Bush Should Cry Uncle and Release Saudi Info

Bush Should Cry Uncle and Release Saudi Info

Opednews.com -6-28-03

By Allan P. Duncan

Photo: Allan P. Duncan

"We will direct every resource at our command to win the war against terrorists, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence. We will starve the terrorists of funding." President George W. Bush, September 24, 2001

Tough words from Bush less than two weeks after the most devastating attack in American history. Over time though, they have become the words of a paper tiger when it comes to actually dealing with those who were clearly involved in financing the attacks on 9-11.

With the release of the Congressional Joint Inquiry Report on 9-11, the Bush Administration forced the redaction of 28 pages from the report on the role of Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country ( Pakistan is my guess), in financing Bin Laden. Their reasoning is that it would compromise our national security for the information to be made public.

I think that the reason the information was not released is because it would reveal embarrassing information about the long term relationship between the Saudis and the Bush family itself.

Some of the information that was revealed pertained to two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. According to the report,

"This Joint Inquiry confirmed that these same two future hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had numerous contacts with a long time FBI counterterrorism informant in California and that a third future hijacker, Hani Hanjour, apparently had more limited contact with the same informant."

"The informant has made numerous inconsistent statements to the FBI during the course of interviews after September 11, 2001."

"The Administration has to date objected to the Inquiry's efforts to interview the informant in order to attempt to resolve those inconsistencies. The Administration also could not agree to allow the FBI to serve a Committee subpoena and deposition notice on the informant. Instead, written interrogatories from the Joint Inquiry were, at the suggestion of the FBI, provided to the informant. Through an attorney, the informant has declined to respond to those interrogatories and has indicated that, if subpoenaed, the informant would request a grant of immunity prior to testifying.

Why would The Administration want to block a more thorough investigation into what the FBI informant might have known?

Maybe because there is far more to this story than most people know.

One of the other characters involved in this story was Omar al-Bayoumi, supposedly just a simple Saudi student studying in the US. The report has some interesting things to say about this simple student though,

"Despite the fact that he was a student, al-Bayoumi had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia. For example, an FBI source identified al-Bayoumi as the person who delivered $400,000 from Saudi Arabia for the Kurdish mosque in San Diego. One of the FBI's best sources in San Diego informed the FBI that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power."

Turns out that some of the money al-Bayoumi received was from Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, and daughter of the late King Faisal. The money then ended up in the hands of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi for monthly living expenses while they rented rooms in the home of the FBI informant.

The checks from Princess Haifa were drawn on Riggs Bank in Washington D.C. One of the chief officers of Riggs Bank is Jonathan Bush, an uncle of President George W. Bush.

According to Margie Burns in her article titled Bush-connected firm provided security at World Trade Center, "Given that Jonathan Bush, the president's uncle, is a Riggs executive, it is difficult to understand any obstacle for US authorities pursuing the recently reported "Saudi money trail." The princess's charitable activities were processed through Riggs, but attention focused on the Saudis seems not to extend to the US bank they used."

So this is most likely one of the main reasons why information relating to the funding of Al Qaeda by the Saudis has been redacted from the report. If Bush was really serious about starving the terrorists of their funding, he'd have to start by seizing Saudi money from his Uncle Jonathan's bank in Washington D.C.

So it appears to me, that the redaction of the Saudi information from the 9-11 Report had more to do with covering the President's own ass from the embarrassing fact that his own uncle was part of the Saudi money trail that enabled two of the hijackers to crash a plane into the Pentagon, and very little to do with jeopardizing our national security at all.

Allan Duncan is a Social Worker who lives in New Hope, PA. This article is copyright by Allan Duncan

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printed from Bush Should Cry Uncle and Release Saudi Info on 2004-05-31 11:04:13