COMMENT POSTED TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE
INDEPENDENT
The allegations at the end of the article about Saudis
paying Osama bin Laden were part of Anthony Summers' book on 9/11.
There is little doubt that they are true. He was in his day
one of the world’s best investigative reporters.
But as with all affairs in the Middle East, the situation
was almost certainly more complicated and obscure than that suggests.
The Saudis did not do 9/11. That is a false and ridiculous
charge. There were Saudi citizens involved in events leading up to 9/11, but
even their role is not clear to this day. It does seem that the US had some
kind of elaborate intelligence operation going at the time involving a lot of
men from the Middle East. One minor American diplomat was quoted about the
large number of quickie visas he was required to issue to suspicious types from
the Middle East not long before 9/11. That is a crucial piece of information,
never explained.
It actually is not even clear that Osama bin Laden had a
role in 9/11 besides applauding it afterward, something by the way more than a
few Israelis did also, knowing full well it was a gift from the gods as far as
their position in the region. The US never produced an ounce of hard evidence
to implicate him. Indeed, when the US tried to extradite him from Afghanistan,
the Taleban government asked for some evidence, the supply of which is a
customary part of extradition. Of course, the US just ignored them and invaded,
something it likely wanted to do anyway for a variety of reasons.
While the mainline press has always avoided stories around
it, it is simply a fact that there were two gangs of Israeli spies working in
the US at the time. One posed as a group of art students and moved about quite
a bit, including in the area were pilot training was given to some of the
Saudis. The others went about in a moving truck for a company which did not
exist.
The last group was spotted taking pictures from the top of
their truck and generally dancing and high-fiving as the smoke rose from the
towers. They were reported to police and arrested, but we know virtually
nothing of their mission which clearly included being ready to photograph
events of 9/11. How did they know? Who did they tell anything? They were soon
expelled and no explanation was ever offered.
All we know for sure is that, clearly, advanced information
about 9/11 existed, but it was not acted upon, and the fact has been suppressed
ever since.
As I said, the situation was almost certainly more complicated
and obscure than we understand. But the series of events in years since is
likely related. A host of countries in the Middle East have been violently
toppled, and the main beneficiary of all that violence has been Israel because
the violence created a cordon sanitaire for Israel.
