And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  So where did all those Saudi petrodollars come from?

  The U.S. was easily the world’s biggest consumer of oil products. With 5 percent of the world’s population, America consumed 25 percent of its hydrocarbon energy. So by that logic, the U.S. oil industry was also helping to back al Qaeda and eventually ISIS, which Saudi seed money had also helped to create.

  The U.S. had always been in denial about the Saudis’ support of terrorism. In Robert Baer’s book Sleeping with the Devil, he wrote that when he was a CIA station chief in the Mideast, Saudi allegiance to the U.S. went unquestioned. Critical CIA investigations into the Saudi royals were discouraged, and he never even heard CIA officials seriously evaluate a possible Saudi terrorist threat. In his second book, The Devil We Know, Baer described the Bush administration’s willful disregard for the Saudis’ financing of terrorists and their nuclear sponsors.

  Nor had anything changed since 9/11. U.S. politicians and defense contractors were still selling the Saudis hundreds of billions in high-tech weaponry. The Obama administration had single-handedly sold the Saudis over $100 billion worth of cutting-edge weaponry.

  The facts regarding America’s corrupt alliance with the Saudis were painful to contemplate:

  • Saudi Arabia was one of only three nations, pre-9/11, that recognized Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban as a legitimate government.

  • Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, but the Bush team did not demand instant access to their files in Riyadh or the right to immediately interrogate their friends, family, and associates in the Saudi Kingdom. Nor did the Bush administration punish the Saudis for their refusal to cooperate with U.S. agents for their willful obstruction of U.S. justice.

  • Craig Unger documented in House of Bush House of Saud that the two Bush presidents and their close associates pocketed a total of $1.475 billion in Saudi paychecks, donations, and investments. In fact, Unger left out several lucrative payments—since he could not obtain precise figures—so he may have understated the total.

  • The U.S. government blacked out twenty-eight pages on the Saudis’ 9/11 participation in the official Congressional Report on 9/11. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in both parties characterized those deletions as a cover-up. Over a dozen years would pass before Barack Obama would eventually declassify those unredacted pages.

  • After leaving the Senate, former senators Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey filed affidavits in court stating that serious evidence of Saudi involvement in 9/11 had not been pursued. Graham had been chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had held that position on 9/11. He’d also chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11. Kerrey had served on the official 9/11 Commission. They both had detailed knowledge about what the Bush team had hidden from the American public.

  • Senator Graham was especially concerned about evidence that exposed high-level Saudi involvement in 9/11 that the FBI had concealed from the 9/11 Commission. In one instance, a rich Saudi couple in a well-to-do gated Sarasota community had walked away from their lavishly affluent house. They abandoned their opulent furnishings as well: three expensive automobiles, leaving dirty diapers in a bathroom, the running toy-filled pool, food in the refrigerator, mail on the table, and clothes in the closet. They fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia … two weeks before 9/11. The friends they left behind included three of the 9/11 pilots. Mohamed Atta, who had lived nearby, was one of them. Phone records, photographic evidence the security guards had gathered when their car went through the gate, and the guards’ questioning of the passengers—all of it established the Saudi family’s personal relationship with the three 9/11 pilots. They had phoned and visited the couple on a number of occasions. Furthermore, the house’s owner was a wealthy Saudi financier closely connected to the ruling Saudi family, but Bush’s FBI had concealed all this information from the 9/11 Commission.

  • Two days after 9/11, the White House ordered 160 important Saudis flown out of the U.S. before the FBI’s counterterrorism experts could debrief them. Many of these 160 passengers had clear connections to the bin Laden family; two dozen of them were relatives of bin Laden. They flew out of Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Newark, and Tampa. The Tampa flight—at the White House’s request—was airborne at a time when all other private flights in the U.S. were grounded due to 9/11. Fifteen of the Saudis, who flew out of Lexington, Kentucky, left the U.S. in style. Craig Unger reported that their Boeing 727 came equipped with “a master bedroom suite furnished with a large upholstered double bed, a couch, nightstand, and credenza. The master bathroom had a gold-plated sink, double illuminated mirrors, and a bidet. There were brass, gold, and crystal fixtures. The main lounge had a 52-inch projection TV. The plane boasted a six-place conference room and dining room with a mahogany table that had controls for up and down movement.”

  Dan Grossi, a former Tampa police officer, and Manuel Perez, a retired FBI agent, accompanied the passengers on the flight. Perez now says: “The White House, the FAA, and the FBI all said the flight didn’t happen.” Grossi confirmed that Craig Unger’s account of the Tampa flight in House of Bush House of Saud was accurate. However, when The St. Petersburg Times attempted to cover the story thirty-three months later, they reported: “The FAA is still not talking about the flights, referring all questions to the FBI, which isn’t answering anything either. Nor is the 9/11 Commission.”

  The 9/11 Commission ignored the Tampa flight, which was authorized by the White House when all U.S. private flights were still grounded.

  Furthermore, the Tampa International Airport said “its records indicated that no member of its [security] force screened the Lear [jet’s] passengers.”

  Two days after 9/11, they were flying out of the country.

  The contrast between the Bush administration’s treatment of Saudi suspects and those of other Mideast countries was extreme. Unlike those Saudis, who were sneaked out of the U.S. after 9/11, other Middle Easterners—clearly not connected to bin Laden and al Qaeda—were herded up and incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay and INS facilities often for years on end. Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who retired from the U.S. Army in June 2004, reports: “We ended up incarcerating over 46,000 people, less than 10 percent of whom deserved to be incarcerated.”

  In After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, Steve Brill reported:

  “In the hours and days immediately following [the September 11] attacks, attorney General John Ashcroft … directed that FBI and INS agents question anyone they could find with a Muslim-sounding name … in some areas … they simply looked for names in the phone book … Anyone who could be held, even on a minor violation of law or immigration rules, was held under a three-pronged strategy, fashioned by Ashcroft and a close circle of Justice Department deputies including criminal division chief Michael Chertoff, that was intended to exert maximum pressure on these detainees.”

  * * *

  Years After 9/11, al Qaeda Funders Still Operated with Impunity

  Douglas Farah reported in The Washington Post that a full twenty-seven months after 9/11, Saudi charities backing bin Laden—and supposedly shut down—still operated worldwide with impunity. Governments around the globe ignored sanctions designed to halt the flood of cash to al Qaeda, “allowing the terrorist network to retain formidable financial resources.…”

  Businessmen and charities labeled by the U.N. as al Qaeda funders were allowed to run huge global operations and travel unchecked. The General Accounting Office reported U.S. law enforcement was equally in the dark and that the FBI still did not “systematically collect or analyze” data on al Qaeda’s fund-raisers. “The Justice and Treasury departments had fallen more than a year behind in developing plans to attack terrorist financial mechanisms, such as the use of diamonds and gold to hide assets.” The Council on Foreign Relations reported that over six months after 9/11, “Saudi Arabia … ha[d] yet to demand personal
accountability” from its more prominent financiers of terrorism.

  * * *

  • Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told the Saudi people on national television that “Zionism is behind [9/11],” and Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef blamed the rash of al Qaeda attacks on the Israelis—beginning with the Riyadh bombing on May 12, 2003—explaining that “Al-Qaida is backed by Israel and Zionism.”

  • Saudi antipathy toward America forced the U.S. government to urge U.S. citizens to leave Saudi Arabia thirty-two months after 9/11. The largest Western contractor in Saudi Arabia, BAE Systems, had to offer substantial bonuses to its Western employees to stem their exodus from Saudi Arabia, and The Washington Post reported that “97 percent of Saudis view[ed] the United States in a negative light.”

  * * *

  Feeding D.C.’s Greed

  The Saudi royals always knew how the Washington, D.C. game was played: feed the greed of America’s political power brokers. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, had never adopted those economic tactics. He had never sent charming, free-spending, politically astute emissaries to our nation’s capital—such as the ones the Saudis deployed. Had Saddam sent officials to D.C. who lavished massive financial emoluments on Washington’s political elite, the U.S. would have probably erected monuments to him instead of hanging him.

  * * *

  The Saudis also underwrote the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, including the equipment and expertise needed to manufacture fissile nuclear bomb-fuel. They bankrolled Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and its director, A. Q. Khan, often described as “the Father of Pakistan’s atom bomb.” Khan eventually became the world’s most prolific purveyor of black-market nuclear weapons technology in history, offering it to rogue states everywhere—Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, even, some believe, Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India. Reporters would one day baptize Khan “the Johnny Appleseed of Nuclear Proliferation.”

  Another fact of Saudi life, which was seldom publicized in America’s mainstream media, was its religiously inspired savagery. Long before ISIS was born, Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s state religion, had institutionalized all of that terrorist group’s worst abuses—the demonization of art, science, mathematics, archeology, music, journalism, democracy, women, and all non-Wahhabist peoples. The American media pilloried ISIS for its barbaric brand of justice—its amputation of heads, hands, feet, even eyes; its stonings; its interminable floggings, during which they administer as many as a thousand lashes; its subjugation and sequestration of women. Saudi Arabia, however, routinely brutalized its people in the same ugly way in public view and in plain sight.

  Riyadh’s Deera Square is known in the Kingdom as “Chop Chop Square” for its endless beheadings and amputations. Sometimes after a person has his head cut off, the Saudis crucify the body, placing the head in a plastic bag and hoisting it over the body where it appears to float, almost preternaturally abeyant. They display these crucified headless corpses in public for as long as four days. For example, the Saudi secret police arrested Ali Mohammed al-Nimr—the nephew of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a renowned Shiite cleric, whom the Saudi authorities had recently killed. After torturing and beheading him, his body was crucified and publicly displayed. His crime was attending a peaceful prodemocracy rally.

  During one New Year’s celebration, the Saudi monarchy decapitated forty-seven people in thirteen cities in a single day. After those horrific executions, the Algerian journalist, Kamel Daoud, made the inevitable connection, calling Saudi Arabia “an ISIS that has made it.”

  Yet the U.S. media was and still is embarrassingly silent about this incessant procession of atrocities that Saudis call a judicial system.

  U.S. officials also turn a blind eye to these horrors. Treating the Saudis as allies, all but drowning them in oil money, Pentagon’s central goal is to maximize high-tech arms sales to the Kingdom. The standard rationalization has always been that since they have vast oil deposits, the U.S. has to curry favor with them regardless of their support of terrorism; hence, we arm them to the teeth. Saddam Hussein, however, also had prodigious oil reserves, and we executed him. The more direct explanation is that the Saudis know how to play the United States. They understand that the weakness of America’s power elite is money and that they have always had a small, fanatical army of Saudi billionaires eager to invest in firms friendly to U.S. politicians and in the campaigns of the politicians themselves—often secretly via partisan think tanks and unregulated trade organizations.

  Nor was the Obama administration immune to Saudi influence and entreaties. He and his people have attempted to sell the Saudis nuclear power plants, which would be a never-ending nightmare of apocalyptic proportions. (Source: http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/us-nuclear-marketers-visited-saudi-arabia-trade-talks-under-way/). As we have seen, with the addition of a low-tech fissile bomb-fuel reprocessor, a nuclear power reactor can be converted into a fissile bomb-fuel factory.

  * * *

  Obama’s Nuclear Collusion

  After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, President Barack Obama asked the NRC to determine whether U.S. nuclear power plants were safe and secure. His sudden faith in the NRC’s truthfulness contradicted his earlier skepticism. Four years earlier, he had denounced them as a captive of the industry they were assigned to watch over, but after taking office, he quickly climbed into bed with the commissioners.

  The reasons are obvious: his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had been an investment banker whose firm was instrumental in raising the $8.2 billion for the corporate merger that produced Exelon. Obama’s number one political advisor, David Axelrod, was a paid advisor to Exelon, and that firm eventually became the largest nuclear power company in the U.S. His energy secretary, Stephen Chu, was one of academe’s most committed nuclear power advocates. Even after the meltdown of Fukushima Daiichi—a nuclear power plant that regulatory misfeasance had turned into a fiscal and medical nightmare—Dr. Chu announced that federal regulators should not postpone construction of new U.S. nuclear power plants because of Fukushima … despite the NRC’s corrupt, collusive track record. As for Obama, the nuclear lobby had deposited huge sums in his campaign coffers for years—up to $395,000, which was a lot for a fledgling senator with two years’ senatorial experience. In return, The New York Times reported:

  “[Exelon] was chosen as one of only six electric utilities nationwide for the maximum $200 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department. And when the Treasury Department granted loans for renewable energy projects, Exelon landed a commitment for up to $646 million.”

  Obama and his advisors were to the nuclear industry what the George W. Bush and his oil-rich entourage had been to the petroleum industry.

  * * *

  The deeper I got into my research, the angrier I became. Everyone said a nuclear terrorist attack was their single worst nightmare, but no one had analyzed that possibility in any detail, gathered any factual information on how it might be conducted, or written any serious articles on it, let alone books. No one was even discussing the subject, not in any depth.

  To make matters worse, in 2007, nuclear terrorists fired a warning round over humanity’s bow, which should have been the shot heard round the world but which the U.S. essentially ignored. For decades, the Saudis had bankrolled the Pakistani Taliban—known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)—and that funding finally began to generate acts of genuine nuclear terrorism. The first wave of assaults commenced when the TTP struck that country’s own nuclear installations. These attacks were so impressively professional that some experts believe that the SSG, Pakistan army’s elite commando unit, trained these al Qaeda/Taliban teams.

  These nuclear terrorist attacks included:

  • A 2007 raid on a nuclear missile base south of the Pakistani capital, in which the terrorists killed eight people.

  • In August 2008, terrorists entered and blew up parts of a Wah Cantonment facility, which was believed to be a nuclear weapons assembly plant. />
  • In December 2008, suicide bombers next attacked Pakistan’s Kamra air base—which was thought to be a nuclear weapons storage facility.

  • In October 2009, terrorists disguised in army uniforms breached the Pakistan Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. In this ruthlessly professional, painstakingly planned assault, nine soldiers and nine militants were killed along with two civilians, even as the militants took forty-two hostages.

  • In Bara in 2010, terrorists blew a hole in the military base’s wall and entered, killing six soldiers and wounding fifteen before twenty-five of their own fighters were killed.

  • In 2011, in one of their most daring and meticulously organized raids, ten black-clad terrorists stormed and occupied Karachi’s Mehran naval air base, which is only fifteen miles from a reputed nuclear weapons storage site near Masroor. They not only knew the locations of the base’s surveillance cameras, they knew how to neutralize them. In this operation, fifteen attackers killed eighteen military personnel and wounded sixteen. They also set fire to several state-of-the-art warplanes with rocket-propelled grenades.

  Nor did the TTP limit itself to nuclear sites.

  • In 2012, militants assaulted a military base near Wazirabad in Punjab, killing seven security personnel.

  • In August 2012, dozens of terrorists attacked an army installation, again near Wazirabad, killing eight soldiers. The press reported that they decapitated several of them.