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Paul Merrell

New Saudi King Tied to Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and Islamic Terrorism Washington's Blog - 0 views

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war & peace Saudis King-Salman terrorists™

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • We’ve long noted that Saudi Arabia is a huge supporter of terrorism. But the new Saudi king is particularly bad. Investors Business Daily notes: King Salman has a history of funding al-Qaida, and his son has been accused of knowing in advance about the 9/11 attacks. *** Salman once ran a Saudi charity tied to al-Qaida and has been named a defendant in two lawsuits accusing the Saudi royal family of helping the 9/11 terrorists, one of which the U.S. Supreme Court recently let move forward after years of being blocked by the State Department and the well-funded Saudi lobby. Plaintiffs have provided an enormous amount of material to source their accusations against Salman. Here’s why his ascension to the throne is not good news, especially as the terrorism threat grows: • Salman once headed the Saudi High Commission for Relief to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which served as a key charitable front for al-Qaida in the Balkans. • According to a United Nations-sponsored investigation, Salman in the 1990s transferred more than $120 million from commission accounts under his control — as well as his own personal accounts — to the Third World Relief Agency, another al-Qaida front and the main pipeline for illegal weapons shipments to al-Qaida fighters in the Balkans.
  • • A U.N. audit found that the money was transferred following meetings with Salman, transfers that had no legitimate “humanitarian” purpose. • Former CIA officer Robert Baer has reported that an international raid of Saudi High Commission offices found evidence of terrorist plots against America. • Baer also revealed that Salman “personally approved” distribution of funds from the International Islamic Relief Organization, which also has provided material support to al-Qaida. • A recent Gulf Institute report says Salman and former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal knowingly aided and abetted al-Qaida in the run-up to 9/11. • Salman works closely with Saudi clerics Saleh al-Moghamsy, a radical anti-Semite, and Safar Hawali, a one-time mentor of Osama bin Laden, according to the Washington Free Beacon. • In “Why America Slept,” author Gerald Posner claimed that Salman’s son Ahmed bin Salman also had ties to al-Qaida and even advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
  • David Andrew Weinberg provides a superb round-up of Salman’s ties to terrorism and extremism: As former CIA official Bruce Riedel astutely pointed out, Salman was the regime’s lead fundraiser for mujahideen, or Islamic holy warriors, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as for Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan struggles of the 1990s. In essence, he served as Saudi Arabia’s financial point man for bolstering fundamentalist proxies in war zones abroad. As longtime governor of Riyadh, Salman was often charged with maintaining order and consensus among members of his family. Salman’s half brother King Khalid (who ruled from 1975 to 1982) therefore looked to him early on in the Afghan conflict to use these family contacts for international objectives, appointing Salman to run the fundraising committee that gathered support from the royal family and other Saudis to support the mujahideen against the Soviets. Riedel writes that in this capacity, Salman “work[ed] very closely with the kingdom’s Wahhabi clerical establishment.” Another CIA officer who was stationed in Pakistan in the late 1980s estimates that private Saudi donations during that period reached between $20 million and $25 million every month. And as Rachel Bronson details in her book, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia, Salman also helped recruit fighters for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan Salafist fighter who served as a mentor to both Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
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  • Reprising this role in Bosnia, Salman was appointed by his full brother and close political ally King Fahd to direct the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SHC) upon its founding in 1992. Through the SHC, Salman gathered donations from the royal family for Balkan relief, supervising the commission until its until its recent closure in 2011. By 2001, the organization had collected around $600 million — nominally for relief and religious purposes, but money that allegedly also went to facilitating arms shipments, despite a U.N. arms embargo on Bosnia and other Yugoslav successor states from 1991 to 1996. And what kind of supervision did Salman exercise over this international commission? In 2001, NATO forces raided the SHC’s Sarajevo offices, discovering a treasure trove of terrorist materials: before-and-after photographs of al Qaeda attacks, instructions on how to fake U.S. State Department badges, and maps marked to highlight government buildings across Washington. The Sarajevo raid was not the first piece of evidence that the SHC’s work went far beyond humanitarian aid. Between 1992 and 1995, European officials tracked roughly $120 million in donations from Salman’s personal bank accounts and from the SHC to a Vienna-based Bosnian aid organization named the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). Although the organization claimed to be focused on providing humanitarian relief, Western intelligence agencies estimated that the TWRA actually spent a majority of its funds arming fighters aligned with the Bosnian government.
  • A defector from al Qaeda called to testify before the United Nations, and who gave a deposition for lawyers representing the families of 9/11 victims, alleged that both Salman’s SHC and the TWRA provided essential support to al Qaeda in Bosnia, including to his 107-man combat unit. In a deposition related to the 9/11 case, he stated that the SHC “participated extensively in supporting al Qaida operations in Bosnia” and that the TWRA “financed, and otherwise supported” the terrorist group’s fighters. The SHC’s connection to terrorist groups has long been scrutinized by U.S. intelligence officials as well. The U.S. government’s Joint Task Force Guantanamo once included the Saudi High Commission on its list of suspected “terrorist and terrorist support entities.” The Defense Intelligence Agency also once accused the Saudi High Commission of shipping both aid and weapons to Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the al Qaeda-linked Somali warlord depicted as a villain in the movie Black Hawk Down. Somalia was subject to a United Nations arms embargo starting in January 1992. *** The board of trustees for the Prince Salman Youth Center, which Salman himself chairs, today includes Saleh Abdullah Kamel, a Saudi billionaire whose name showed up on a purported list of al Qaeda’s earliest supporters known as the “golden chain.” (The Wall Street Journal reported that Kamel “denies supporting terror.”) But as the United States sought to shut down Saudi charities with ties to terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Kamel and Salman both condemned the effort as an anti-Islamic witch hunt.
  • In 1995, US aid worker William Jefferson is killed in Bosnia. One of the likely suspects, Ahmed Zuhair Handala, is linked to the SHC. He also is let go, despite evidence linking him to massacres of civilians in Bosnia. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 263-264] In 1997, a Croatian apartment building is bombed, and Handala and two other SHC employees are suspected of the bombing. They escape, but Handala will be captured after 9/11 and sent to Guantanamo prison. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 266] In 1997, SHC employee Saber Lahmar is arrested for plotting to blow up the US embassy in Saravejo. He is convicted, but pardoned and released by the Bosnian government two years later. He will be arrested again in 2002 for involvement in an al-Qaeda plot in Bosnia and sent to Guantanamo prison (see January 18, 2002). By 1996, NSA wiretaps reveal that Prince Salman is funding Islamic militants using charity fronts (Between 1994 and July 1996).
  • History Commons adds important details: By 1994, if not earlier, the NSA is collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between Saudi Arabian royal family members. Journalist Seymour Hersh will later write, “according to an official with knowledge of their contents, the intercepts show that the Saudi government, working through Prince Salman [bin Abdul Aziz], contributed millions to charities that, in turn, relayed the money to fundamentalists. ‘We knew that Salman was supporting all of the causes,’ the official told me.” By July 1996 or soon after, US intelligence “had more than enough raw intelligence to conclude… bin Laden [was] receiving money from prominent Saudis.” [Hersh, 2004, pp. 324, 329-330] One such alleged charity front linked to Salman is the Saudi High Commission in Bosnia (see 1996 and After). Prince Salman has long been the governor of Riyadh province. At the time, he is considered to be about fourth in line to be king of Saudi Arabia. His son Prince Ahmed bin Salman will later be accused of having connections with al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida (see Early April 2002). [PBS, 10/4/2004] It appears this surveillance of Saudi royals will come to an end in early 2001 (see (February-March 2001)).
  • Author Roland Jacquard will later claim that in 1996, al-Qaeda revives its militant network in Bosnia in the wake of the Bosnian war and uses the Saudi High Commission (SHC) as its main charity front to do so. [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 69] This charity was founded in 1993 by Saudi Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz and is so closely linked to and funded by the Saudi government that a US judge will later render it immune to a 9/11-related lawsuit after concluding that it is an organ of the Saudi government. [New York Law Journal, 9/28/2005] In 1994, British aid worker Paul Goodall is killed in Bosnia execution-style by multiple shots to the back of the head. A SHC employee, Abdul Hadi al-Gahtani, is arrested for the murder and admits the gun used was his, but the Bosnian government lets him go without a trial. Al-Gahtani will later be killed fighting with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 143-144; Schindler is a professor at the U.S. Army War College] In 1995, the Bosnian Ministry of Finance raids SHC’s offices and discovers documents that show SHC is “clearly a front for radical and terrorism-related activities.” [Burr and Collins, 2006, pp. 145]
  • In November 2002, Prince Salman patronized a fundraising gala for three Saudi charities under investigation by Washington: the International Islamic Relief Organization, al-Haramain Foundation, and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. Since 9/11, all three organizations have had branches shuttered or sanctioned over allegations of financially supporting terrorism. That same month, Salman cited his experience on the boards of charitable societies, asserting that “it is not the responsibility of the kingdom” if others exploit Saudi donations for terrorism. *** The new king has also embraced Saudi cleric Saleh al-Maghamsi, an Islamic supremacist who declared in 2012 that Osama bin Laden had more “sanctity and honor in the eyes of Allah,” simply for being a Muslim, than “Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, apostates, and atheists,” whom he described by nature as “infidels.” That didn’t put an end to Salman’s ties to Maghamsi, however. The new Saudi king recently served as head of the supervisory board for a Medina research center directed by Maghamsi. A year after Maghamsi’s offensive comments, Salman sponsored and attended a large cultural festival organized by the preacher. Maghamsi also advises two of Salman’s sons ….
  • A 1996 CIA report mentions, “We continue to have evidence that even high ranking members of the collecting or monitoring agencies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan – such as the Saudi High Commission – are involved in illicit activities, including support for terrorists” (see January 1996). Jacquard claims that most of the leadership of the SHC supports bin Laden. The SHC, while participating in some legitimate charitable functions, uses its cover to ship illicit goods, drugs, and weapons in and out of Bosnia. In May 1997, a French military report concludes: ”(T)he Saudi High Commission, under cover of humanitarian aid, is helping to foster the lasting Islamization of Bosnia by acting on the youth of the country. The successful conclusion of this plan would provide Islamic fundamentalism with a perfectly positioned platform in Europe and would provide cover for members of the bin Laden organization.” [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 69-71] However, the US will take no action until shortly after 9/11, when it will lead a raid on the SHC’s Bosnia offices. Incriminating documents will be found, including information on how to counterfeit US State Department ID badges, and handwritten notes about meetings with bin Laden. Evidence of a planned attack using crop duster planes is found as well. [Schindler, 2007, pp. 129, 284]
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 15
     
    So the U.S. invades Afghanistan and Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia? 
Paul Merrell

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5376904

banksters CIA 9-11 arms-deals opium congtinuity-of-government

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6
  • In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20
  • since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27
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  • The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21
  • In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33
  • The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30
  • At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29
  • The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35
  • As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).
  • Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38
  • In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.
  • The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.
  • It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40
  • After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.
  • This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.
  • 1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48
  • 3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51
  • But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.
  • The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58
  • This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.
  • But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.
Paul Merrell

US-Saudi Blitz into Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation | Global Research - C... - 0 views

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war & peace Yemen Houthi Saudis invasion U.S.-foreign-policy terrorists™

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The “proxy war” model the US has been employing throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even in parts of Asia appears to have failed yet again, this time in the Persian Gulf state of Yemen. Overcoming the US-Saudi backed regime in Yemen, and a coalition of sectarian extremists including Al Qaeda and its rebrand, the “Islamic State,” pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militias have turned the tide against American “soft power” and has necessitated a more direct military intervention. While US military forces themselves are not involved allegedly, Saudi warplanes and a possible ground force are. Though Saudi Arabia claims “10 countries” have joined its coalition to intervene in Yemen, like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq hid behind a “coalition,” it is overwhelmingly a Saudi operation with “coalition partners” added in a vain attempt to generate diplomatic legitimacy. The New York Times, even in the title of its report, “Saudi Arabia Begins Air Assault in Yemen,” seems not to notice these “10” other countries. It reports:
  • Saudi Arabia announced on Wednesday night that it had launched a military campaign in Yemen, the beginning of what a Saudi official said was an offensive to restore a Yemeni government that had collapsed after rebel forces took control of large swaths of the country.  The air campaign began as the internal conflict in Yemen showed signs of degenerating into a proxy war between regional powers. The Saudi announcement came during a rare news conference in Washington by Adel al-Jubeir, the kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.
  • Indeed, the conflict in Yemen is a proxy war. Not between Iran and Saudi Arabia per say, but between Iran and the United States, with the United States electing Saudi Arabia as its unfortunate stand-in. Iran’s interest in Yemen serves as a direct result of the US-engineered “Arab Spring” and attempts to overturn the political order of North Africa and the Middle East to create a unified sectarian front against Iran for the purpose of a direct conflict with Tehran. The war raging in Syria is one part of this greater geopolitical conspiracy, aimed at overturning one of Iran’s most important regional allies, cutting the bridge between it and another important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And while Iran’s interest in Yemen is currently portrayed as yet another example of Iranian aggression, indicative of its inability to live in peace with its neighbors, US policymakers themselves have long ago already noted that Iran’s influence throughout the region, including backing armed groups, serves a solely defensive purpose, acknowledging the West and its regional allies’ attempts to encircle, subvert, and overturn Iran’s current political order.
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  • What may result is a conflict that spills over Yemen’s borders and into Saudi Arabia proper. Whatever dark secrets the Western media’s decades of self-censorship regarding the true sociopolitical nature of Saudi Arabia will become apparent when the people of the Arabian peninsula must choose to risk their lives fighting for a Western client regime, or take a piece of the peninsula for themselves. Additionally, a transfer of resources and fighters arrayed under the flag of the so-called “Islamic State” and Al Qaeda from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula will further indicate that the US and its regional allies have been behind the chaos and atrocities carried out in the Levant for the past 4 years. Such revelations will only further undermine the moral imperative of the West and its regional allies, which in turn will further sabotage their efforts to rally support for an increasingly desperate battle they themselves conspired to start.
  • The aerial assault on Yemen is meant to impress upon onlookers Saudi military might. A ground contingent might also attempt to quickly sweep in and panic Houthi fighters into folding. Barring a quick victory built on psychologically overwhelming Houthi fighters, Saudi Arabia risks enveloping itself in a conflict that could easily escape out from under the military machine the US has built for it. It is too early to tell how the military operation will play out and how far the Saudis and their US sponsors will go to reassert themselves over Yemen. However, that the Houthis have outmatched combined US-Saudi proxy forces right on Riyadh’s doorstep indicates an operational capacity that may not only survive the current Saudi assault, but be strengthened by it. Reports that Houthi fighters have employed captured Yemeni warplanes further bolsters this notion – revealing tactical, operational, and strategic sophistication that may well know how to weather whatever the Saudis have to throw at it, and come back stronger.
  • The unelected hereditary regime ruling over Saudi Arabia, a nation notorious for egregious human rights abuses, and a land utterly devoid of even a semblance of what is referred to as “human rights,” is now posing as arbiter of which government in neighboring Yemen is “legitimate” and which is not, to the extent of which it is prepared to use military force to restore the former over the latter. The United States providing support for the Saudi regime is designed to lend legitimacy to what would otherwise be a difficult narrative to sell. However, the United States itself has suffered from an increasing deficit in its own legitimacy and moral authority. Most ironic of all, US and Saudi-backed sectarian extremists, including Al Qaeda in Yemen, had served as proxy forces meant to keep Houthi militias in check by proxy so the need for a direct military intervention such as the one now unfolding would not be necessary. This means that Saudi Arabia and the US are intervening in Yemen only after the terrorists they were supporting were overwhelmed and the regime they were propping up collapsed. In reality, Saudi Arabia’s and the United States’ rhetoric aside, a brutal regional regime meddled in Yemen and lost, and now the aspiring global hemegon sponsoring it from abroad has ordered it to intervene directly and clean up its mess.
  • the Yemeni people are not being allowed to determine their own affairs. Everything up to and including military invasion has been reserved specifically to ensure that the people of Yemen do not determine things for themselves, clearly, because it does not suit US interests. Such naked hypocrisy will be duly noted by the global public and across diplomatic circles. The West’s inability to maintain a cohesive narrative is a growing sign of weakness. Shareholders in the global enterprise the West is engaged in may see such weakness as a cause to divest – or at the very least – a cause to diversify toward other enterprises. Such enterprises may include Russia and China’s mulipolar world. The vanishing of Western global hegemony will be done in destructive conflict waged in desperation and spite. Today, that desperation and spite befalls Yemen.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 15
     
    Usually I agree with Tony Cartalucci, but I think it's too early to pick winners and losers in Yemen. At least a couple of other nations allied with the Saudis are flying aerial missions and there's a commitment of troops and air support by Egypt, although it isn't clear that these would enter Yemen, but may just deploy to "protect" the waters approaching the Suez Canal from the Yemenis. The Saudis have a surfeit of U.S. weaponry but their military is inexperienced. The House of Saud has preferred proxy wars conducted by Salafist mercenaries over direct military intervention. How effective its military will be is a very big unknown at this point. But I like Cartalucci's point that if the House of Saud has to send in its ISIL mercenaries, it will go a long way toward unmasking the U.S. excuse for invading Syria and resuming boots on the ground in Iraq.
Paul Merrell

Russia May Hit Back at Saudi Arabia for Volgogard Attacks - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37364.htm

war & peace Russia U.S. Saudis Sochi Volgograd Olympics terroism

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Russian intelligence has now reportedly obtained solid proof that Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the twin terror attacks on the city of Volgograd. The attacks killed more than 32 people and injured over 100 others. Most of the victims were civilians. According to an informed Russian official source, reported by the Fars News Agency, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has informed President Vladimir Putin of the Saudi link to the Volgograd massacre. This will come as no surprise to Putin. The Russian leader was warned by the Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan during a heated four-hour private meeting back in July that Wahhabi-sponsored terrorists based in the North Caucasus region of Russia would be targeting the Sochi Winter Olympics.
  • The Sochi Games are due to open on February 7. Volgograd is a key transport hub linking Moscow with the southern Russian territory and the Black Sea resort city of Sochi in particular, where the Winter Olympics are to be held. The double bombings on Volgograd’s transport system on 29-30 December were therefore unmistakably an assault on Russia’s hosting of the Olympics. The atrocity caused the deaths of several women and children, and in the aftermath President Putin was livid in his disgust at the attacks. He said there was no justification, whatsoever, for the killing of innocent civilians and he vowed to “destroy the terrorists” behind the bombings. This raises the onerous question: What will Putin do next if he has, in fact, been told that the authors of the Volgograd crime against humanity are connected to the Saudi rulers? This could be construed as an act of war. There are unconfirmed reports that Putin and his senior intelligence officers have already drawn up plans to “destroy Saudi Arabia” over its systematic sponsoring of terrorism on Russian territory.
  • The Volgograd atrocity is just the latest in a long series of terrorist acts connected to Saudi-sponsored radicals in the North Caucasus. Back in October, another suicide bomb on a packed bus in Volgograd left six dead. The group believed to be behind these attacks is known as the Caucasus Caliphate, led by Doko Umarov. Saudi Arabia is a major source of funds for the Caucasus Caliphate, which espouses the same fundamentalist ideology as the Saudi-sponsored Takfiris operating in Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq. Based in Chechnya and Dagestan, Umarov has publicly stated that “all means necessary would be used to derail” the Sochi Olympics. Previously, the same network carried out suicide bomb attacks on Moscow’s metro system in 2010 and 2011, which caused dozens of deaths. The Caucasus extremists are known to have close logistical connection with both American and Saudi military intelligence.
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  • Indeed, from the early 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Americans and the Saudis redeployed their Afghan Al Qaeda tactics into the southern Russian territories as a way to further destabilize Moscow. One of the architects of this plan was former CIA chief William Casey. This US and Saudi covert operations fuelled the two Chechen wars of 1994-95 and 1999-2000. Although Moscow has since managed to subdue the large-scale violence, the Caucasus Caliphate remains a potent source of terrorism and sabotage, as the latest horror in Volgograd all too grimly attests. Saudi spy chief Bandar’s earlier threat to Putin that the Sochi Games were at risk of attack from the Caucasus-based terror groups was thus no idle threat. In retrospect his words amount to self-indictment. Bandar reportedly boasted to Putin: “We control them (the Caucasus militants).” This implies that Saudi Arabia can turn on and off the conduct of these terror groups. That places Saudi Arabia as the ultimate author of a catalogue of crimes that Russia has endured for the most part of 20 years, the latest being in the city of Volgograd.
  • It is not known what precise evidence Russian intelligence has lately uncovered that allegedly pinpoints Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Volgograd massacre. But there is already copious circumstantial evidence, as well as Bandar’s own braggadocio. One of the suicide bombers in the Volgograd double attack has been identified as Russian national Pavel Pechyonkin (32). He reportedly traveled to Syria last year and fought in the ranks of Saudi-backed extremists trying to topple the government of Bashar al Assad.
  • If the Russians have acquired hard evidence of Saudi collusion in terrorism on their soil, there is firm legal ground for Russia to exact retaliation under the doctrine of self-defense. In a second meeting between Bandar and Putin, the Russian leader reportedly told the Saudi in no uncertain terms that his support for terrorism was “a double-edged sword” that would eventually inflict damage on those who wield it. For years now Saudi Arabia has gotten away with covert state-sponsored terrorism disrupting its Middle East neighbors. Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are but the latest victims. The Saudis have done this with impunity in the service of American imperialism, just as Zionist Israel has likewise functioned as an imperial crime syndicate. But now Saudi Arabia may have swung its double-edged sword too recklessly. It has apparently been caught red-handed in an outrage against the Russian bear. Prince Bandar, we can be sure, will from now on be making extra checks beneath his car.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Jan 14
     
    Note that it has long been known that Chechen revolutionaries in Russia have been the beneficiaries of Saudi and U.S. assistance, with firm evidence of Saudi command and control.  
Gary Edwards

Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance? | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...ey-seal-israeli-saudi-alliance

Sunni-Shiite-War

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Exclusive: The odd-couple relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel may have been sealed with more than a mutual desire to kiss-off Iran. According to an intelligence source, there was a dowry involved, too, with the Saudis reportedly giving Israel some $16 billion, writes Robert Parry.By Robert Parry
  • For more than half a century, Saudi Arabia has tried to use its vast oil wealth to build a lobby in the United States that could rival the imposing Israel Lobby. At top dollar, the Saudis hired law firms and PR specialists – and exploited personal connections to powerful families like the Bushes – but the Saudis never could build the kind of grassroots political organization that has given Israel and its American backers such extraordinary clout.Indeed, Americans who did take Saudi money – including academic institutions and non-governmental organizations – were often pilloried as tools of the Arabs, with the Israel Lobby and its propagandists raising the political cost of accepting Saudi largesse so high that many people and institutions shied away.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Apr 15
     
    Thanks to Marbux we have this stunning summary explaining how Israel and Saudi Arabia are working together to stop Iran and the Shiite Crescent from taking over the Middle East and establishing an oil rich Shiite Caliphate. ........... "New Terrorist Gains Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies, along with Turkey, are also ramping up support in Syria for Al-Qaeda's Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Flush with jihadist reinforcements, the two terrorist organizations have seized new territory in recent weeks, including the Islamic State creating a humanitarian crisis by attacking a Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus. All of these Saudi actions have drawn minimal criticism from mainstream U.S. media and political circles, in part, because the Saudis now have the protection of the Israel Lobby, which has kept American attention on the supposed threat from Iran, including allegedly controversial statements from Iranian leaders about their insistence that economic sanctions be lifted once the nuclear agreement is signed and/or implemented. Neocon warmongers have even been granted space in major U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, to openly advocate for the bombing of Iran despite the risk that destroying Iran's nuclear reactors could inflict both human and environmental devastation. That might serve the Saudi-Israeli interests by forcing Iran to focus exclusively on a domestic crisis but it would amount to a major war crime. [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran."] The strategic benefit for Israel and Saudi Arabia would be that with Iran unable to assist the Iraqis and the Syrians in their desperate struggles against Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the Sunni jihadists might well be hoisting the black flag of their dystopian philosophy over Damascus, if not Baghdad. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism."] Beyond the slaughter of innocents that would follow
Paul Merrell

US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose

must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
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  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia Replaces Key Official in Effort to Arm Syria Rebels - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...702303775504579392942097203608

war & peace Syria Saudis Bandar bin-Nayef MIteb

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has sidelined its veteran intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as leader of the kingdom's efforts to arm and fund Syrian rebels, replacing him with another prince well-regarded by U.S. officials for his successes fighting al-Qaeda, Saudi royal advisers said this week. The change holds promise for a return to smoother relations with the U.S., and may augur a stronger Saudi effort against militants aligned with al Qaeda who have flocked to opposition-held Syrian territory during that country's three-year war, current and former U.S. officials said.
  • Saudi Arabia has sidelined its veteran intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as leader of the kingdom's efforts to arm and fund Syrian rebels, replacing him with another prince well-regarded by U.S. officials for his successes fighting al-Qaeda, Saudi royal advisers said this week. The change holds promise for a return to smoother relations with the U.S., and may augur a stronger Saudi effort against militants aligned with al Qaeda who have flocked to opposition-held Syrian territory during that country's three-year war, current and former U.S. officials said.
  • Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who has won praise in Washington for his counterterror work against al Qaeda in Yemen and elsewhere, is now a main figure in carrying out Syria policy, a royal adviser and a security analyst briefed by Saudi officials said Tuesday. Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, Saudi King Abdullah's son and head of the Saudi National Guard, has also assumed a bigger share of responsibility for the kingdom's policy towards Syria, the advisers said. A Saudi analyst who serves as adviser to top royals said the changes signaled the kingdom would also now emphasize diplomatic means, including outreach to and pressure on Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the main backers of Mr. Assad's regime.
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  • "Prince Miteb and Mohammed bin Nayef, they are in charge," the adviser said. The world will see a "new strategy for Syria—quieter, more open, not too extreme. There will be more politics to it, and probably much less military." U.S. officials said Prince Mohammed enjoys good relations with Secretary of State John Kerry and CIA Director John Brennan. The latter first met the prince in 1999, shortly before he left Saudi Arabia after serving as the CIA station chief there. The officials also credit the prince with providing intelligence that foiled at least two al Qaeda bomb plots against Western targets.
  • The changes put the Syria efforts in the hands of princes who are believed to have been among the most cautious among top royals about aggressively supporting the rebels. The U.S. wants to see the moderate rebels it supports fight both the regime and radical fighters such as the al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS). Increasingly, this is happening on the ground in Syria. "You could see a smarter Saudi approach, one more targeted on the Assad regime and one also targeting extremists," said Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank. "It seems as if they continue to back the rebels. I think the question is what will that entail."
  • Prince Mohammed, as a leading counterterror figure globally, is in a position to assuage American fears that if the West supplies weapons, they will wind up in the possession of radicals, said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst with the Gulf Research Center who is close to Saudi security and intelligence circles. "The Americans have to change their policy, and Prince Mohammed is the right person to take this mission.…He's the one who can calm their worries," Mr. Alani said. Saudi officials have told their American counterparts that they intend to ramp up their support for the moderate opposition after the collapse of peace talks in Geneva last month. U.S. officials say they haven't given the Saudis a green light to move forward with plans to give shoulder-fired missiles that can bring down jets to hand-picked rebels. But it is unclear to what extent the U.S. would move to block the Saudis if they insisted on going ahead with the deployment of the weapons over Washington's objections.
  • Prince Mohammed's appointment reflects shifting U.S. interests in the conflict, with both the Americans and Saudis increasing their focus on countering al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria. U.S. and European officials fear these groups could plot attacks against the West from camps in Syria and that foreign fighters now in Syria will pose a significant threat when they return home to Europe, the Gulf and the U.S. The U.S. has gradually expanded its involvement in Syria at the urging of the Saudis, though not nearly as quickly as the Saudis had hoped. The Saudis persuaded the CIA to pay salaries to some fighters of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army rebel group, and the payments started about a year ago.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 14
     
    Bandar Bush exits, stage right, as the Obama Administration scrambles for realignment in the Mideast. 
Gary Edwards

EXCLUSIVE: Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...168135

Syria

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Sep 13
     
    "Ghouta, Syria - As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week's chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit. ........ continued ............... Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much. The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad's guilt was "a judgment … already clear to the world." However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack. "My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry," said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta. Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a "tube-like structure" while others were like a "huge gas bottle." Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels. A
Paul Merrell

Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...-for-chemical-weapons-in-syria

war & peace Syria WMD sarin Damascus whodunnit Saudis

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • On 21 August 2013, the Syrian Arab Army launched a major military campaign in Damascus. The campaign, called “Operation Shield of the Capital”, was the largest military operation of the Syrian Arab Army in the Damascus region since the beginning of the war in 2011.
  • Although U.S. Intelligence reports repeatedly stressed that the opposition was incapable of launching a major, well coordinated attack, the Syrian Army in Damascus was confronted with an organized fighting force of 25.000 men under arms. The Saudi Arabia backed Jihadist front had amassed 25.000 fighters, organized in 13 battalions or kitab, to to launch a major assault against the capital Damascus. Most of the battalions belonged to Jabhat al-Nusrah and Liwa-al-Islam. The other battalions that took part in the campaign, were the Abou Zhar al-Ghaffari, al-Ansar, al-Mohajereen, Daraa al-Sham, Harun al-Rashid, Issa bin Mariam, Sultan Mohammad al-Fatih, Syouf al-Haqq, the Glory of the Caliphate, the Jobar Martyrs. During the night of 20 to 21 August and during the early morning hours of 21 August, the Syrian Arab Army broke through the insurgent lines in the area near the Jobar entrance. The breakthrough resulted in a collapse of the jihadists defensive positions and to a crushing and decisive strategic defeat of the Jabhat al-Nusrah led brigades.
  • Loosing Jobar effectively cut off the insurgents connection to the Jordanian border town of Al-Mafraq, the most important logistical base for the insurgents as well as for Saudi Arabia and the United States in Jordan. Al-Mafraq was already used as a major staging ground for the two failed attempts to conquer the city of Homs in June and July 2012. In 2012 al-Mafraq became the staging ground for some 40.000 fighters; more than 20.000 of them fought under the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was under the command of Abdelhakim Belhadj and his second in command, Mahdi al-Harati. The CIA maintains a station, US Special Forces (JSOC) train insurgents, and several other US institutions are present in al-Mafraq. The point is of particular importance with regards to the visit of the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Jordan, which will be detailed below. Al-Mafraq has been the major transit point for Saudi and U.S. arms shipments since 2012, and the delivery of advanced Saudi and U.S. weapons to the insurgents since early August 2013.
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  • The collapse of the insurgent front prompted the front commanders, most of which work in liaison to U.S. Special Forces, to deploy an elite force that should prevent the Syrian Army, at all costs, from gaining access to the Jobar Entrance, and from gaining control over the Jobar area. The majority of the insurgent crack forces came from Liwa-al-Islam with some additional troops from Jabhat al-Nusrah. The commanding officer of the elite forces was a Saudi national who is known by the name Abu Ayesha, whom eyewitnesses from Ghouta later identified as Abu Abdul-Moneim. Abdul-Moneim had established a cache of weapons, some of which had a tube-like structure, and others which looked like big gas bottles. The cache was located in a tunnel in the Eastern Ghouta district of Damascus. Reports about this tunnel and the weapons cache emerged in international media, after the son of Abdul-Moneim and 12 other fighters lost their lives there, because they mishandled improvised chemical weapons and caused a leak in one of them. Besides Abu Abdul-Moneim, the supreme leader of the Liwa-al-Islam and commander of their chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush took personal charge of the elite troops and chemical weapons specialists who were operating under his direct command. Liwa-al-Islam has, along with other al-Qaeda brigades, the capability to manufacture and launch primitive, but none the less very deadly chemical weapons. The chemical weapons which Zahran Alloush had delivered to Damascus were most likely from al-Qaeda’s (ISIL) chemical weapons stockpiles in Iraq.
  • In early September 2013, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif stated, that Iran had sent a memo to the White House via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. Tehran had reportedly informed the USA that handmade articles for chemical weapons, including Sarin gas, were being transferred to Syria. The White House failed to respond. Having to hold the Jobar Entrance and the Jobar district of Damascus “at any cost to maintain any hopes of launching a successful, major military assault on Damascus”, the insurgent commanders decided to launch a chemical weapons attack to halt the advance of the Syrian Arab Army. The political and military opposition and core members of the international alliance behind them had already decided that chemical weapons should be used in August – September. The large scale use of chemical weapons should justify renewed calls for a military intervention. Intelligence about this decision transpired in June.  nsnbc international issued several reports in late June and early July, warning that the insurgents would use large scale chemical weapons attacks in August or September.
  • The decision to launch the chemical weapon on 21 August was most likely based on two considerations. That the use of chemical weapons was already planned. That the Jobar Entrance should be defended at all costs. The final decision, made by Zahran Alloush may in fact have been predetermined together with his U.S. – Saudi liaison officers. Launching a chemical weapons attack would allow the USA, UK and France, to call for military strikes against Syria and to turn the tide. Also, Russian and Syrian intelligence sources described the weapons which were used in the attack as rockets which were altered so as to carry chemicals, launched by Liwa-al-Islam. The projectiles were most likely fired from a flatbed.
  • There is a growing and substantial amount of evidence that indicates direct U.S. and Saudi involvement in the chemical weapons attack. To begin with one merely has to answer the fundamental question “Who Benefits”, and the answer is definitely not “the Syrian government”. In fact, the  Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) claims that it has intercepted phone calls between Syrian officers and the Syrian High Command. The BND is convinced that none of the Syrian forces have used a chemical weapon. Leaving alone any moral considerations, the domestic and international repercussions were foreseeable and there would not have been any strategic benefit for the Syrian Army or the government.
  • Also, the involvement of Saudi Arabia ultimately points towards Washington and the White House. The involvement of Liwa-al-Islam in the chemical weapons attack establishes a strong chain of circumstantial evidence to the Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The supreme leader of Liwa-al-Islam and commander of the groups’ chemical weapons specialists, Zahran Alloush, has been working for the then Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki al-Faisal in both Afghanistan and Yemen in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, Alloush was involved in the Salafist – Wahabbist terrorist networks in Syria which led to his arrest by Syrian intelligence. He was released in early of 2011, when the Assad administration granted a general amnesty. Immediately after his March 2011 release from prison, Zahran Alloush began receiving substantial funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence, which enabled him to establish Liwa-al-Islam as a de facto Saudi Arabia sponsored mercenary brigade under the auspices of the Saudi Interior Ministry.
  • Saudi funding enabled Alloush to establish the Liwa-al-Islam as a major fighting force in Syria. The group gained fame due to risky, high-profile attacks. On 8 July 2012, the group carried out a bomb attack against the headquarters of Syria’s National Security Council in Rawda Square, Damascus. The group succeeded in assassinating several high profile members of Syria’s security establishment, including the Deputy Minister of Defense and brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, Assaf Shawkat, Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Hassan Turkmani, a former Defense Minister and military adviser to then Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15
     
    One I had missed before. Whodunnit on the Ghouta, Syria sarin gas attack, right down to the unit commander, a Saudi intelligence asset working with a U.S. Special Forces unit, both controlled by the U.S.-led command and control center in Jordan.   
Paul Merrell

Explosive Saudi 9/11 Evidence Still Ignored By Media - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

whowhatwhy.org/...1-evidence-still-ignored-media

war & peace 9-11 Saudi-involvement

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Times goes on to say that Moussaoui’s testimony, if found to be factually accurate, could change our understanding of Saudi Arabia and its relationship to 9/11: [T]he extent and nature of Saudi involvement in Al Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the Sept. 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute. *** That may be so, but the Times, like the rest of the traditional media, has ignored earlier evidence of deep Saudi royal ties to the 9/11 attacks—evidence that isn’t dependent on a man whose sanity has been questioned. Back in 2011, a small non-profit news outfit in South Florida, the Broward Bulldog, which does primarily local stories, published an article that also appeared in a major traditional newspaper, the Miami Herald. Despite the story’s explosive content, it was widely ignored.
  • That article revealed that a well-heeled Saudi family, living in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida, had direct connections to the hijackers. Phone records documented communication, dating back more than a year, between this Saudi family and the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta, his hijack pilots and 11 of the other hijackers. In addition, records from the guard house at the gated community showed Atta and other hijackers had visited the house.
  • The family left the country abruptly just before the 9/11 attacks. Family members abandoned enough valuable possessions—such as three cars—to testify to the speed of their departure. The article also revealed that the FBI had quietly investigated the family and documented numerous interactions between them and the alleged hijackers. They, however, neglected to tell Congressional investigators and the evidence didn’t appear in the 9/11 Commission Report. You might think these revelations would attract widespread attention, considering that 15 of the 19 purported hijackers were Saudi citizens. Yet the Bulldog story generated barely a blip.
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  • Next, our small non-profit news outfit, WhoWhatWhy, which covers primarily international and national investigative stories, took the reporting to another level. Our story established that the owner of the house, Esam Ghazzawi, was a direct lieutenant to a powerful member of the Saudi royal family who’d learned to fly in Florida years earlier. Ghazzawi was director of the UK division of EIRAD Trading and Contracting Co. Ltd., which among other things, holds the Saudi franchise for many multinational brands including UPS. Ghazzawi’s boss, the chairman of EIRAD Holding Co. Ltd., is Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud.
  • A fighter pilot who also flew on a Space Shuttle mission, Prince Sultan is the son of the new Saudi king, Salman. WhoWhatWhy’s reporting raised serious questions about whether high-ranking Saudis were directly involved with the 9/11 operation, and whether the U.S. government covered up what it knew. WhoWhatWhy paid a major news distribution outfit to send our story to thousands of news outlets, major and minor, in the United States. Again, the silence was deafening. *** The debate about Moussaoui’s newly released testimony centers on whether he can be trusted. But there is no debate about the Sarasota evidence we uncovered. We’re still waiting for the Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, to acknowledge that material. Whatever happened in Florida, whatever the veracity of Moussaoui’s claims, anyone with an open mind will smell enough smoke to wonder whose interests are being served by pretending there’s no fire in the Saudi-9/11 connection.
  • For more on the Bush family’s relationship to the Saudi royal family, see Russ Baker’s book, Family of Secrets.
Gary Edwards

Benghazi report: Trinkets of treason - 1 views

canadafreepress.com/...54740

Banksters-of-America Saudi-Arabia Saudi-Globalist

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13
     
    The truth is dribbling out, thn=anks to Douglas J. Hagmann and Canada Free Press .....................  We've been aligned and hostage to the Saudi Royal Family ever since FDR met with King Ibn Saud, Feb 14th, 1945 near the end of WWII.  It was at this meeting that FDR promised protection for the Saudi family in exchange for the right to develop Saudi oil and sell that oil exclusively in dollars.  Hence the "petro dollar" - backed by Saudi oil instead of GOLD. That agreement, and our subsequent history of our military and state departments acting to further Saudi interests has dominated America.  Our troops and military resources ae mercenaries fighting for Saudi dominance of the Globalist ruling elites.  Our politicians are bought and paid for by the Saudi Globalist Alliance.  They have sold their souls for power and money, with the destruction of the USA Constitution the only thing standing between the Globalist and their quest to rule the world. excerpt: We are witnessing one of the biggest government cover-ups since Watergate. A cover-up that involves murder, arms trafficking, and lies by high ranking officials under oath. It involves the murderous attacks in Benghazi, and congressional investigators just released a 46-page interim progress report that at least exposes Hillary Rodham Clinton and the White House lying under oath. Where's the accountability? Where's the outrage? Where's the media? A 46-page interim progress report of an ongoing investigation across five House Committees by the U.S. House of Representatives was released on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. The executive summary states that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton signed off on a reduction of diplomatic security forces suggesting that this reduction of security was, in large part, to blame for the attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.  The report emphasizes that this is "inconsistent" with her sworn testimony of January 23, 2013. Simply stated, Hillary Rod
Gary Edwards

Doug Hagmann: The Embassy Threat, Proxy War - America Conservative 2 Conservative - 0 views

americac2c.com/...n-the-embassy-threat-proxy-war

Benghazi Syria WWIII

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 13
     
    The real story behind Benghazi, Syria and WWIII. excerpt: "Benghazi exposed .... It was shortly after the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi that I wrote in explicit detail the actual reason for that attack. Thanks to a highly placed source in the intelligence venue, readers learned the truth ten months before the corporate media finally acknowledged that the compound in Benghazi was the operations center for a large CIA weapons smugglin... where Libya was being used as a weaponsstorage depot to arm the anti-Assad "rebels." The attack at Benghazi was described by this administration and the Clinton State Department as a spontaneous protest over an internet video, although that narrative was proven to be a lie. It was a lie they continued to stick with to hide the fact that the U.S., in conjunction with other NATO allies, were actually doing the work of Saudi Arabia. But why - who benefits? To understand the answer to that question, we must look at what Saudi Arabia is and how the Saudi royals came to power. Much like the U.S., the nation of Saudi Arabia itself is a captured operation, established by a cabal of globalists for the sake of oil. It would be helpful to understand the role Aramco and other oil interests played in the establishment of the Saudi power structure. As the Obama regime continued forward to advance this Saudi-globalist agenda, Russia's Putin warned the U.S. that the insanity of destabilizing Syria was not in their best interests, and certainly not in ours. When the warnings were not heeded, proxy groups for Russia, Syria and Iran, in the form of Ansar al Sharia and AQIM launched a deadly assault on the CIA operations center in Benghazi. The continued pressure of possibly exposing the true nature of the activities in Benghazi, from the illegal arms trafficking in violation of international law to the attack itself, became a serious annoyance to the globalist planners and the Obama subjects to the Saudi royals. The assistanc
Paul Merrell

The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syria - 0 views

www.boilingfrogspost.com/...-stupid-saudi-us-deal-on-syria

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy war by proxy Ukraine Syria pipelinestan-war

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia. One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen 20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.
  • What has happened is that the long-time US ally inside OPEC, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deep discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC, with Iran following suit and panic selling short in oil futures markets. The Saudis are targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major Asian customer, China where it is reportedly offering its crude for a mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around $100. [1] That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely.
  • The US-Saudi oil price manipulation is aimed at destabilizing several strong opponents of US globalist policies. Targets include Iran and Syria, both allies of Russia in opposing a US sole Superpower. The principal target, however, is Putin’s Russia, the single greatest threat today to that Superpower hegemony. The strategy is similar to what the US did with Saudi Arabia in 1986 when they flooded the world with Saudi oil, collapsing the price to below $10 a barrel and destroying the economy of then-Soviet ally, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, ultimately, of the Soviet economy, paving the way for the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, the hope is that a collapse of Russian oil revenues, combined with select pin-prick sanctions designed by the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will dramatically weaken Putin’s enormous domestic support and create conditions for his ultimate overthrow. It is doomed to fail for many reasons, not the least, because Putin’s Russia has taken major strategic steps together with China and other nations to lessen its dependence on the West. In fact the oil weapon is accelerating recent Russian moves to focus its economic power on national interests and lessen dependence on the Dollar system. If the dollar ceases being the currency of world trade, especially oil trade, the US Treasury faces financial catastrophe. For this reason, I call the Kerry-Abdullah oil war a very stupid tactic.
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  • According to Rashid Abanmy, President of the Riyadh-based Saudi Arabia Oil Policies and Strategic Expectations Center, the dramatic price collapse is being deliberately caused by the Saudis, OPEC’s largest producer. The public reason claimed is to gain new markets in a global market of weakening oil demand. The real reason, according to Abanmy, is to put pressure on Iran on her nuclear program, and on Russia to end her support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria.[2] When combined with the financial losses of Russian state natural gas sales to Ukraine and prospects of a US-instigated cutoff of the transit of Russian gas to the huge EU market this winter as EU stockpiles become low, the pressure on oil prices hits Moscow doubly. More than 50% of Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas.
  • The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia. One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen 20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Dec 14
     
    One I missed from late October.
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia confirms plans to send troops to Syria | Middle East | News | The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...-troops-to-syria-a6867636.html

war & peace Syria Saudis invasion

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has confirmed it is planning to deploy ground troops to Syria to fight Isis. The announcement, reported by the Saudi owned news organisation al-Arabiya, comes after several weeks of rumours the Gulf state would lead troops in Syria.  A ground operation will likely anger President Bashar al-Assad, as well as the governments of Russia and Iran - who will see the intervention as an attempt to slow the progress of the Syrian government against rebels, according to Conflict News. It is currently unclear whether Saudi Arabia will deploy ground troops or call upon their newly-formed anti-terror coalition, made up of over 30 countries. 
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 16
     
    "Saudi Arabia has previously threatened to remove President Assad "by force" if he refuses to give up his power.  The kingdom has engaged in a number of proxy wars against Iran, such as the one currently raging in Yemen.  The US has previously indicated it is in favour of greater military involvement by the Gulf states.  Some UK officials have argued a Saudi presence in Syria may curb the Russians' increasingly aggressive military action, due to a desire not to damage commercial and diplomatic ties between the two nations."
Paul Merrell

Syrian Air Strike Exterminates Commander Behind 2013 Chemical Weapons Attack in Ghouta ... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...mical-weapons-attack-in-ghouta

war & peace Syria Alloush Jaysh al-Islam Liwa al-Islam Ghouta sarin false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Zahran Alloush, the commander of the Jaysh al-Islam alliance was killed in a Damascus suburb. August 21, 2013 the Saudi intelligence asset Alloush was commanding Liwa-al-Islam when he gave the order to launch the chemical weapons attack against the East Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Zahran Alloush has been on the payroll of Saudi intelligence since the 1980s.
  • The Central Command of the Syrian Arab Army confirmed that it successfully launched an air strike in the Damascus suburb of Otaya, targeting and killing several Jihadist commanders. Among them the leader of Jaysh al-Islam, Zahran Alloush. Jaysh al-Islam is an alliance of several Jihadist militia, including Liwa-al-Islam. Jaysh al-Islam is allied with the Syrian Al-Qaeda Franchise Jabhat Al-Nusrah. An in-depth investigation by nsnbc international, in 2013, concluded that Zahran Alloush was the commander who gave the direct order to launch the chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta on August 21, 2013.
  • The investigation also concluded that command responsibility for Alloush’s decision led directly to the U.S.’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House, and to the Saudi government. Alloush would also be in control over choosing the “security guards” UN inspectors had to submit to while gathering evidence after the chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta. (see details and names in the report). Zahran Alloush, Liwa-al-Islam and Saudi intelligence also played central roles in the attempt to obstruct Syria’s decommissioning of chemical weapons by launching attacks against chemical weapons transports. The information about these transports was highly classified, leading the Syrian government to the conclusion that Saudi intelligence provided information to Liwa-al-Islam. Zahran Alloush was since the 1990s involved in the Salafist – Wahabbist terrorist networks in Syria which led to his arrest by Syrian intelligence. He was released in early of 2011, when the Assad administration granted a general amnesty. Immediately after his March 2011 release from prison, Zahran Alloush began receiving substantial funds and weapons from Saudi intelligence, which enabled him to establish Liwa-al-Islam as a de facto Saudi Arabia sponsored mercenary brigade under the auspices of the Saudi Interior Ministry.
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  • The Saudi intelligence assets Alloush and Liwa-al-Islam also played crucial roles in the demise of the predominantly Qatari and Turkish backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other, predominantly Qatari-backed insurgencies. In June 2013 in the Jobar district of Damascus, for example, Alloush withdrew his Liwa-al-Islam troops during a major battle with the Syrian Arab Army without announcing the sudden withdrawal to the Qatar-sponsored First Brigade and the Liwa Jaish al-Muslimeen. Both brigades were literally wiped out by the Syrian Army. The air strike that exterminated Zahran Alloush also exterminated one of the primary field commanders who were responsible for the transition from the primacy of Muslim Brotherhood linked insurgencies to Al-Qaeda-linked insurgencies in the Syrian theater. That includes the primacy of Jabhat al-Nusrah, Jaysh al-Islam, Liwa-al-Islam, and ultimately also the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a.k.a. ISIL, ISIS or Daesh.
Paul Merrell

Land Destroyer: Grisly Peshawar Slaughter - Who Created Taliban, Who Still Funds Them? - 0 views

landdestroyer.blogspot.dk/...war-slaughter-who-created.html

war & peace Taliban U.S.-foreign-policy U.S.-funding Saudis UAE Qatar must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Taliban militants stormed an army public school in the northern city of Peshawar, killing over 100, including many young students. It is believed up to 10 militants took part in the attack, dressed as soldiers to first infiltrate the school's grounds before beginning the attack.  While the details of the attack are forthcoming, the background of the Taliban and the persistent threat it represents is well established, though often spun across the Western media.  Who Put the Taliban into Power? Who is Funding them Now?  In the 1980's the United States, Saudi Arabia, and elements within the then Pakistani government funneled millions of dollars, weapons, equipment, and even foreign fighters into Afghanistan in a bid to oust Soviet occupiers. Representatives of this armed proxy front would even visit the White House, meeting President Ronald Reagan personally. 
  • In 1997, Taliban representatives would find themselves in Texas, discussing a possible oil pipeline with energy company Unocal (now merged with Chevron). The BBC would report in a 1997 article titled, "Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline," that: A senior delegation from the Taleban movement in Afghanistan is in the United States for talks with an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company's headquarters in Sugarland, Texas.
  • However, it was already claimed by the US that the Taliban had been "harboring" Osama Bin Laden since 1996, and had branded the Taliban's human rights record as "despicable." The Telegraph in an artile titled, "Oil barons court Taliban in Texas," would report (emphasis added):  The Unocal group has one significant attraction for the Taliban - it has American government backing. At the end of their stay last week, the Afghan visitors were invited to Washington to meet government officials. The US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban's policies against women and children "despicable", appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract. The Taliban is likely to have been impressed by the American government's interest as it is anxious to win international recognition. So far, it has been recognised only by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is clear that to the West, as they were during the proxy war against the Soviets, and during attempts to forge an oil pipeline across Afghan territory, the Taliban remain a tool, not an ally - to be used and abused whenever and however necessary to advance Wall Street and Washington's agenda - a self-serving Machiavellian agenda clearly devoid of principles. 
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  • The Global Post would reveal in a 2009 investigative report that the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan was mostly funded via redirected US aid. The report titled, "Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don’t want to know," would state:  It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country. The report would also reveal that Taliban members were in the capital city of Kabul, directly involved in redirecting the funds, apparently under the nose of occupying NATO forces:
  • But the narrative of the "accidental" funding of Taliban militants in Afghanistan is betrayed when examining their counterparts in Pakistan and their source of funding. While the US funds roughly a billion USD a year to the Taliban in Afghanistan "accidentally," their allies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia are confirmed to be funding the Taliban in Pakistan.In the Guardian's article, "WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists," the US State Department even acknowledges that Saudi Arabia is indeed funding terrorism in Pakistan:   Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton."More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups," says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan."Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," she said.Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
  • Pakistani terror organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi - which maintains ties to the Taliban - has also been financially linked to the Persian Gulf monarchies. Stanford University's "Mapping Militant Organizations: Lashkar-e-Jhangvi," states under "External Influences:"  LeJ has received money from several Persian Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates[25] These countries funded LeJ and other Sunni militant groups primarily to counter the rising influence of Iran's revolutionary Shiism.   Astonishingly, despite these admission, the US still works politically, financially, economically, and even militarily in tandem with these very same state-sponsors of rampant, global terrorism. In fact, Wall Street and Washington are among the chief architects and beneficiaries of this global terrorism. 
  • Just as in Libya and Syria where the US and its Persian Gulf allies funded terrorist fronts in bids to overthrow each nation's respective governments, this unholy alliance is working in Pakistan to create a militant front with which to menace political groups in Islamabad and reorder the country to reflect and serve their collective interests. And just as in Syria now, where the US feigns to be locked in battle with terrorists of their own creation, the fact that the US is funding their own enemy billions of dollars while allegedly fighting them in Afghanistan creates a perpetual conflict justifying their continued intervention in the region - overtly and covertly.  When a terrorist attack is carried out in Pakistan by the "Taliban," it must then be looked at through this lens of global geopolitical reality. Attempts by the Western media to reduce this recent attack to mere "extremism," preying on global audiences emotionally, provides impunity for the state-sponsors of the Taliban - those funding, arming, and directing their operations across the region, and then benefiting from their horrific consequences.It appears, just as in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, the West and its allies are waging a proxy war in Pakistan as well. Attempts to exploit the tragedy in Peshawar compound this insidious agenda. Those across Pakistan's political landscape must understand that their is no line these foreign interests are unwilling to cross in achieving their agenda - be it a line crossed at a perceived ally's expense, or a perceived enemy's expense. 
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 14
     
    How to fight the "Long War?" Well, you need a constant supply of new enemies to fight ...
Paul Merrell

Saudi Arabia willing to send ground troops to Syria to fight ISIS | News , Middle East ... - 0 views

www.dailystar.com.lb/...-operation-in-syria-saudi.ashx

war & peace Syria Saudis ISIL boots-on-the-ground

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia said Thursday it was ready to participate in any ground operations in Syria if the U.S.-led alliance decides to start such operations, an adviser to the Saudi defense minister said. "The kingdom is ready to participate in any ground operations that the coalition (against Islamic State) may agree to carry out in Syria," Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri, who is also the spokesman for the Saudi-led Arab coalition in Yemen, told the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV in an interview. Asiri said Saudi Arabia had been an active member of the U.S.-led coalition that had been fighting ISIS in Syria since 2014, and had carried out more than 190 aerial missions.
  • He said Saudi Arabia, which has been leading Arab military operations against the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen, believed that to win against ISIS, the coalition needed to combine aerial operations with ground operations. "If there was a consensus from the leadership of the coalition, the kingdom is willing to participate in these efforts because we believe that aerial operations are not the ideal solution and there must be a twin mix of aerial and ground operations," Asiri said. He didn't elaborate on how many troops the kingdom would send. Saudi Arabia is deeply involved in Yemen's civil war, where it is fighting Iranian-backed Shiite rebels.
  • Asked about the comments at a briefing, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the coalition was generally supportive of having partners contribute more in the fight against ISIS but he had not seen the Saudi proposal. "I would not want to comment specifically on this until we've had a chance to review it," he said. The United States is scheduled to convene a meeting of defense ministers from countries fighting ISIS in Brussels this month.
Paul Merrell

Embracing the Saudi War on Yemen | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...bracing-the-saudi-war-on-yemen

war & peace Yemen U.S.-foreign-policy Saudis Iran

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • As the humanitarian crisis in Yemen worsens, the Obama administration seems less concerned about the plight of the desperate Yemeni people than the feelings of the Saudi royals who have spent the last month indiscriminately bombing a nearly defenseless Yemen, using high-tech U.S. jets and bombs to reportedly kill hundreds of civilians and damage its ancient cities.On Friday, the Obama administration took credit for blocking nine Iranian ships from reaching Yemen with relief supplies, claiming that the ships may have carried weapons that the Yemenis could use in their civil war or to defend against Saudi attacks. President Barack Obama had dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier fleet to the Yemeni coast to enforce an embargo that has helped the Saudis seal off the country from outside help.
  • A person closely involved with the Yemen crisis told me that the Iranian ships carried food and medicine, not weapons, but turned back to avoid the risk and humiliation of being boarded by the U.S. Navy. Meanwhile, Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, is facing shortages of basic supplies since the Saudis have cut off normal trade routes into Yemen.Yet, despite the suffering of Yemen, the U.S. government appears more worried about the sensitivities of Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries in the region. A Defense Department official, speaking anonymously, told the New York Times that it was “important that the Saudis know that we have an arm around their shoulders.”
  • Defense Department officials also acknowledged that they didn’t know what type of cargo was being transported aboard the Iranian ships, the Times reported. Though the Obama administration had touted the possibility that the Iranian ships carried weapons, the decision by Iran to avoid a confrontation may have reflected Tehran’s desire not to worsen relations with the United States and thus disrupt fragile negotiations over international guarantees to ensure that its nuclear program remains peaceful.But the losers in this military/diplomatic maneuvering appear to be the Yemenis who, in effect, face a Saudi strategy of starving the country into submission with the help of the United States. While U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power built her public image as a “humanitarian interventionist” asserting a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations, she has said little about the Saudi role in Yemen’s humanitarian crisis.
Paul Merrell

Parliament calls for neutrality in Yemen conflict - Pakistan - DAWN.COM - 0 views

www.dawn.com/...r-neutrality-in-yemen-conflict

war & peace Yemen Pakistan Saudis neutrality

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • ISLAMABAD: On day five of the joint parliamentary session on Yemen, lawmakers approved a draft resolution proposing that Pakistan "should maintain neutrality in the conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis”. Although implying that Islamabad should refrain from assisting Riyadh militarily, the resolution added that Pakistan should stand shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia to protect the latter's territorial integrity. No direct clarity was provided on whether Pakistan would, or would not involve itself militarily at any point.The lawmakers okayed the resolution unanimously on the fifth day of the joint parliamentary session on the Saudi-led offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
  • The session was summoned after the Saudi government approached Islamabad for Pakistani warplanes, warships and soldiers to assist in the conflict and join the Saudi-led military coalition that began conducting air strikes last month against Houthi forces in Yemen.Expressing “unequivocal support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, the resolution that the lawmakers agreed upon stated that “in case of any violation of its territorial integrity or any threat to Haramain Sharifain, Pakistan will stand shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia and its people”.
  • It further said that the crisis in Yemen could “plunge the region into turmoil”, calling upon the warring factions in Yemen to resolve their differences "peacefully and through dialogue". The resolution noted that while the war in Yemen was not sectarian in nature, it had the potential of turning into a sectarian conflict and thereby having a critical fallout in the region, including within Pakistan. It added that the government should initiate steps to move the UN Security Council and the OIC to bring about an immediate ceasefire in Yemen.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15
     
    Well there it is. Saudi Arabia will need to send its own troops into Yemen or depend on mercenary forces for boots on the ground in Yemen. The Saudis and neocons in the U.S. State Dept. must be spitting nails. Note particularly the Parliamentary call for Pakistan to press for a U.N. Security Council-ordered cease-fire. Would the Obama Administration dare to publicly oppose it? 
Paul Merrell

The Missing Pages of the 9/11 Report - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...-pages-of-the-9-11-report.html

war & peace 9-11 28-pages Saudis

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The lead author of the Senate’s report on 9/11 says it’s time to reveal what’s in the 28 pages that were redacted from it, which he says will embarrass the Saudis.A story that might otherwise have slipped away in a morass of conspiracy theories gained new life Wednesday when former Sen. Bob Graham headlined a press conference on Capitol Hill to press for the release of 28 pages redacted from a Senate report on the 9/11 attacks. And according to Graham, the lead author of the report, the pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the 9/11 hijackers.
  • “This may seem stale to some but it’s as current as the headlines we see today,” Graham said, referring to the terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris. The pages are being kept under wraps out of concern their disclosure would hurt U.S. national security. But as chairman of the Senate Select Committee that issued the report in 2002, Graham argues the opposite is true, and that the real “threat to national security is non-disclosure.” Graham said the redacted pages characterize the support network that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, and if that network goes unchallenged, it will only flourish. He said that keeping the pages classified is part of “a general pattern of coverup” that for 12 years has kept the American people in the dark. It is “highly improbable” the 19 hijackers acted alone, he said, yet the U.S. government’s position is “to protect the government most responsible for that network of support.”   The Saudis know what they did, Graham continued, and the U.S. knows what they did, and when the U.S. government takes a position of passivity, or actively shuts down inquiry, that sends a message to the Saudis. “They have continued, maybe accelerated their support for the most extreme form of Islam,” he said, arguing that both al Qaeda and ISIS are “a creation of Saudi Arabia.”
  • It all signals that the decades-long bipartisan policy of always keeping the Saudis happy, and never rocking the boat, may be coming to an end. In Sarasota, Florida, a federal judge is reviewing 80,000 pages of documents that relate to a prominent Saudi family and its extensive contacts with three of the hijackers when they attended flight school in Sarasota.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When the 800-page Senate report was made public in 2002, Graham recalled that he and Republican Sen. Richard Shelby were “shocked to see an important chapter in the report has been redacted.” All but three Senate Democrats, joined by one Republican and one independent, signed a letter calling on President Bush to declassify the 28-page section detailing the role of foreign governments in bankrolling the 9/11 attackers. “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” the redacted portion, begins midway through the report, on page 395. Despite the title, then-CIA Director Porter Goss and the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission all called for it to be declassified, yet it has stayed secret for a dozen years, fueling conspiracy theories that Graham says can only be put to rest by its release.   
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15
     
    Graham went farther than before, now saying that the deleted section is about Saudi Arabia's involvement in the 9-11 attack. But is this all to reinforce the narrative of 19 Islamic hijackers -- none of whom had the necessary pilot skills, flying airliners into targets on 9-11? Why no investigation of Israeli and U.S. government participation in the attack?  
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