There are a lot of bad 9/11 conspiracy theories out there, but the one where the Saudis had more of a hand in it than they want to let on seems to have some substance to it. Some of it may be a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” kind of connection that looks very bad but doesn’t actually denote foreknowledge or direct complicity. And I don’t discount that parts of the plot were designed to implicate Saudis since the attacks were intended to create a rift between our two countries.
But, still, there are those 28 pages from the congressional investigation that the public has never been allowed to see. And now the Saudis are so spooked about a Senate bill that would allow them to be sued for 9/11 (with the accompanying discovery provisions) that they’ve threatened to sell billions of dollars of assets to prevent them from potentially being seized by judges. That sounds like an admission of guilt to me, or at least a lack of confidence in their ability to defend themselves in court.
It’s probably an empty threat, but they felt the need to deliver it personally.
The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.
President Obama is headed to Saudi Arabia soon for a diplomatic visit and he’ll want to thank them for taking in more Yemeni prisoners from Gitmo.
The U.S. detainee count at Guantanamo Bay is down to 80 after nine Yemeni men were released into the custody of Saudi Arabia on Saturday, Reuters reports. The population at the detention facility is now the lowest it has been in 14 years as the Obama administration continues to try and close the prison and fulfill one of the president’s inaugural promises.
There are therefore some practical reasons why the administration doesn’t want to upset the Kingdom at the moment, but I do wish we could know the truth about their role in creating this unending War on Terror.
I also wish they didn’t have an iron grip on Mecca and that the only likely alternatives to them weren’t ISIS-types who would be even worse.
Me too!
Who are the leakers? And why?: (CNN)Saudi Arabia is warning it will sell off billions in American assets if the U.S. Congress passes a bipartisan bill that would allow victims of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks to sue foreign governments. Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir issued the warning to U.S. lawmakers last month during a visit to Washington, two senior State Department officials told CNN. Tom Kludt, Elise Labott and Ted Barrett – Saudis warn of economic reprisals if Congress passes 9/11 bill CNN 16 Apr 16 If Obama is urging Congress to defeat this bill how is it that… Read more »
Chuckie and Cornyn do seem to be an odd pair to co-sponsor the legislation. (Wouldn’t both of them be privy to those twenty-eight pagers? Precedent suggests those pages will remain classified.) Perhaps those two are merely acting in Israel’s interests and hitting KSA in the pocketbook would benefit Israel.
Who knows? All of these has been made so complex that the even the participants have lost the narrative.
I’ll say. As for the house of Saud, I’m guessing that from Yemen to Northern Syria their actors and minions have been involved at many inconvenient levels, sometimes clearly in direct opposition to US interests. These are heady days of Sunni hegemony; caliphate and all. The Saudi leadership is notoriously unwilling to reign in its Wahabist radicals; a feature of Saudi rule familiar to those who understand the circumstances of their ascension to the throne. But one could say much the same for secular Pakistan’s permissiveness with her own radical military factions. So we backed a century of military coups… Read more »
As a posted in another thread, KSA has a major demographic problem. Far too many men. Polygamy probably exacerbates it. Pakistan’s male to female ratio isn’t as bad as KSA’s, but it’s not good either. Feed them religion that can easily morph into violent and radical Islam for the surplus males and KSA has to direct their attention to outside the Kingdom.
Would be interesting to know what the male:female ratio is in Belgium and France minority Muslim communities.
Interesting fact, but that the KSA is directing the attention of surplus, landless males to Wahhabism overseas, while probably true, seems to elide the point that during the Saudi revolution the Ikhwan, the Wahhabist religious militia, were largely the tip of Ibn Saud’s spear. It is totally baked in; they were the Che to his Fidel. Nothing has changed; check out their flag at the link (hint: black with Arabic slogan and a sword).
Interesting and strange distribution. My first thought was female infanticide, but there is not much difference up to age 14. It is thereafter that the female distribution drops dramatically. Death in childbirth? Exporting child brides? But they are a rich country. If anything, I would expect them to import brides from poorer countries like Yemen. A second thought would be natural selection pressure for male offspring but that would produce a surplus of male babies, not teenagers. I haven’t graphed those numbers (maybe later). That might shed a clue. i.e. is it a steady divergence or is there a cliff?… Read more »
Would need to see the age demographics in KSA over the past six decades to begin to draw any conclusions. Am unaware any cultural practices that would cause the female population to drop after age fifteen. (Honor killings would seem too rare to account for such a large difference.) There are many intervening variables that may explain this. One would be access to modern medicine within a culture with a high preference for sons over daughters, I’m reminded of when (mid-late ’70s?) a KSA hospital opened an impotency clinic. The doctor there struggled to understand why there were so many… Read more »
But if it were infanticide that would be reflected in the under age 15 numbers, not commencing at the beginning of adulthood. Unless it reflects death in childbirth.
could it be unwanted girls are being trafficked as young teenagers?
They may be “unwanted” in families, but needed overall by the country. Not aware of Saudi girls over the age of 14 being exported. More common for Saudi men looking to women in other countries to add to their harems. For example OBL’s mother was Syrian as was his first wife. (His father while favored by the KSA royal family was actually Yemeni.) His next three wives appear to have been Saudi women and his last one was from Yemen.
well, it wouldn’t be documented and it wouldn’t be in the upper classes; I’m thinking indigent selling daughters to brothels and the like
Any documentation to support that? I allowed earlier that this could be an enumeration problem. Girls sent (or sold) off to be lifetime domestic servants and/or second to fourth wives and then aren’t counted. Some of those 2nd-4th brides are temporary and when cast off do end up in the sex trade because there’s no where else for them to go and sex workers are unlikely to be counted. However, the disproportionate M:F ratios are too staggeringly large for that to be more than a small factor. (Also, KSA is one of the larger importers of domestic workers.) Still, if… Read more »
none at all, I was just joining in to speculate what happened to all those girls between 14 and 25. I’m just speculating since sons are prioritized in certain circles the girls may be shoved into the brothel system. not in the upper classes of course.
a lot of Islamic law was, in the time of the Prophet, to protect women, and Saudi upper class women have tremendous wealth and control of their wealth. As far as the girls go I have absolutely no idea. how many outside the most wealthy actually have multiple wives?
Let me ‘splain (and this became longer than I’d intended.) What the mundi report tells us: Birth years of age cohorts and male to female ratio as of 2014 Birth <1950 — M:F 1.057 Birth 1950-1959 — M:F 1.22 Birth 1960-1988 — M:F 1.34 Birth 1980-1999 – M:F 1.07 Birth 2000-2014 – M:F 1.054 The youngest cohort (2000-2014) is a normal ratio and the next youngest is somewhat elevated. For those born before 1950, that 1.057 ratio today is too high; should be closer to 1.0 or less than one. That suggests a high ratio for those in that birth… Read more »
Definitely possible. Another possibility crossed my mind. Increased immigration during a certain period by young males? Certainly something. see the figures I posted about Egypt. Iran and Iraq would be distorted by the Iran-Iraq war. Egypt might have been distorted by war, but the age distribution with increased female longevity looks more biologically normal.
War has traditionally been one of the ways that the M:F ratio declines to nearer 1:1 by mid-life. But that’s when the age cohort begins at the more normal 1.05 to 1.07. But Egypt’s age distribution appears to be too normal to speculate on factors that could make it look normal.
I see something was lost as I typed because there is an incomplete sentence that makes no sense. I forget what I was trying to say.
Anyway, I thought maybe male emigration to the Holy Cities might account for higher male percentages in the older cohorts. Very old men rarely move so the oldest cohorts look normal. Many possibilities but very odd.
Yes, odd because we know that it’s not a naturally occurring demographic age and gender pyramid. Unlike China and India, we don’t know what created this oddity or even if it’s accurate and not just a reporting oddity.
OK, here it is. I contrasted it with Egypt as another Arab Muslim population. Saudi M F M F 0-14 3,869,961 3,681,616 51.2% 48.8% 15-24 2,832,538 2,458,339 53.5% 46.5% 25-54 7,086,004 5,323,373 57.1% 42.9% 55-64 674,571 555,136 54.9% 45.1% 65+ 444,302 420,146 51.4% 48.6% Egypt M F M F 0-14 14,272,494 13,639,550 51.1% 48.9% 15-24 … Read more »
See my comment above. The same issue is seen in China and India but it came later and the governments acted more quickly on it; so, it didn’t become as extreme. Still, through age 24, the current ratio is worse in China than in KSA.
Perhaps this might help. Use the <TT>…</TT> or <CODE>…</CODE> HTML tags, which display the enclosed text in a fixed-width font. You still need to manually insert/delete spaces for desired indentation and to align columns, but what-you-see-is-what-you-get since the comment input box already uses fixed-width whitespace and characters. Here’s part of your table enclosed in TT tags with 4-space indentation:
<tt>
25-54 7,086,004 5,323,373 57.1% 42.9%
55-64 674,571 555,136 54.9% 45.1%
</tt>
produces
25-54 7,086,004 5,323,373 57.1% 42.9%
55-64 674,571 555,136 54.9% 45.1%
Shaun, Would you be kind enough to explain what Karl Marx might have to do with all this? I’m really baffled. Maybe even stupid.
Cold War Iran: Cementing the US-Iranian alliance Given the emerging bipolarization of international politics (and Cold War Iran’s unpleasant history with the Soviet Union), the shah favored the US as his principal ally. Iran Moves Closer to the United States On October 11, 1955, Iran declared its intent to join the Pact of Mutual Cooperation between Iraq and Turkey, known as the Baghdad Pact. While America was not a member, the US wanted Iran to play a central role primarily for strategic and military reasons having to do with the Soviet Union. CIA/MI6 Overthrow of Mosaddeq – The Coup That… Read more »
Thanks. I was wondering how to interpret the stream of death-to-America crap that has never stopped, even with the nuclear deal. Now I understand. It’s this:
Iranian eleven-dimensional chess.
At first, I was going to dismiss this. Then I thought about how individual Iranian men and women seem to like America and Americans much more than Arab men (I don’t know any Arab women). Maybe you are right and the official crap is just political propaganda.
“Death to America” is a translation issue. One that served USG propagandists very well. “Death to X” is used like Americans use “screw X” or “fuck X.” IOW, not to be taken literally.
I can’t see what any of the foregoing has to do with Karl Marx.
Iran has a a lot of rabid conservatives or propagandists, similar to our own, that are extremely hostile to any rapprochement or detente with the US. That’s why Rouhani and Zarif have to be very careful to avoid being seen as too friendly to the West.
This faction has their own clerics that do incite hatred to the US and that’s where the continued use of that slogan comes from.
Change will come to Iran but it will likely be a slow and measured process.
We favoured Islamic radicals over lefties with our thumb on the geopolitical scale throughout latter half of 20th century; coups and so forth. Would have thought that was obvious. Pakistan classic example but only one of many.
About the Israelis is well taken; I’m guessing Schumer’s co-sponsorship was a clue. It would explain a lot.
Don’t know, but Bob Graham certainly does, he co-authored them: Mr. Graham, 78, a two-term governor of Florida and three-term senator who left Capitol Hill in 2005, says he will not relent in his efforts to force the government to make public a secret section of a congressional review he helped write — one that, by many accounts, implicates Saudi citizens in helping the hijackers. Carl Hulse – Florida Ex-Senator Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks NYT 13 Apr 15 And if that’s not enough: WASHINGTON — In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a… Read more »
Bob Graham wasn’t on the 9/11 Commission, but he surely read those pages before leaving office in January 2005. It’s always a bit difficult to assess how much Graham knows when he’s sworn to secrecy and can only very vaguely hint at what may be hidden. IIRC he had also urged his colleagues to read the NIE before voting on the IWR and was angry that so many didn’t. It was on that basis that he ran for POTUS in the 2004 Democratic primary. (Note: that was before the 9/11 Commission issued its report in August 2004.) Didn’t get any… Read more »
He was a co-chairman of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks.
Seems utterly lacking in charisma, as you suggest, but he’s been like a dog with a bone on this one issue. Props for that. Anyone who can help resolve our co-dependant and toxic relationship with recent history is welcome. Even if it hurts a little.
I suppose you know that Graham published a book, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror, in 2004?
Second edition with new preface and new postscript published in 2008.
And now a novel. He’s also former chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Nope. Thanks for telling us. Do you know the difference between these two?
Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror (Paperback) – Common Paperback – 2008
by By (author) Jeff Nussbaum By (author) Bob Graham (Author)
and this radically more expensive version?
Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror (Paperback) – Common Paperback – 2008
by By (author) Jeff Nussbaum By (author) Bob Graham (Author)
I must be missing something. They appear to be exactly the same, including the prices.
First link is $55.95 used!
Second link got screwed up. It’s supposed to be:
Which is $15.58 new.
As long as we’re talking about books — you might want to check out Michael Springmann’s Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World (2015).
I stand corrected — the 28 pages are from the Joint Inquiry Report and Graham was the lead Senator on that. Odd that both Graham and Goss initially opposed the inquiry. Did it really get as far along as Graham has been hinting at? This new (April 2016) development is that Goss now supports the KSA cover-up conclusion. What a tangled web.
Should add that I didn’t intend to sound dismissive in my comments. I’ve long surmised a direct link to one or more major KSA royals involvement in 9/11. No way was it hatched and perpetrated from OBL’s Afghanistan lair.
Plenty of skulduggery around when it comes to 9/11; wake me when someone brings up Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. That would get interesting.
I will confess I have suspected there is more than meets the eye about the US Saudi relationship.
On the surface they have spread an ideology with material that is every bit as inflammatory as AQI.
We don’t need their oil, either, anymore.
But I suspect behind the scenes they have been more of an ally than we know.
“We don’t need their oil, either, anymore.”
True, but this is in large part to an increase in fracking and drilling, right?
“behind the scenes they have been more of an ally than we know.”
I wouldn’t be so sure. My feeling about them is more like : With friends like this — who needs enemies?
It’s not a conspiracy theory. Wahabbi extremists, funded by the Saudis, flew planes into our buildings. Period. Full stop. That’s what happened. No wonder they’re so freaked about it being exposed.
Fuck them.
Nonsense!
What ‘plane’ flew into building #7?!
What ‘plane’ crashed into the Pentagon leaving virtually no debris?
If we keep buying these obvious frauds, how does that move us forward?
I thought that already WAS exposed.
What they are really afraid of being exposed, is that what actually happened was a little different.
And by the way, it IS a conspiracy theory — Namely, a theory about a conspiracy. Nothing wrong with that, unless you believe conspiracies don’t exist. What else could be behind such an elaborate plot — a “lone nut”?
The only question is whether this or that theory is actually correct.
Sorry, I’m just speaking plain English.
They are guilty as sin. We should have given Saddam the green light to invade Saudi Arabia in exchange for normalized relations.
No could do — GHWB had declared that Saddam was the new Hitler to get his war on and it was way too soon for an administration to rewrite that one. (Americans were so ill-informed in 1990 wrt to US collusion with Saddam in the ’80s that turning him into Hitler was and easy sell. Same with Noriega who had been one of GHWB bffs.)
All else aside, Saddam chose to invade Kuwait. He made it very easy for the US to turn on him after supporting him during the Iraq-Iran war.
Yes, he did and likely with some tacit approval from the US. And why not since Saddam also invaded Iran in 1980 and the US was cool with that? Why was Kuwait our problem?
Those are good questions. The US government and public, at large. obviously viewed Iran as an enemy after the revolution so that partly explains support for Iraq in that war. I really don’t know that Kuwait was our problem just like Libya wasn’t our problem or Syria wasn’t our problem. That’s never stopped us from getting involved and likely won’t anytime soon. If you’re consistently anti-war then helping expel the Iraqis using military force was the wrong thing to do. If you support multilateral applications of force sanctioned by the UN then it was at least justifiably the right… Read more »
Yup.
There’s something else you’re leaving out of the KSA-Obama relationship. He has given the Saudis military intel and weaponry needed to savage Yemen for over a year now. he only dumb war Obama has opposed since the 90s has been the Iraq war. Just a few days after absolving Obama of guilt in the Libya fiasco you ignore his role in the Yemen conflict. He has supported nearly every other intervention including regime change efforts in Syria. I give him no credit for initially showing restraint and then proceeding to make the wrong choice. There is little ideological difference… Read more »
Yes, US intelligence and a line of military credit but I’m guessing the Yemen engagement has been a source of increasing discomfort for all concerned. More a motive for the unravelling of the alliance than a sign of it, I would have thought.
You would think that except that there is nothing new evident today about the Yemen disaster that wasn’t known a year ago. Obama et al have succeeded in making the US widely hated in the country and their support of the Saudis has only strengthened the AQ branch there while alienating the Houthis. These folks have a long memory and they know very well what we are up to in their backyard.
Obama considers himself something of a realist but many of his foreign policy decisions contradict that.
Well after selling them billions in military gear we could hardly tell them to go pound sand. Oh… Wait.
Yemeni plots against the USA predate Obama’s election. On 12 October 2000, Cole was the target of a terrorist attack carried out by al-Qaeda in the Yemeni port of Aden, when two suicide bombers detonated their small boat near the warship, killing 17 sailors, injuring 39 others, and damaging the ship.
Nearly a year before 9-11.
Nonsense!
You contradict yourself right at the beginning.
“al-Qaeda” attacked the US Cole, not the Yemenis. And what has been the result of the Saudi/US supported war on Yemen? Increased influence of “al-Qaeda” in Yemen!
“al-Qaeda” was started by the US in Afghanistan, remember? And now we are aiding them in Syria. Petraeus was quite open about this.
If we keep buying into these fascist fantasies, what hope is there for us?
If we live in a dream world what hope there is for us?
Yes, this happened. I don’t agree with kafkanada much at all but he’s right that the USS Cole attack was an Al Qaeda plot and not state-sponsored by Yemen if that’s what you meant by “Yemeni plot”.
‘A source of increasing discomfort’. Well that’s really taking this whole filthy, cruel war to the most polished level of tea and biscuits.
Exactly … well said! No wonder Israel and Saudi Arabia are secret allies in the Middle-East power game in opposition to Qatar and Iran. The Saudis were snubbed by GWB, his decision to go into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Recall Yasser Arafat and the King of Jordan supported Saddam Hussein in 1990. US Ambassador to Iraq April Gillespie was informed by Saddam he would invade Kuwait. It was the Iron Lady who persuaded George H Bush to oppose Saddam’s invasion during a meeting at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. The GB ties to the House of Saud and BP… Read more »
As a Muslim convert, I’m appalled by the wanton destruction of historic sites by the Saudis. Nearly all of the ancient structures have been obliterated in order to build luxury hotels that make a mockery of the ideals of the hajj. People pay $7,000 a night or more to stay in hotels with butlers while donning the simple white cloth that’s supposed to make clear that everyone, rich and poor, is equal. Though going on hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam, I don’t think I’d go so long as the Wahabis continue to control the state and… Read more »
It’s unnecessary to be a Muslim to be appalled by all this.
True.
I’ve heard that cheap transportation, especially air travel, turned the hajj into what you described. Is that accurate?
The hadj: a cash and power cow for the Saudis. Osama ben Laden wouldn’t have been upset about this.
More than cash, my sense is the Saudis love the power and prestige.
Modern transportation has made it ever easier to get there. In 1900, people would spend months traveling, often on foot or animal, without certainty that they would ever return. But in the 1960s it was still very traditional. Malcolm X commented about the incredible history all around. That’s almost entirely gone now. The last 20 years have been incredibly destructive.
If Saudi involvement is more than they are willing to admit, we might have to conclude that the word ‘conspiracy’ is not applicable. Try getting it both ways and making sense of the contradiction. If I were the Saudis I would also get my money out of the US as fast as possible. The US loves moral excuses for pillaging and stealing.
Saudi Arabia is run by people in thrall to a bloody minded medieval religion/ideology. Woman hating and Jew hating are features, not bugs. What a great ally….
What really gets me about the Saudis is their poisoning Islam world wide. We’ve seen the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in previously more easy going places in SE Asia, for example. Thats strongly attributed to Saudi money. This is basically the same problem the Ottomans had with them in the 19th century upgraded with modern technology. Ive said it before, I prefer Iran. They do a lot of nasty things too but Shiites cant spike Islam globally and at least they give some voice to their people, one descended from one of the most storied civilizations on Earth. I very… Read more »
I dunno about 6 degrees.
Fact – what was it – overwhelming of majority of the terrorists on 9/11 were Saudi
Fact- architect – Osama Bin Laden – Saudi
Fact- the origination of the branch of Islam – Wahabbi – that preaches DEATH TO THE WEST – SAUDI ARABIA
Fact- who funds the spread of Wahabbism in schools all around the world -SAUDI ARABIA
So, you can miss me with the 6 degrees.
Saudi fingerprints are ALL OVER 9/11.
Technically on #2 — KSM claims credit for being the architect of 9/11 and he’s not a Saudi. I’ve yet to see any solid evidence that OBL even had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. It’s all after the fact and he says. Not saying that he didn’t, but difficult not to recognize that he was a convenient patsy.
Back in the 80s and 90s Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall and others were writing about “The Safari Club.” This was a reaction to the congressional hearings back in the 70s trying to curtail all the abuses of our intelligence services. Essentially, much of the dirty work of the CIA was privatized and off-shored. In the Middle East and Africa the US had a network with Saudi intelligence, Pakistani military intelligence. I believe elements of the Turkish deep state also (to include the Gray Wolves) worked with each other for their interests. 9/11 was a provocation. It served as the… Read more »
They want to sell those treasury bonds? Why should I care? Maybe they can trade them for euro bonds or something. And then someone else will own them. And then what? Sounds like not only idle threat but meaningless as well.
that extends far beyond 9/11 lawsuits for them. Bloomberg 3/9/16 – Iran Told to Pay $10.5 Billion to Sept. 11 Kin, Insurers Iran was ordered by a U.S. judge to pay more than $10.5 billion in damages to families of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to a group of insurers. U.S. District Judge George Daniels in New York issued a default judgment Wednesday against Iran for $7.5 billion to the estates and families of people who died at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It includes $2 million to each estate for the victims’ pain… Read more »