Tracking Saudi Arabia role in 9/11

Solly Rakgomo | Friday October 7, 2016 11:14

The suit had its first big break in 2014 when a New York federal court ruled that the Saudi government was not allowed to claim sovereign immunity, and was thus liable to be sued for damages if the link to 9/11 could be proven.

Since then, its progress has become something of a bellwether for the U.S’ overall stance on Saudi Arabia, and of a decades-old alliance that would now appear to be unravelling.

The alliance has been underpinned for decades by Saudi Arabia’s role as the world’s “swing” oil producer and thus its centrality to the Western powers’ dominance over world energy supplies.

It has also rested on the ability of the kingdom to recycle a portion of its “petrodollars” every year into expensive Western arms imports and, more broadly, into a variety of assets in the U.S and Western Europe.

Often glossed over, the alliance was also key to the U.S winning the Cold War, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s financial and ideological backing of hardline Islamist movements provided Washington with a useful reactionary and religiously conservative counterweight to more progressive and largely secular nationalist movements, popular liberation fronts, and new regimes such as the People’s Democratic Party in Afghanistan – all of which threatened to nationalise resources and end Western monopolies, and some of which had little choice but to seek the Soviet Union’s protection.

With more than 2,800 killed on September 11, 2001, including 11 unborn babies, the first serious test of the US-Saudi alliance had begun, especially after it emerged that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers had been Saudi citizens and that a secret Saudi-bound flight had been given special permission to fly out of the U.S on September 13.

But with the Saudi petrodollar still vital to the health of the U.S economy, and rumours of over $100bn of US Department of Treasury bonds by then having been purchased by Saudi Arabia, it was imperative that the strategic relationship remained intact. Fast-forward to today, however, and it is no coincidence that this 15-year-old narrative on 9/11 has now finally begun to come unstuck. Most obviously, in the wake of the 2014 U.S shale oil revolution, which saw U.S companies briefly overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia has clearly lost its coveted “swing producer” role.

How JASTA will feed into this new dynamic remains to be seen, as the class action lawsuit may still take years to come to fruition.

Nonetheless, in the meantime, it seems that every extra piece of evidence that is assembled by the 9/11 lawyers and is reported on in the media will serve to lower Saudi Arabia’s reputation even further amongst the American  and global public, and perhaps eventually bring it down to the sort of level last experienced by Gaddafi’s Libya or Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

Furthermore, it is also entirely possible that long before the lawsuit is concluded, a consensus will have emerged in the U.S that important elements of the Saudi state were indeed involved in 9/11.

Recent revelations, including the release of about 85% of the content of 29 pages (known erroneously as the “28 pages”) that were originally redacted from the joint congressional enquiry into 9/11, have provided additional, but unconfirmed circumstantial evidence about a Saudi role.

But there also now exists a considerable body of recently declassified documents, leaked materials, interrogation transcripts, and court subpoenaed files that point to a much more substantial connection and the clear existence of Saudi 9/11 financiers and the operation of a Saudi cell in the U.S that provided logistical assistance for the hijackers.

The new evidence paints a clear picture of a network of key Saudi businessmen and ruling family members known as the “Golden Chain”, which had played a role in financing the 1980s Afghan jihad but had then been reinvigorated in the mid-1990s following Osama bin Laden’s blackmail-like fatwa criticising the Islamic credentials of the Saudi king.

Known to Western intelligence agencies, the network’s members included three princes, one of whom was on the secret flight out of the U.S on September 13, 2001, and all three of whom were soon after named by a heavily water boarded al-Qaeda prisoner.

Dying within a week of each other in June 2002, the men’s deaths were ascribed to a “heart attack” (at age 43), a car accident of which no convincing records exist, and a “thirst incident” that took place during a desert hiking trip with no witnesses.

I will try my level best in the next few weeks to unearth more on this scandalous issue and try to observe how the Washington power elites especially the Military Industrial Complex react to the issue more so that they have made profits worth trillions of dollars in war business across many countries in the Middle East especially Iraq in the so called ‘War on terror”.

The U.S has destroyed countries like Iraq which had nothing to do with 911 while the masterminds and supreme sponsors of Islamic extremism Saudi Arabia has always been left scot-free and even supplied with weapons to cause more havoc to other countries notably Yemen.