American companies sue to seize Saudi Royal Family's Holdings in the U.S.; British Court hears Prince's terrorist threats against Blair A federal court in Washington, D.C. has ordered U.S. holdings of Prince Bandar, a leading member of the Saudi Royal family, frozen in a case brought by U.S. companies affected in a major British bribery and terrorism case. That ruling has received little attention in major U.S. media.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article3340854.eceFebruary 10, 2008
Saudi royal Prince Bandar Bin Sultan's assets frozen
Grant Ringshaw
PRINCE Bandar Bin Sultan, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to America, has been hit by a court order in effect freezing some of his US assets, as part of a class-action lawsuit over bribery allegations at British defence giant BAE Systems.
A Michigan pension scheme � the City of Harper Woods Employees’ Retirement System � has been granted a restraining order, according to documents filed in the US district of Columbia and seen by The Sunday Times.
The order, granted last Tuesday, blocks Bandar from transferring out of the country any money he makes from the sale of property in America.
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At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Prince Bandar was Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. New evidence of Bandar's role in that attack has been disclosed in a parallel federal court case. Filings in that case, pending in New York, detail the actions of top Saudi leaders in the network that supported terrorist attacks on Americans.
Under pressure from the Bush Administration, the 9/11 Commission omitted 28 pages of evidence implicating leading Saudis in support of jhadist groups who attacked the U.S. Many of these facts, not previously disclosed, are contained in a recently-released filing by a group of large US insurance companies suing Prince Bandar and other members of the Saudi Royal family for losses these companies sustained after the 9/11 attacks.
The revised complaint is more than one hundred pages long, and provides a very comprehensive picture of the role allegedly played by the Saudi royal family in supporting and assisting al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack cells before and after their arrival in the U.S.
(The complaint, linked below, is The Motherload of information about the Saudi role in 9/11. It will knock your socks off).
See,
http://www.september11terrorlitigation.com/pdf/Federal_Insurance_Company_First_Amended_Complaint.pdfVery few Americans have read the Complaint in the 9/11 Insurance case. The case, itself, has received practically no major U.S. media coverage since it was first filed five years ago. The document, prepared by professional legal investigators, is the 9/11 Commission Report that should have been released in 2004, but wasn't.
British Court Hears Evidence of Threats by Prince Bandar of Further Terrorist Attacks Meanwhile, a parallel court case is proceeding in London. Prince Bandar is accused there of threatening then Prime Minister Blair with further terrorist attacks following the 07/07/2005 London transit bombings if a long-simmering bribery case against him and fellow Saudi princes was not quashed. The following article in the Guardian also references an important development in the US case against Prince Bandar. See,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade
BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
Spectre of 'another 7/7' led Tony Blair to block bribes inquiry, high court told
David Leigh and Rob Evans
The Guardian,
Friday February 15 2008
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This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday February 15 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 12:08 on February 15 2008.
Prince Bandar, head of Saudi Arabia’s national security council, leaving Downing Street last October. Photograph: Martin Argles
Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.
Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.
Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.
He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations
SNIP
Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided. The group alleges that BAE made £1bn of "illegal bribe payments" to Bandar while claiming to be a "highly ethical, law-abiding corporation".
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If only half of the specific information in the complaint, and testimony given before the British judge, is accepted as true and relevant by the courts, these may prove by far the most damning court cases in history.
No accident, surely, that the allegations about Prince Bandar's threats against Blair are coming out now, as major U.S. corporations move to seize Saudi assets. BAE, a UK-based defense contractor has in recent years become one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, is in the middle of the massive Saudi "Yamamah" slush fund and bribery scandal. Features of the BAE Yamamah Saudi bribery scandal has already appeared as a little-noticed part of the Duke Cunningham case, and reaches right into the Bush White House. See,
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/308***
Note: Most of the detailed material about the Saudi Royal support for terrorim is in the latter half of the U.S. court filing, linked above. The short sections at the end dealing with Iran, Iraq and Syria as co-defendants in the 9/11 suit are much less detailed and convincing. This material seems to be a rehash of the rather thin evidence offered in the suit a few years ago, most of which has been thoroughly refuted. These added defendants seem to have been thrown in there as an afterthought in an otherwise solid, convincing case against leading members of the Saudi Royal Family as knowing, sustained supporters of al-Qaeda.
Finally, there are some key defendants in this case that go unnamed, despite their obvious contributing negligence that led to 9/11 - George W. Bush and Condi Rice, CIA Director Tenet and Cofer Black, head of the Central Intelligence Agency Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC), along with Directors Freeh and Mueller of the FBI and their very top aides at Bureau HQ counter-terrorism.
Very much worth reading, if you really want to know the details of the Saudi role in 9/11. I expect that when this gets into the mass media, it will trigger a major international confrontation with Saudi Arabia. It may also finally lead to the indictment of the former President, Vice President and other ranking officials of the Bush-Cheney Administration.