Square, recording the area on his phone. He considered killing cops by using a suicide vest and obtaining AR-15 assault rifles. In April 2019, he had Lasik eye surgery so that he no longer needed glasses. “Let’s say we are in an attack, right, say that my glasses fall off,” he told an undercover cop. “What if I accidentally shoot you? You know what I mean. Imagine what the news channel would call me the ‘Looney Tunes Terrorist’ or the ‘Blind Terrorist.’” He later discussed buying grenades, because a grenade could “take out at least eight people.”
Most of these Islamist plots have received scant public attention, mainly because they were detected and prevented. John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, says that public concern about terrorism is now focused on the surge in domestic right-wing extremists. “Domestic terror blunts the impact of the [jihadi] plots that didn’t happen,” he told me. Miller is complacent about neither threat. Though New York has not suffered a right-wing-inspired mass shooting, hate crimes are up in the city. So is anti-Semitism. And Miller warns that the pace of jihadi plots is accelerating.
According to an NYPD intelligence estimate published last October, nine terrorist plots or attacks targeted New York City between 2001 and 2009. Since 2009, a total of 19 attacks were formulated—11 since ISIS declared a caliphate in 2014. The report notes that 13 of the 14 lone-actor terrorist attacks or plots in New York City have involved “Salafi-jihadist violent extremists.” The study predicts “with high confidence” that both trends—an acceleration in the rate of plots and attacks and the increasing dominance of lone actors inspired, but not directed by, foreign and domestic extremist organizations—“will continue over the next four years.”
“The reason there hasn’t been another 9/11 is not because of luck,” Miller says. Intensive national and international counterterrorism campaigns across three presidential administrations have degraded these groups’ ability to plan and carry out major attacks. At home, Miller added, the absence of successful attacks owed to what he called the “seamless partnership between the NYPD and the FBI.”
While President Trump has taken credit for having “destroyed” ISIS and its caliphate, once the size of Great Britain, and has often expressed a desire to bring most American troops home, terrorism experts warn that a complete military exit from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would be unwise. Just as President Obama’s premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 permitted ISIS to take hold and expand into the vacuum left there, the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the region would permit the Taliban, al-Qaida, and ISIS to reconstitute and regain their deadly reach. “The Taliban are far from defeated,” David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. Central Command and a former CIA director, asserted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. A premature withdrawal would risk the “re-establishment of a terrorist sanctuary” in which the Taliban and some 20 other foreign terrorist organizations could reconstitute, train recruits, and carry out terrorism abroad.
“Al Qaeda has seeded a global network that is competing with and complementing ISIS,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert based in Singapore. “Though its core has suffered, many of its leaders are alive,” he argues. “It has not disappeared but entered a new phase of expansion” through affiliates in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, and South Asia. ISIS, too, the “son of Al Qaeda,” he argues, may have lost territory and endured “command and control infrastructure losses,” but its murderous intent “remains known to its wilayats, networks, groups, and cells.” If either of their current leaders is killed, he warns, the two groups would likely unite and pose what he called “an unprecedented threat.” While the Trump administration has embraced containing China as its highest priority, “the real, ongoing threat to American and its allies remains ideological extremist terrorism,” Gunaratna maintains, calling the war against militant Islamic extremism a “generational” struggle.
Mitch Silber, a former NYPD director of intelligence and analysis, fears that Washington’s war fatigue, Trump’s desire to claim victory, and the lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with America’s Middle East wars endangers the U.S. “Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders and supporters have been killed, captured, and tens of thousands put in camps in Iraq,” he said. “But there is no post-hostilities plan to deal with this Islamist netherworld, those people in the camps. AQ and ISIS could easily regenerate in some form there.”
Failure to appreciate the nature of the militant Islamist threat puts New York, especially, at growing risk. “There is a temporary drop in their capability,” Silber said of the jihadi movement. “But there is no drop in intention among those who want to strike the U.S. And for them, New York will always remain a key target.”
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?
By James
Lewis
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?
By Elise Cooper
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.
TRUMP AND HIS SAUDIS
The Saudi Challenge
Jamal
Khashoggi's murder -- and no one now questions whether the Washington Post
contributor was killed by Saudi agents in the kingdom's consulate in Turkey --
has far-reaching implications for the Trump administration. President Donald
Trump appears to want to help sweep the incident under the rug, providing cover
for the Saudis' ludicrous suggestion that the killing was a rogue operation or
an interrogation gone awry. And he's enmeshed the highest officials of his
administration in the mess by sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh,
where the secretary was photographed, all smiles, sitting with Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman, who most likely ordered Khashoggi's murder. The
administration is giving itself little leeway to take serious measures to
protest the killing, signaling to the world that the U.S. cannot be counted on
to stand up against bloodthirsty autocrats, even when a U.S. resident and
member of the American press is the victim.
I doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message
he's sending. Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family,
have been his patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he
needed money. In the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht
so that the then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off
personal bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel,
one of Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of
his landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001. During
the campaign, the Trump Organization registered more than a half-dozen limited
liability companies in the kingdom, in anticipation of cashing in on Trump's
enhanced renown. When Trump actually won (which apparently he didn't think he
would at the time), someone must have explained he couldn't move ahead with new
business there as president, because he withdrew the registrations. Of course,
a little thing like benefiting from the office of the presidency hasn't stopped
the Trump Organization, run by the president's two eldest sons, from accepting
Saudi largesse since the election. With many Trump properties and brands losing
customers in today's highly polarized political atmosphere, Saudis are spending
lavishly on Trump properties in Washington, New York and even Chicago as many
others avoid them.
But
if Trump doesn't get why looking the other way when an American journalist is
tortured, beheaded and hacked to pieces by a team of Saudi government
operatives is bad, surely national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary
Pompeo do. Autocrats are stepping up their game around the world. Russian
President Vladimir Putin didn't hesitate to order a hit on British soil of an
ex-KGB agent and his daughter earlier this year. But the United Kingdom
responded quickly, kicking out Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions. The
United States followed suit, but only because Congress, not Trump, knew that to
do otherwise would have let down an ally and encouraged a despot. When asked in
a "60 Minutes" interview Sunday whether he believes that Putin was
involved in the poisoning and other assassinations, Trump's response was:
"Probably he is, yeah. ... But I rely on them. It's not in our
country."
The
Trump administration relies on Saudi Arabia, too. It is the enemy of our enemy
Iran, which, in political calculus, makes Saudis our "friends." But
even friends require reining in at times. And these friends need us more than
we need them. We are no longer dependent on oil imports; our oil reserves
surpass those of Saudi Arabia. Although Trump worries about losing that
promised $110 billion Saudi arms purchase he keeps touting (but which has yet
to materialize), the Saudis don't have anywhere else to go if they want to keep
their airplanes in the air. They are locked in by past purchases; no one else
can deliver the spare parts for U.S.-built weapons. As for the help in
challenging Iran, they have no choice there, either. Iran is far more a direct
threat to the kingdom than it is to the U.S. And as for their most crucial role
-- the war on Islamic terrorism -- the Saudis claim to fight terrorism but are
also a major source of funding for radical Islamic schools and mosques that
recruit terrorists around the world.
The
administration has only a short time to come up with a proper and proportionate
response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The president thinks Americans will
move on -- but his inaction makes the world a more dangerous place. And next
time, the attack just might be on American soil.
Trump
scrambles to cover for Saudi regime as crisis over Khashoggi murder mounts
By Barry
Grey
19 October 2018
Following US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s emergency talks in
Riyadh and Ankara, and amid mounting reports implicating Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, the Trump administration is scrambling to shield Washington’s closest
ally in the Arab World.
On Thursday, Trump continued to suggest that Prince Mohammed and
his father, King Salman, may have had nothing to do with the disappearance and
evident torture and murder of Khashoggi on October 2 in the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul. However, after being debriefed by Pompeo following the latter’s talks
with Prince Mohammed and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump told
reporters it appeared that Khashoggi was dead.
The official line is that Pompeo secured a pledge from the Saudi
leadership to hold accountable anyone found in the course of the regime’s own
investigation to have played a role in Khashoggi’s disappearance. On that
fraudulent basis, Pompeo advised Trump to give Riyadh several more days to
provide an accounting, after which the White House will decide its response.
Meanwhile, unnamed Turkish officials and the pro-Erdogan
newspaper Yeni
Safak reported Wednesday on the contents of what they claim is
an audio recording of the events that transpired in the Istanbul consulate
following Khashoggi’s entering the building on the afternoon of October 2. The
60-year-old self-exiled Saudi national and resident of Virginia in the US, who
went from being a regime insider to a Washington
Post columnist and critic of the new crown prince, ostensibly
went to the consulate to obtain documents in advance of his impending wedding
to a Turkish national. He never emerged from the consulate.
According to the Turkish accounts, he was almost immediately
attacked by a team of 15 men who had flown that day to Istanbul from Saudi
Arabia, brutally tortured, drugged, murdered, beheaded and dismembered. These
sources say his fingers were cut off, but do not stipulate whether that
occurred before or after he had expired. One of those reported to have been in
the group is a forensic doctor who carried a bone saw.
The Washington
Post on Wednesday published a detailed profile of the 15 men,
complete with photos and scans of travel documents. It reported that at least
nine of the men have ties to Saudi security. The New York Times reported
Wednesday that at least four are directly linked to the crown prince, having
traveled with him as part of his personal security detail.
The claim of Crown Prince Mohammed that he had no foreknowledge
of a plan to kill the former regime loyalist-turned critic is absurd on its
face. He is an absolute ruler in a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, and is
known to closely oversee the activities of his security apparatus and to be
personally extremely cruel.
Pompeo’s meetings on Tuesday with King Salman and Crown Prince
Mohammed were aimed at signaling continued US support while making a pretense
of seeking a full accounting of Khashoggi’s disappearance. The same is true of
his meeting the following day with Erdogan, at which he evidently did not ask
for a copy of the audio recording of the events inside the consulate.
For his part, the Turkish president has yet to publicly make any
accusation against the Saudi leadership or endorse the reports being leaked by
Turkish officials and the media. At odds with Riyadh over the Saudi regime’s
support for US-allied Kurdish forces in Syria, its backing for the el-Sisi
dictatorship in Egypt, and its lineup with Washington over Iran, Erdogan
appears nevertheless to be reluctant to sever relations with the oil-rich
Saudis and may be seeking to use Riyadh’s crisis as leverage in obtaining
concessions.
On Wednesday after meeting with Erdogan, Pompeo told reporters
on his plane back to the US: “I do think it’s important that everyone keep in
their mind that we have lots of important relations, financial relationships
between US and Saudi companies, government relationships, things that we work
on all across the world. The efforts to reduce the risk to the United States of
America from the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, Iran.
“We just need to make sure that we are mindful of that as we
approach decisions that the United States government will take when we learn
all of the facts.”
This amounts to an unwitting admission of the outright
criminality of both governments.
As the former CIA director and current secretary of state,
Pompeo’s reference to the “things we work on all across the world” includes
conspiring to strangle, destabilize and potentially wage war against Iran, in
alliance with Israel and most of the other Gulf oil sheikdoms.
These “things” also include the near-genocidal Saudi-led war in
Yemen, which has already killed some 50,000 men, women and children and
threatens another 14 million with starvation and deadly epidemics of cholera
and diphtheria. The Saudis could not carry out their relentless bombing and de
facto blockade of the Arab world’s poorest country without US arms, its mid-air
refueling of Saudi bombers, its provision of intelligence and help in selecting
targets and the assistance to its naval forces.
It is notable that in all of the US press commentary critical of
Trump and the Saudi crown prince, there is virtually no mention of the US role
in the slaughter in Yemen.
There is as well the collaboration between Washington and Riyadh
in suppressing the Palestinians and propping up Israel, and their joint support
for Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorists in the war for regime-change in Syria.
The US is particularly reliant on the Saudi monarchy at the
present moment, in advance of its November 5 deadline for imposing sanctions
against all Iranian exports. It is counting on Riyadh to open its oil spigot to
prevent a spike in oil prices as a result of a sharp reduction in Iranian oil
exports.
At the same time, the administration is coming under increasing
pressure, both internationally and at home, to distance itself from the crown
prince. It made a reluctant concession to this pressure on Thursday with the
announcement that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin would join the swelling
ranks of Western officials, bankers and media organizations that have announced
they will not attend next week’s international investors’ conference in Riyadh,
to be hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed.
Dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” the event is on the brink of
collapse. On Wednesday, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine
Lagarde pulled out. Businesses that have made similar announcements include
Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Viacom, BlackRock and Blackstone Group. CNN, the Financial Times, CNBC,
Nikkei and the New York
Times are among the media organizations that have withdrawn as
media sponsors.
The likely debacle of the investors’ conference will intensify
an already acute crisis facing the Saudi monarchy. The Wall Street Journal reported
Thursday that global investors are growing increasingly alarmed at what the
newspaper called Saudi Arabia’s “debt binge” in recent months. In the
two-and-a-half years since May 2016, the country has floated $68 billion in
dollar-denominated bonds and syndicated loans—up from zero.
In addition, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund took out its
first-ever bank loan last month, raising $11 billion. And the national oil
company Saudi Aramco plans to raise up to $50 billion.
Reflecting declining confidence in the regime, the cost of
insuring against Saudi default has risen by 30 percent since the disappearance
of Khashoggi, and even before the Khashoggi allegations, foreign direct
investment had fallen to historically low levels.
Also on Thursday, the Washington
Post published Khashoggi’s final column for the newspaper.
Introducing the piece, Global Opinions Editor Karen Attiah explained that
the Post had
received the column one day after Khashoggi’s disappearance, but had decided to
hold it in the hope that he would reemerge. In publishing the piece, the
newspaper acknowledged that the author had died.
The content of the column points to Khashoggi’s likely links to
sections of the US state and intelligence apparatus. A former aide to the Saudi
chief of intelligence and one-time ambassador to the US, Khashoggi had long
been known as an interlocutor between the Saudi regime and Western media and
government officials. He also had close ties to Osama bin Laden.
In his final column he compares the suppression of speech and
expression in the Arab world to the Soviet “Iron Curtain,” and calls for the
development of an “independent” news source in the Middle East modeled after
the cold war-era propaganda organ Radio Free Europe.
This would in part explain the furious reaction of Trump critics
in both political parties, the media and the intelligence establishment to the
administration’s efforts to alibi for the Saudi leadership. Obama’s CIA chief
John Brennan, for example, has repeatedly denounced Trump’s attempts to cover
for the regime and insisted that the crown prince personally ordered the murder
of Khashoggi
9/11 Mastermind, 4 Co-Conspirators Still Awaiting Trial 18 Years Since Attacks
5:22
The death penalty trial of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind and his four co-conspirators held at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is still pending nearly two decades after the jihadis executed the attack, the deadliest on American soil.
In an unprecedented move, however, the judge overseeing the military tribunal at Gitmo finally set a date at the end of last month for the start of the trial for the five defendants.
On August 30, U.S. Air Force Col. Shane Cohen, who took over as the judge overseeing the case in June, said the trial would begin January 11, 2021, as the nation approaches the 20th anniversary of the day that triggered the longest war in American history.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to remove the Taliban from power for harboring the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the days leading to the attack and prevent the South Asian country from again becoming a haven for terrorists seeking to attack America.
Afghanistan is now home to the “highest regional concentration” of terrorist groups in the world, including the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), the Pentagon reported in July.
Pre-trial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and the four other men alleged to have played vital roles in helping carry out the massacre on September 11, 2001, resumed Monday.
As the U.S. holds another memorial service Wednesday for the nearly 3,000 people killed by al-Qaeda 18 years ago, the five defendants will still be awaiting trial.
KSM and his co-conspirators — Walid Muhammad Bin Attash, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi — could face the death penalty.
The U.S. is still holding the five terrorists at the detention facility in Guantánamo, commonly known as Gitmo.
U.S. authorities did not arraign KSM and his four co-conspirators until May 2012, more than a decade after the attacks. American service-members captured KSM in 2003 and transferee him to Gitmo in 2006.
The military commission at Gitmo has repeatedly delayed the prospective trial of the 9/11 perpetrators in U.S. custody.
In setting the trial date, Judge Cohen acknowledged that the U.S. military base at Guantánamo “will face a host of administrative and logistics challenges,” the Military Times reported.
National Public Radio (NPR) added:
[A] number of other deadlines would need to be met for the long-delayed trial to begin.That includes the U.S. government turning over all evidence it is required to give to defense attorneys. Lawyers for the five defendants say prosecutors have not been forthcoming.Several defense attorneys told NPR they think the scheduled trial date is unrealistic, and they say Guantánamo isn’t physically ready for a trial of that magnitude. But prosecutors have been asking for a trial date for several years and say that finally having one will motivate all parties to meet the deadline.
The tribunal overseeing the case of the 9/11 attackers is a hybrid of the federal and military justice system.
This week, the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) revealed:
Crucial pre-trial hearings for the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and four other men alleged to have played key roles in helping carry out the passenger plane hijackings will resume on Monday (September 9) in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…[KSM], who confessed to being involved in the capture and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was subjected to extensive torture and was waterboarded 183 times.The procedure simulates a drowning experience.Lawyers for the defense are arguing that any confessions or other material should be invalidated because of the torture and are likely to file motions to have the entire trial set aside.
Gitmo is still housing 40 jihadis, the majority of whom are considered “forever prisoners,” or too dangerous to release.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has only transferred one detainee out of the facility. Former U.S. President Barack Obama had approved the prisoner for release.
The Trump administration is considering sending newly captured terrorists to the prison, particularly the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadis.
Citing the slow-moving pace of the military commissions and the cost of operating Gitmo, critics continue to argue in favor of allowing civilian courts on U.S. soil to handle the remaining cases.
U.S. law approved under the Obama administration, however, makes it impossible to transfer any Guantánamo prisoner to the United States.
Gitmo’s military tribunals have only produced eight convictions, including four overturned completely and one partially.
KSM and the other four defendants are among the only seven prisoners still held at Gitmo who face charges before a “military commission.”
Of the four overturned convictions, the military commission will have to deal with three. The other prisoner has appealed his life sentence to the U.S. Supreme Court.
U.S. authorities only charged 16 detainees held at G with criminal offenses, Human Rights Watch reported.
Yemenis make up the single largest national group at the prison, followed by Saudis.
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