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Late in the day of Sept. 11 10 years ago, someone asked me who I thought the United States would blame for what had just happened in New York and Washington.
Without thinking about it too much I replied: "They'll attack Afghanistan, but they should bomb Riyadh."
A decade later I don't see much reason to change my off-the-cuff judgment that it is in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, that the real source of global Islamic radicalism and support for terrorism is to be found.
And it is not just that the Saudi royal family and government have financed and encouraged the worldwide export of their brutally puritanical Wahhabist form of Islam.
Members of the Saudi royal family and government were directly involved in financing and facilitating the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.
Three senior royal princes have been named by one of bin Laden's lieutenants as key supporters of al-Qaida and the attacks on New York and Washington.
All three died within one week in July 2002. The implication is that they were put to death by Saudi authorities in an attempt to placate the U.S. administration and minimize damage to relations with American officials.
Details of the Saudi involvement with al-Qaida, bin Laden and 9/11 were first set out by author Gerald Posner in his 2003 book Why America Slept. Many other writers, journalists and filmmakers have added details to the Saudi charge sheet since then.
A new book examining the relationship between Saudi Arabia, the Sept. 11 terrorists and the Bush White House, The Eleventh Day, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, has just been published. One of the things this book takes a close look at is the 28-page section of the 2004 Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, which was censored on the orders of president George W. Bush.
Several newspapers have reported that blanked-out sections of the 396page report dealt with Saudi involvement in the attacks. The censorship of those 28 pages is being continued by the administration of Barack Obama.
Bob Graham, the co-chair of the Congressional committee, is quoted by Summers and Swan as telling them his panel found "that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. It's my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States."
Financial support for bin Laden and his terrorist objectives by elements within the Saudi royal family and government was well known before the 2001 attacks. The CIA noted bin Laden's transition in the 1990s from an ally in the war against the occupation by the Soviet Union of Afghanistan to a freelance sponsor of jihadist terror against the U.S.
But when in 1996 the CIA set up its first unit dedicated entirely to bin Laden and al-Qaida, it got absolutely no cooperation from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, then headed by Prince Turki al-Faisal.
A former head of intelligence for the Taliban, al-Qaida's hosts and protectors in Afghanistan in the 1990s, has testified that in 1998 Prince Turki did a deal with bin Laden.
In return for bin Laden's agreement not to attack Saudi targets, the Saudi government would provide funds for the Taliban and not seek bin Laden's extradition.
In addition, the tens of millions of dollars in Saudi government money being channelled to bin Laden every year would continue.
By late morning on Sept. 11, 2001, it had been established that the attacks on New York and Washington had the hallmarks of a bin Laden, al-Qaida operation. And by the end of the next day, American officials knew that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.
This created panic among the many members of bin Laden's family and the royal family who were in the U.S. at the time. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, the Bush administration allowed four planes to take the Saudis out of the U.S. while all regular flights were still grounded. How many people on these planes might have been useful for American investigators to question and why they were not has never been made clear.
Among those to flee was well-known horse racing enthusiast and owner of Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner War Emblem, Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz.
After senior bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002 he named Prince Ahmed as one of three Saudi princes who had actively supported the 9/11 attacks.
Soon afterward, in July 2002, all three died within a week. Prince Ahmed is said to have died of a heart attack following stomach surgery. Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud supposedly died in a car crash while speeding to Prince Ahmed's funeral. And Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, we are told, died of thirst. By this time the FBI had retraced the steps of the hijackers' lives in the U.S. before the terrorist attacks. The stories of two in particular showed clear involvement by elements in the Saudi government.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, part of the team that crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, arrived in Los Angeles in January 2000.
Over the next 20 months they received Saudi government money and support through two Saudi officials. They were Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat appointed by the Saudi ministry of Islamic affairs to liaise with American Muslims, and Omar al-Bayoumi, an employee of the subsidiary of the Saudi Civil Aviation Administration.
Also involved in supporting the two hijackers was Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexican-born Islamic lecturer now hiding in his family home country, Yemen, who acts as an online recruiter for al-Qaida.
He inspired Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik, the "Christmas Day Bomber" Umar Farouk, and wouldbe Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.
Some of the money paid to Mihdhar and Hazmi while they prepared for 9/11 even came through Princess Haifa al-Faisal - the wife of longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, and close personal friend of both George W. Bush and then CIA director George Tenet, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan.
Prince Bandar is the son of the Saudi Crown Prince and is now the country's defence minister.
jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/9-11-anniversary/Saudi+Arabia+Teflon+kingdom/5382190/story.html#ixzz1Xa9j5P4Y
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