Saudi royal family lambasts Michael Moore for twisting the truth in his 9/

[RamboLiberal]

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/01/wsaud01.xml

The Saudi royal family has launched a bitter attack on the American film-maker Michael Moore over his claims that the Bush administration secretly smuggled a number of high-ranking Saudi nationals out of the US in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Prince Turki al-Faisal: Saudi Arabian ambassador to the UK
In the first official comment by the Saudi royal family on Moore's controversial film Fahrenheit 9/11, a leading member of the family said his country has been fully exonerated of any complicity in the attacks by the report of the 9/11 commission.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to London and a half-brother of Crown Prince Abdullah, was in charge of Saudi intelligence at the time of the 2001 terror attacks. He said that Moore had failed to carry out adequate research into his controversial claims that the Saudis were involved with Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'eda leader, in the build-up to the 9/11 atrocity.

'It would have been far better if Michael Moore had been able to read the 9/11 report before he made his film. It shows that all the protocols were strictly observed.' Because Moore had not thoroughly researched the allegations levelled against Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki said that Fahrenheit 9/11 is 'grossly unfair' to the Saudis.

[noahmijo]

1. Uh the 9-11 report does confirm that Moore did his research

Scumbags go Cheney yourselves all a yas.

[lottie244]

38. They mean for "presenting the truth" not "twisting the truth"

This administration doesn't know who to whore for the most, Saudi Arabia or Israel. It's just sickening that our country does not belong to us. How can we even beging to take it back?

[roguevalley]

2. Interesting timing. Must have seen Bush's poll numbers. :-D

[Corgigal]

3. Remind me

to mail a box of tissues to the royal family.

Bunch of babies.

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. Since when has the 9/11 report become a through investigation

of the events leading to 9/11. The sole stated mission of that report was to determine what kind of intelligence failures lead to 9/11. Those bastards are as good at twisting the facts as chimp.

[searchingforlight]

5. Who gives a flying F what they think?

[DustMolecule]

6. If not the Saudi's , then where should we looK???

n/t

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. That is kind of funny.

I'm sure the Saudis are angry that Michael Moore isn't following the 9/11 script. They must have paid dearly for it and are really pissed off that no one is buying it.

[Gregorian]

8. Oh. He touched a Saudi nerve.

Why do they like the bushes, one must wonder.

[2Design]

9. Now how many terrorists were from Saudi Arabia.........and where

was Bin Laden from......HHMmmmmmm ....must be Michael Moore and Clintons fault

[leesa]

35. We have absolutely no idea who the terrorists were, if there were any at

all. Dov Zakheim, PNAC author and recently pushed out comptroller of the DOD ran a company whose product was software that could take over the controls of up to five airliners from the ground in the event of a hijacking. Why couldn't PNAC have used this method to get their new Pearl Harbor?

Also, the alleged terrorists were using stolen IDs and passports. Seven of them are alive and well, but there has never been any further investigation into who the actual hijackers might have been. We only know what the Bush Crime Family insisted upon before the ashes even hit the ground...AlQaeda did it. The all-purpose boogieman.

[nolabels]

37. Thanks, I needed that :^)

The Saudis: Friends or Foes?

by Loretta Napoleoni
The new mood in Washington these days is that the Saudis are once again our loyal friends. After a summer of discontent, Republicans have more pressing worries: how to fund the next presidential campaign? Several of them have already started lining up to knock at the Saudis' door. Why not? Four years ago, the Republican outreach to the fast-growing American Muslim community, which today stands at 7 million, contributed significantly to getting George W. Bush into the White House. For Grover Norquist, the well-known Republican fund-raiser who masterminded the coalition, it was an alliance made in heaven; “American Muslims look like members of the Christian Coalition,” he wrote in the summer of 2001 in the American Spectator.
(snip)
Among the 236 charities still operational inside Saudi Arabia is the Committee for Support of the Intifada al Quds, whose charitable activities include financing Hamas suicide operations in Israel. The charity is headed by Saudi interior minister, Naif Ibn Adeb al Aziz, who, people may recollect, implied that September 11 attacks against the US were the work of 'Zionists'. Another prominent Saudi charity untouched by the crackdown is the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which last year held a charitable fund-raising conference in Saudi Arabia where Hamas representatives had the chance to personally thank Crown Prince Abdullah for the Saudis' valuable financial help. Interestingly, while the US has put tremendous pressure on the Europeans to list Hamas' non-militant wing among the organizations regarded as terrorist, WAMY still operates freely inside the US. Among the tasks carried out by the US branch, which until September 11, 2001 was headed by Abdulah bin Laden, brother of Osama, is the spreading of hate literature against Americans. Recently, WAMY has promoted the ideas of one of its employees, Sheikh Saad al Buraik, the religious advisor of Prince Abdul Azziz bin Fahd, a son of King Fahd, who, in 2001, called for the enslavement of Jewish women and the death of all their children. So well-received was Buraik's anti-Jewish exhortation in his homeland that it got him a job as the host of a weekly TV show on the Middle East Broadcasting Company (MBC), owned by Azziz and his uncle, Waleed al Ibrahim. Is the Bush administration so naïve as to believe that firing a few young Mullahs here and there in Saudi Arabia will be enough to silence radical voices such as Buraik?

A topic carefully avoided by the US and the Saudis is the role that Saudi Islamic banks play in the distribution of funds to Islamist cells and armed groups scattered throughout the Muslim world. Many believe that the 20 pages of the report from the Senate Committee on Saudi financing of terror groups which the Bush administration blacked out contained valuable information about Saudi banks. Why has nobody investigated them? Former Al Qaeda members have testified that Osama regularly uses the intricate network of Islamic banks and their subsidiaries to bankroll the group's terror activities. More important than fund-raising, it is the distribution of funds which is the lifeline of terrorist organizations which run trans-national networks -- getting money across the world in the fastest and most secure way possible.

Saudi banks are heavily involved in the distribution business. The Dallah Al Baraka (DAB), one of the cornerstones of Saudi banking, has been named in the $1 trillion lawsuit filed by the relatives of September 11. The DAB was among the largest shareholders of the Faisal Islamic Bank, accused by bin Laden business associate, Jamal Ahmed Mohammed al Fadl, of having been one of the vehicles used to channel money to Al Qaeda around the world. No steps have been taken to shut down these banks or to investigate their books. Saudi dissidents in London point out that whenever the trail leads to banks, records disappear. Last week, in the special report on the Saudis published by Newsweek, one of the US administration's top counter-terrorism officials admitted that the records of one the Saudi charities suspected of bankrolling Islamist terror had mysteriously vanished.
(snip)
http://www.progress.org/2003/saudi01.htm
http://www.modernjihad.com/articles.htm

[MichiganVote]

10. Go fuck yourselves. I'm sick of

this sheets on top, sexy underwear mentality, that says bow and scrape to me and send your kids to war for my marble mansions. Take your money, take your religion, take your good buddy George and get the hell out of our country. It might not look like it belongs to us but we're working on it and one day you can take that black gold and stick it where the sun don't shine. What goes around comes around.

[Carni]

13. AMEN Michigan vote!

And I say this as an agnostic and not in a religious sense...

The Saudis are the worst violators of human rights known to humanity and I am sick of suppporting their fat asses because we have two oil whores leading the country!

[Rose Siding]

11. Yet no explanation for why the SS guards their embassy?

Actually, this direct attack makes me kind of nervous. How could the bushies spin this to make Moore some kind of security risk? Is our Constitution still strong enough to protect him?

[Columbia]

15. Uniformed Secret Service guard all embassies

Check out their website:

http://www.secretservice.gov/opportunities_ud.shtml

"In addition, Uniformed Division officers provide protection for the White House Complex, the Vice-President's residence, the Main Treasury Building and Annex, and foreign diplomatic missions and embassies in the Washington, DC area."

[Sterling]

21. They do get extra protection though.

eom

[Carni]

12. The Saudis can go Cheney themselves

Scumbags--maybe "Bandar" could explain why his half brother (or brother) was on that Sept 13th flight out of Tampa...

Not to mention what his wonderful father "The minister of Aviation and defense" had to do with this.

(On edit "This" meaning the SAUDI pilots that carried out the attacks on 911)

[gratuitous]

14. Non sequitur alert!

Non sequitur is a Latin term that means, "it does not follow." For example, if someone said you owned a .38 special, and a .38 special was used to kill someone last night, you'd shout, "I'm not a murderer! I didn't kill that guy!" That is a non sequitur, because no one accused you of doing the killing.

In this instance, the Saudis are mighty upset that Michael Moore pointed out, correctly, that the Saudi royal family received some highly specialized, one might almost say preferential treatment, in the scheduling of flights out of the country. Well, that certainly seems beyond debate. But the Saudi ambassador to the UK is quite vehement that Saudi Arabia "has been fully exonerated of any complicity in the in the attacks."

The non sequitur is that the preferential flight schedule doesn't naturally lead to an accusation of complicity in the attacks. But the ambassador certainly seemed anxious to make that statement. I wonder why?

[Boomer]

18. Makes ya wonder, doesn't it?

Having seen F9/11 twice, I never came away from the film thinking the Flying Saudis had necessarily been responsible for 9/11. I *did* wonder why they received such special treatment. As Moore pointed out, if Clinton had shown such favoritism and special privilege to the family of Timothy McVeigh, there would have been a widespread scream of WTF! from the American public.

[JohnLocke]

16. Wow.

[zuzu98]

17. post- 9/11 Saudi flights

according to Craig Unger in "House of Bush/House of Saud":

9/13: 3 Saudis were flown from Tampa to Lexington, KY in a chartered Learjet (originally denied by booth the FAA and the WH). This was at a time when commercial aircraft were flying on a very limited basis, but private planes were still not allowed to fly.

9/13-9/19: Private planes transported Saudis from Los Angeles, Orlando (OBL's brother boarded there), Washington & Boston.

9/18: chartered 727 takes five members of the bin Laden family out of the country from Boston

9/19: 11-14 members of the bin Laden family fly out of Logan airport (Boston) by private jet over the protests of Logan officials

There's also a passenger list for a 9/15 flight from Lexington to London re-printed in the book, but I haven't read far enough to understand the circumstances.

[TahitiNut]

19. The "Royal Family" pretends they ARE Arabia. They're disgusting!

First off, it's not "Saudi" Arabia; it's Arabia - despite the filthy pretensions of an abominable group of inbred autocrats.

Michael Moore referred solely to the "Saudi Royal Family" in Fahrenheit 9/11. He did not demean the citizens of Arabia; it's the "Royal Family" that dehumanizes and oppresses those people.

Again, the people in this country, fed a preservative-laden diet of People Magazine Princesses and fairy tale history, seem to have lost any semblance of sanity when it come to the inhuman abuses and heinous crimes of 'monarchs' throughout recorded history.

Those who would make the US even more authoritarian constantly feed both adults and children a steady diet of 'pro-monarchical' propaganda, desensitizing the population the insatiable aspirations of greedy and power-hungry autocrats.

[TexasBushwhacker]

23. So true - it's the House of Saud that's the problem n/t

[lebkuchen]

26. They also pretend they are Muslim. nt

[cliss]

20. Poor Michael

Not only does he have to worry about his safety against the BFEE, but he's also taken on the Saudi "Royal" Family. Sheesh.

All I can say is, this is not a guy who's afraid of a fight. I just hope he can stay safe.

I just listened to him today on the Randi Rhodes show as she was broadcasting from the Democratic convention. He sounded relaxed, joked and was sarcastic. Must have nerves of steel.

[goforit]

22. Monarchies????........England/Bush/Saudis.....who needs any of them?

They are nothing but trouble.

[flordehinojos]

24. POPPY BUSH PROBABLY TOLD/BEGGED/PLEADED WITH MEMBERS OF THE SAUDI ROYAL

FAMILY to unleash an unrestrained attack against Michael Moore and
F-911 movie.

The same way that they told the Pakistani government to deliver some high Al-Qaida operative dead-or-alive in the month of July preferably during the Kerry/Democrats convention.

NO MORE BUSHES!
}(

[0007]

25. Maybe the Saudis will get James Baker III to sue Mr. Moore?

The Carlyle Group and the Saudi families are one and same. No fucking difference!

Look who making the big bucks off this Iraq war.

[Swamp Rat]

27. GOOD! I hope they keep calling attention to themselves.

I also wanna hear repukes try to defend the Saudis... this will be some of the best ammunition against Bush&Co and they don't realize it.

[Disturbed]

28. I guess this means that...

Mr. Moore won't be flyin' to Arabia anytime soon.

The Saudi Monarchy are Fascist barbarians and the Bush Crime Family is thick as thieves with them.

[Capt_Nemo]

29. I wish the House of Saud the very same Ken Livingstone advocates for them:

That the people they've been oppressing for decades rise up and
hang them all from lampposts!
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[RFKHumphreyObama]

30. This only enhances the film's credibility

The Saudi royal family are a bunch of self-centred, indulgent, decadent, morally bankrupt and decadent spoilt brats whose extravagance and contempt for their citizens makes Marie Antoinette look like Mother Theresa. Through their shameless self promotion of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the globe, they have aided and abetted the spread of terrorism more than most of the countries in the world put together. To have them criticize Michael Moore’s film is the probably the greatest endorsement and testament to the authenticity and credibility of the film that he could have hoped for

Read Carmen Bin Ladin's autobiography (the estranged wife of Osama's brother) for a true insight into the royal family and the nature of the Saudi aristocracy. Or Jean Sasson's "Princess". The royal family in Saudi Arabia is probably the worst in the world

[NashVegas]

31. More on Prince Turki

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0124/ridgeway.php

In the same year, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, reputedly came up with a scheme to capture bin Laden on his own; after consulting with the Taliban he flew his private plane to Kabul and drove out to see Mullah Omar at his HQ. The two men sat down, as Helms recounts the story, and the Saudi said, "There's just one little thing. Will you kill bin Laden before you put him on the plane?" Mullah Omar called for a bucket of cold water. As the Saudi delegation fidgeted, he took off his turban, splashed water on his head, and then washed his hands before sitting back down. "You know why I asked for the cold water?" he asked Turki. "What you just said made my blood boil."

Bin Laden was a guest of the Afghanis and there was no way they were going to kill him, though they might turn him over for a trial. At that the deal collapsed, and Turki flew home empty-handed.

[blueknight]

32. yeah, the rotten bastards...

are crying all the way to the bank. they are afraid of kerry,and want to keep bush in office because they are afraid of what jk will find out!

[RFKHumphreyObama]

34. I remember reading this version of events

I've always wondered whether it's genuine or just a Saudi PR gimmick designed to make it look like they were doing something to combat Bin Laden before 9/11. Even if they did want Bin Laden back in Saudi Arabia, I think it's probably more due to the fact that he was embarassing and undermining the Royal Family than because they were serious about countering terrorism or preventing the spread of the fundamentalist doctrine

[kodi]

33. the american people never found out what the saudis were up to.

Classified Section of Sept. 11 Report Faults Saudi Rulers (NYT, 26 July)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/072703A.shtml

Senator Bob Graham defends the Bush administration and US intelligence agencies with assertions of "ineptitude and incompetence" while diverting blame to the Saudis: "High officials in this government, who I assume were not just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial contributions to the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated their ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of Sept. 11."
Lawmakers Accuse Administration of Protecting Saudi Sentiment with Secrecy (AP, 27 July)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/072803B.shtml

Senator Graham is not one to be pointing fingers of blame — he is in fact very highly suspect in the shady activities that went on around Sept. 11, as explained in the following article. So, even while he appears to be challenging the Bush administration, he has his own motivations to divert the public's attention:
Secret Hearings Conceal 9/11 Terrorist Links to Congress & White House (Tom Flocco, 11 Aug 02)

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/FLO208A.html

White House Criticized for Censoring Sept. 11 Report (Reuters, 27 July)

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=3166224
Shelby

[Media_Lies_Daily]

36. I find it rather humorous that the Saudis are using the white-washed....

...GOP-controlled 911 Commission Report as a defense.

[Barrett808]

39. Love the publicity!

The mobsters just keep stepping in it don't they? Every time they denounce Mike they probably bring another thousand viewers into theaters.

[Joanne98]

40. Bwhahahahahaha

More money for Moore. F9/11 is heading for the 200 million mark. Go Michael go. This is so funny. Like anyone actually believes the 9/11 report. When it comes to the Saudi Royal Family anyway. OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.