Forget the support to Israel.....this is where we've made our mistake but the alternative might be losing access to the oil.
The Saudi Support For Sep 11
While it's wonderful that Osama Bin Laden is dead, dead, dead, it is also awful that he was not captured so that he could be thoroughly interrogated, identifying all the people, organizations, and nations that supported him. Ten years on, there is still a lot we don't know about how it all went down. What we know is only the tip of the iceberg.
What strikes me about the event is that Al Qaeda did not have the experience nor expertise to make this happen. They did not skyjack any airliners before Sep 11 nor after but the one time they tried it they were wildly successful. Organizations just don't engage in complicated operations and succeed on their first try. They stumble on their first tentative forays, get better with practice, and slowly improve. However, Al Qaeda hit three home runs on their first four tries on Sep 11. My conclusion is that they had help, lots of help to make that happen. But who?
Way back in the day some thirty years ago when the Palestinians were skyjacking jets every Tuesday, their skyjackers were trained in a skyjacking school, rehearsing in a real airliner at Beirut airport. They had a rigid script to which they trained: Take the jet, murder a passenger to demonstrate seriousness, make their demands, keep on the move from airport to airport, and then surrender their hostages within three days after their own escape had been negotiated. Their skyjackings rigidly followed that plan and were consequently successful.
By contrast, the Libyans attempted a skyjacking without properly training their terrorists, who did not attend skyjacking school. They ran a half ass hijacking, continuing to kill passengers which forced the commandoes to storm the jet, killing dozens of passengers.
Training matters. The stamp of training is all over the Sep 11 skyjacking. Three of the four skyjack teams keyed the mike in the same incorrect way, transmitting to the cabin rather than the air. That indicates thorough drilling in a mock up. I've trained a fair number of aviators in the F-4 Phantom simulator. It takes a fair number of repetitions to ensure a new guy performs consistently under pressure.
The tradecraft employed by the Sep 11 skyjackers shows they had help. The leaders communicated over the Internet by embedding their text messages in image files, a technique called steganography. I've worked in IT for years but never heard of steganography nor do I know anyone who does. It seems unlikely that Bin Laden learned about it from some passing caravan in Afghanistan. Steganography sounds like the kind of peculiar skill that an intelligence service would cultivate.
Bin Laden was in contact with a lot of Middle Eastern nations and their intelligence services. He talked with Iraq, which, by the way, operated a skyjacking school at Salman Pak complete with airliner. He talked with Iran. He talked a lot with Saudi Arabia.
A lot of the intelligence has been made public in the last ten years. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have plowed through it to write a fresh new book on Sep 11, "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden." It is a good follow on book to "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," a must read. If you haven't read that, what the heck have you been doing with your life? "The Eleventh Day" plows the familiar ground of Sep 11 that most people know but uncovers startling new things from declassified information that hasn't seen the light of day.
Part of "The Eleventh Day" deals with the Saudi support for the Sep 11 attacks, which Summers and Swan treat in this article for last months Vanity Fair: "The Kingdom and the Towers"; Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan; Vanity Fair; August 2011. I recommend you read the whole thing. They point out the amazing number of coincidental meetings between Saudi agents in America and the Sep 11 skyjackers and the deception displayed by those agents in later interviews. Here's the core of it:
Congress’s Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had found evidence “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. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.”
Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” Was it credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation? “I think,” the former senator said, “that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”
For example, one Saudi religious official, Saleh al-Hussayen, and his wife were on a three week visit to the US leading up to September 11, 2011. On September 10, they checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia. That's the hotel were Sep 11 skyjackers Mihdhar and Hazmi stayed before they departed the next morning to fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. There are too many incredible coincidences like this. When FBI agents questioned Hussayen the night of Sep 11, he faked a seizure to evade the questions.
Three of the skyjackers stayed in Room 433 of the Parks Motel near Boston Logan airport the night before Sep 11. All the skyjackers were dead by 10 AM the next morning. At 11 AM, a maid knocked on the door of Room 433 to clean it. An Arab man answered, told her to come back later because people were sleeping in the room. Who was that guy? He appears to have been part of the support structure for the skyjackings.
The Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID), which is the Saudi equivalent of our CIA, covertly paid for some of the legal defense of the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman when he was tried and convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The Blind Sheikh is an Egyptian citizen, not a Saudi, so it appears the Saudi government supported him due to religion.
Just this week, it was revealed that Saudi subject Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife Anoud abruptly departed their home in Sarasota, Florida two weeks before the Sep 11 attacks. They left a spanking new car in their driveway, a fridge full of food, fruit on the counter, and on open safe in the bedroom. FBI investigators discovered that Mohammed Atta had called and visited them.
After reading "The Eleventh Day," it's obvious that the Saudi and Pakistani government were involved with Al Qaeda and the Sep 11 attack. My gut feeling is that the Pakistani ISI helped with the high level planning like picking the kind of jets to be skyjacked and what training would be needed. They probably helped with the tradecraft. The Saudis probably helped a little through the GID for support in America but mostly through their Department of Islamic Affairs, Wahhabi missionaries with diplomatic credentials attached to their embassy. It looks like imams from Islamic Affairs were the spiritual advisors to the skyjackers and fixers for them. They probably were with them that last night before the skyjackings as hand holders to keep their motivation high.
Most of the Muslim support team for the Sep 11 skyjackers fled back to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Everybody knows Bin Laden was found in Abottobad, a mile from Pakistan's military academy. We've forgotten that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was caught in Rawalpindi, walking distance from the headquarters of the Pakistani military. Pakistan was their sanctuary.
The public knows who the skyjackers were but knows little about their support teams in country nor the nations which sponsored them. All of that needs to be exposed and the people involved hunted down and killed. And that trail will lead back to Saudi Arabia, the author of this religious war of terror
