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Friday International Webcast
9 January 2015
The webcast is a direct followup to the Wednesday press conference on Capitol Hill, ‘Declassify the 28 Pages of 9/11 Joint Inquiry Report’, in the urgent context of the continuing attacks in France - Cliquez ici pour la transcription de l’exposé de Jeff Steinberg en français Jeff Steinberg presentation starts at 9:29 minute.
JEFFREY STEINBERG: I think that Senator Graham really set the framework for answering the institutional question which focused on this past several days’ events in France. But I think the point should be clear to all of you by now that it’s impossible to even begin to discuss those events without minimally going back to the 9/11 events, and the brutal cover-up that is followed. In other parts of the press conference on Wednesday, Senator Graham and I believe also Congressman Lynch made the point that when government documents are subject to classification review before being released to the public, very often there are reactions. There are names omitted, perhaps sometimes the names of countries are omitted, because there’s genuine concerns about what they might reveal. Never has there been a document of the importance of the Joint Congressional Inquiry, where an entire chapter, virtually with every word in the chapter locked down and declared to be classified. And every member of Congress who has recently read those 28 pages, which was a fight in and of itself, has said that there’s nothing that rises to the standard of legitimate national security concerns. What they do reveal, and there are important elements of those 28 pages that we do know about, they reveal, number one, that there was in fact an extensive support network that was operating in the case of at least the lead two hijackers, that’s to say the first two 9/11 hijackers who arrived in the United States well over a year prior to the September 11th attacks. They were met at the Los Angeles airport by two men, identified as agents of the Saudi Arabian intelligence services; those two Saudi agents arranged their housing, arranged other kinds of logistical requirements, provided them with money, and actually set them up in the initial flight training. Now, during this entire time, those two Saudi intelligence officers were regularly receiving money to finance those activities. Some of the money came through a company that was an exclusive, private so-called, front for the Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation and one of those two Saudi intelligence officers was a ghost employee who received significant, not only salary, but expensive account funds, during the period that the 9/11 hijackers were being shepherded around and protected and financed. At least $50,000, probably closer to $70,000 came directly to the those Saudi intelligence agents, in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks from the personal bank account, of the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Prince Bandar bin Sultan was a fixture in the United States for decades; many people referred to him as "Bandar Bush," because he had such an extraordinarily close relationship to the both President Bush 41 and President Bush 43. Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa was the sister of Prince Turki bin Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence for over a decade, and who resigned from that position, two weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Prince Turki was one of the critical players who negotiated directly with Osama bin Laden and opened up the floodgates for Saudi funding to go into al-Qaeda during the period just prior to the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole attack, and then the 9/11 attacks. Now, I think that Senator Graham was very conscious of the juxtaposition of his comments about Saudi Arabia, the monarchy of Saudi Arabia and his references to the perfidy of the British monarchy during the period of the Civil War. Because, in point of fact, today, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between the British monarchy and the Saudi monarchy: They represent a singular force, and were it not for the active and witting involvement of the British monarchy and British intelligence services, the Saudis would not be in a position to have played the kind of role that they played, in delivering critical support to the 9/11 hijackers, and many, many other similar kinds of activities. There is in fact a well-documented picture of the convergence of British and Saudi monarchical operations, that have direct bearing on 9/11. Beginning in 1985, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, although the Ambassador here in Washington, D.C., was the personal broker with then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, of a very unique barter agreement between the British and the Saudis, in which the British, through the BAE Systems major arms company, provided about $40 billion in various kinds of weapons, from fighter planes to radar systems, to the Saudi Ministry of Defence. The Saudis in return, paid for all of that military hardware, and some very hefty bribes that went to leading officials of the Saudi Defence Ministry and spread around among a number of other Saudi princes, by delivering 600,000 barrels of oil a day, from 1985 and in fact that program still continues to this day. Now, we did a little bit of work at EIR in crunching the numbers, and then we were supplied with certain critical confirming information from Prince Bandar himself. If you look at the amount of money that was spent by the British in providing those weapons systems, and then compare it to the amount of revenue that was generated by the spot-market sales of literally one supertanker of oil a day for a period beginning in 1985 and running through to the present, you’ll find that after all of those factors were taken into account, there was well over $100 billion in funds left over. Now, in a recent sanctioned biography, Prince Bandar boasted about the fact that the special relationship between the Saudi monarchy and the British monarchy allowed for a series of offshore funds to be established — black funds, probably the biggest pool of covert operations money ever assembled at one time. And these jointly British-Saudi administered funds, as Bandar himself boasted, went to (quote/unquote) "the war against communism," by which he meant the financing of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which was one of the breeding-grounds for al-Qaeda and all of the other groups that we now see acting on the world stage. And so during period that Bandar and his wife were providing funds to the Saudi intelligence officers who were shepherding around two of the key 9/11 hijackers, Bandar was regularly receiving bank transfers from the Bank of England, which was in the form of his "broker’s fee" for the oil-for-weapons agreements between the British and the Saudis — it was called al Yamamah; they called it "The Dove," translated into English from Arabic. So, Bandar’s piece of that arrangement was, at minimum, $2 billion in broker’s fees, that were coming into his bank accounts at Riggs National Bank. Those were the funds that were being shipped off to help finance the 9/11 hijackers. This is all a piece of what’s in those 28 pages. We don’t know it because we sneaked into the vault in the Capitol Building and got to read them; we know it because there have been other accounts. For example, Senator Graham wrote a book in 2004, called Intelligence Matters, and that book recounted his experience as the Chairman of the Joint House-Senate 9/11 investigative panel, and so he recounted anecdotally a number of the key findings that were then included in the 28 pages, that were blacked out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and which continue to be kept under wraps by President Obama, despite the fact that he promised the family members, the 9/11 families, on at least two face-to-face occasions, that he would make sure those pages were declassified. Now, there are many other factors, I am sure, that are included in those 28 pages, which dealt with the question of whether or not there were networks involved in backing up the terrorists, and where the finances came for the 9/11 operations. The name Saudi Arabia, names of specific senior figures within the Saudi monarchy and in the Saudi government are all over those 28 pages. I had an opportunity, during the press conference on Wednesday, to ask Senator Graham to give a brief account of another element of the 9/11 story: Coming out of the investigation into the San Diego, California cell where the Saudi intelligence officers were directly facilitating the activities and preparations of the hijackers, Senator Graham raised the question, whether or not there were similar support operations in place in other critical locations where the hijackers were doing the preparatory work. That included places like Sarasota, Florida, where Mohammed Atta and one of the teams were training and were operation; it included Herndon, Virginia; it included Paterson, New Jersey; there were other places. But those four locations, San Diego, Sarasota, Herndon, and Paterson, were critical centers for the entire preparations and staging of the 9/11 operation. Senator Graham was from Florida. He asked the FBI, at the point that he was chairing the Joint Congressional Inquiry for all files related to the investigations that were conducted in Florida, whether there was any indication of a similar support apparatus operating in that area. The FBI came back, repeatedly, and said no, there were no records, there was no such evidence. Many years later, basically in the last two years, through some work by investigative journalists, and through the filing of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it was belatedly discovered that, yes, indeed, there was another support cell, this time, led by a very prominent Saudi businessman who was in the employ of the Saudi royal family, whose home was frequently visited by Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers. And lo, and behold, the FBI finally admitted that they have over 80,000 pages of documentation! That documentation was withheld from the Joint Congressional Inquiry, was suppressed and covered up for a dozen years; and now, for the first time, a Federal judge is reviewing that material. This now puts a much bigger spotlight on not only the Saudi, but the Anglo-Saudi element within the entire 9/11 process. Now, again, had that information come out publicly, Congressman Jones, Congressman Lynch, Congressman Thomas Massie, who’s the third cosponsor of bill to declassify the 28 pages, have all said that, having read those 28 pages — and they’ve been very careful not to say a word about what they know of the content of those 28 pages, but they’re free to give their opinions; and in all cases, they said that their entire view of the history of the last 15 years, and more, was fundamentally changed and shaken by what they read in those 28 pages. Now, here we are, in the beginning of 2015. We’ve just seen this horrific attack that took place in Paris, France, on Wednesday morning of this week. The United States is now supposedly an alliance, with Saudi Arabia, with Great Britain, and with other countries from the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Persian Gulf, Sunni countries, mostly monarchies, supposedly waging war against the Islamic State, ISIS. Yet, the evidence contained in those 28 pages, suggests that this Anglo-Saudi apparatus is the wellspring of all of the international terrorism that we’ve been facing over the last dozen years. Instead of revealing the profound and deep Saudi involvement in 9/11, all of the Saudis that were in the United States, including members of the bin Laden family, were the first people allowed on commercial airliners after the 9/11 attacks. Days after the 9/11 attacks, every single one of the people were rounded up and, not put in jail, not rendered, but were put on a commercial flight, and brought back to Saudi Arabia, safe out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement. So the cover-up has been persistent, and as the result of that, as Senator Graham just said at the press conference, there was a clear message: You can continue with impunity, because the United States will cover up for those British-Saudi factor. Now, the events several days ago in Paris, are still very much under investigation. It would be premature to wrap a ribbon around the story and claim that there’s a clear picture of what was behind that operation. But certain things have already come out that are verified and clear: First of all, the two brothers who were involved as the attackers at the Charlie Hebdo office, who killed a dozen people, were part of a network, a recruiting network, a jihadist network that has been operating under the protective umbrella of the British monarchy, for a very long time. There are mosques in London, including the Finsbury Park Mosque, where the recruiters of those two [Kouachi] brothers, were based and were for decades, protected by the British Crown and by British intelligence. One of the leaders of that mosque, Abu Hamza, was recently, in the last several years, extradited to the United States and was put on trial for his role in certain terrorist activities and terrorist recruitment, and his principal defense in court in the United States, is that, while he was there as a recruiter for al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, he was also secretly working for British MI5, the equivalent of their FBI. And there’s some reason to believe that there’s a significant credibility to those claims. One way or the other, what you’re dealing with here, is from the top down, an Anglo-Saudi apparatus that is the wellspring for the financing, for the training and for the protection of international terrorism, and so long as that truth remains concealed from the American people and from the world as a whole, there is no way to stop this terrorism; this terrorism will go on, uninterrupted, and yet, by simply exposing the truth, starting with the release of those 28 pages, we can begin to solve this problem in the proper manner. Now, I should just add one footnote: Because months before the 9/11 attacks Executive Intelligence Review presented a dossier to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And the dossier basically called for the State Department to consider whether the government of Great Britain should be put on the list of state-sponsors of terrorism. EIR, Vol. 27, #3, Jan. 21, 2000, "Put Britain on the List of State Sponsoring Terrorism"; That dossier, which can be found on the homepage of the EIR website, was based exclusively on government documentation, formal diplomatic démarches that were filed with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, from governments as diverse as that of Egypt, Russia, Peru, Colombia, India — and in every instance the complaint was the same. That terrorism networks that were active in all of those countries, were being given safe-haven protection, logistical support, and financing, by the British government. In the case of Russia, there were mosques throughout the United Kingdom, that were hotbeds of recruitment to send wild-eyed jihadist recruits, first to be trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then sent into the Caucasus to join with the Chechen networks that were carrying out a bloody terror campaign against Russia. In the case of Egypt, the Islamic Jihad group, that carried out the massacre of tourists at the Luxor historic sites in upper Egypt, was run out of London by networks that were financed and protected by the British government. So, the issue on the table, with those 28 pages, goes beyond just Saudi Arabia. It goes to the heart of the nature of the still existing imperial powers on this planet. And so, by releasing those 28 pages, and by unleashing an element of the truth, we not only have a unique opportunity to achieve justice, for the families, for all Americans, and for all victims of terrorism worldwide; but we lay the basis for shutting this apparatus down, once and for all. Because terrorism is not a "sociological phenomenon"; it’s not something that is managed from the bottom up. Like the international drug trade, it is run from the top down, and all roads ultimately lead back to what even the British press refer to as "Londonistan." Why target France? Why Hollande? (...) There’s one other thing I should mention: Which is, why Paris? Why France? If you take in the broad message that we’ve hopefully presented effectively so far this evening, one thing that should be clear is that the deployment of international terrorism is strategic. And in the case of France, right now, why target Hollande? Why target France? In the last several weeks, Hollande, who admittedly is a weak President, with very small popular support, has done something very important: He’s broken ranks and has pushed back against the pressures from London, from Washington; he’s done something that Angela Merkel has yet to do, he’s said, "we must stop these provocations against Russia. We’ve got to stop pushing on the path for general war. No more sanctions. Roll back the sanctions and let’s try to once again work on a cooperative basis with Russia." That has been a pushback, that has infuriated the British and their various allies and cowardly suckers around Europe and the United States. And so, there have been comments that I have heard in the last 24 hours, from very well-informed people, including in and around the U.S. government, who know what’s going on; and they’ve said that basically, the attack against the Charlie Hebdo office, was actually a warning shot fired at the head of French President Hollande, warning him to back off from his efforts to get in the way of this drive for war. Video of Press Conference: ‘Declassify the 28 Pages of 9/11 Report’ Press Conference on Capitol Hill. |
