Bandar Bush: Kingdom COULD HAVE helped U.S. prevent 9/11

[reprehensor]

Ex-Saudi ambassador: Kingdom could have helped U.S. prevent 9/11

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/01/saudiarabia.terrorism/index.html

(CNN) -- Saudi Arabia could have helped the United States prevent al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a "credible" way, the kingdom's former ambassador said in a documentary aired Thursday.

The comments by Prince Bandar bin Sultan are similar to the remarks this week by Saudi King Abdullah that suggested Britain could have prevented the July 2005 train bombings in London if it had heeded warnings from Riyadh.

Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision."

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said...

Continued...
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/01/saudiarabia.terrorism/index.html

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Uh-huh.

U.S. authors Susan and Joseph Trento allege that hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were protected by the CIA, and were indeed GID (Saudi) agents; http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/context.jsp?item=a083101cianervous#a083101cianervous

UK author Nafeez Ahmed alleges that MI5 didn't need to consult the GID for information on the 7/7 bombers, the problems go much deeper;

COLLABORATION with Islamic extremists led British intelligence officers to ignore explicit warnings of a terrorist attack at least six months before the 7/7 London bombings, a new parliamentary briefing has claimed. The report supports calls by Rachel North, a survivor of the King’s Cross bombing that killed 26 people on the Piccadilly line Tube train, for a public inquiry into the events leading up to the attacks...

The report’s author Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed said: “The problem is there’s a huge bureaucracy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of closed doors.” He added: “There’s no doubt that the government has lied about 7/7 and exaggerated the problem in Muslim communities. It has become a community problem because of excessive protection of specific extremist networks.”

But thanks for the really late offer Bandar Boosh!

The tight relations between Saudi intel and US intel in particular go back years and years, to at least Bill Casey, as chronicled by Steve Coll in his big, boring book, "Ghost Wars". Indeed, Osama was a Saudi asset, if not agent...

Ahmed's Rashid's "Taliban" is an oft-cited history of Afghanistan that chronicles the rise of the Taliban. Along the way, Rashid drops some useful information that he has gathered during his on-the-ground, on-the-scene journalism expeditions:

"...in 1986, CIA chief William Casey had stepped up the war against the Soviet Union by taking three significant, but at that time highly secret, measures. He had persuaded the U.S. Congress to provide the Mujaheddin with American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes and provide U.S. advisers to train the guerrillas. Until then no US-made weapons or personnel had been used directly in the war effort. The CIA, Britain's MI6 and the ISI also agreed on a provocative plan to launch guerrilla attacks into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the soft Muslim underbelly of the Soviet state from where Soviet troops in Afghanistan received their supplies. The task was given to the ISI's favourite Mujaheddin leader Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. In March 1987, small units crossed the Amu Darya river from bases in northern Afghanistan and launched their first rocket attacks against villages in Tajikistan. Casey was delighted with the news, and on his next secret trip to Pakistan he crossed the border into Afghanistan with President Zia to review the Mujaheddin groups.

Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982 and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea." p.129

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"His father backed the Afghan struggle and helped fund it, so when Bin Laden decided to join up, his family responded enthusiastically. He first traveled to Peshawar in 1980 and met the Mujaheddin leaders, returning frequently with Saudi donations for the cause until 1982, when he decided to settle in Peshawar. He brought in his company engineers and heavy construction equipment to help build roads and depots for the Mujaheddin. In 1986, he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border. For the first time in Khost he set up his own training camp for Arab Afghans, who now increasingly saw this lanky, wealthy and charismatic Saudi as their leader.

'To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan,' Bin Laden said later. 'I settled in Pakistan in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi Kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my fist camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis." p.132

Page numbers from the 2001 Yale Note Bene paperback reprint.

Have you ever felt like you've been cheated?

[seemslikeadream]

1. I guess the sublect never came up when they were in the middle of a kiss

[seemslikeadream]

2. or out walking hand in hand