Professor Smartass

A small issue and a big one.

The small is that two of the hijackers made airline reservations for AFTER 9/11, including back to Saudi Arabia. That could arguably be to make their activities look less suspicious--or the guys themselves might not have known they wouldn't survive their 9/11 flights.

The bigger issue is the 9/11 Commission lied about when these two hijackers hooked up with another Saudi in the US and redacted the third guy's name from the report (even though it can be found elsewhere). The report says they met by chance after wandering around LA for a couple of weeks, but their rental agreement shows they met the day the guys arrived since they signed that day.

Their contact who was already in America started receiving stipend checks from the Saudi ambassador's wife, and made constant phone calls to Saudi officials in DC and LA.

The effect of leaving this information out is to obscure the Saudi role in 9/11.

Since this information was provided by the FBI to the 9/11 Commission, it is reasonable to assume the Bush administration saw it too.

We were attacked by an ally, Saudi Arabia, covered their tracks, and used the attacks as an excuse to attack someone else, Iraq.

Why exactly would the Saudis do this if they weren't 100% sure of what our reaction would be? If they were acting on their own, wouldn't they expect at minimum the kind of beat down we gave Afghanistan? Instead, Prince Bandar, whose wife sent the checks to the hijackers, was smoking cigars on the back balcony of the White House with Bush two days after 9/11.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission, has said this should be investigated. No word from the Bushies on the Commission like Zelikow, who had written a book with Condi.

On a related note, it was recently revealed Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, long time ambassador to the US, made veiled threats of terrorist attacks against Great Britain if they didn't back off a corruption investigation, and Tony Blair took them seriously enough to call off the investigation.

Just for the hell of it, why not call your congressman and senators and ask them why they don't look into this stuff?


KEY EXCERPTS:

FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report
02/28/2008 @ 8:01 am
Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.

The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.

The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

***
“In the official version of the story now, the hijackers drift around L.A. listlessly for two weeks before chancing to come across Bayoumi in a restaurant [according to Bayoumi’s account],” Thompson added. “Whereupon he's an incredible good Samaritan and takes them down to San Diego, pays their rent, etc.”

”But from the FBI's timeline, we now know the hijackers started staying at Bayoumi's place on Jan. 15 – the very same day they arrived,” Thompson says. “So obviously they must have been met at the airport and taken care of from their very first hours in the US. That's huge because the FBI maintains to this day that the hijackers never had any accomplices in the US.”

***

“Bayoumi seemed clearly to be working for some part of the Saudi government,” [New York Times reporter Phillip] Shenon wrote on page 52. “He entered the United States as a business student and had lived San Diego since 1996. He was on the payroll of an aviation contractor to the Saudi government, paid about $2,800 a month, but apparently did no work for the company.”

In fact, Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi defense contractor Dallah Avco. According to a 2002 Newsweek article about Bayoumi, Dallah Avco is “an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar.”

Newsweek points to another connection between Bayoumi and Bandar: “About two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar, [the two hijackers] NEWSWEEK has learned, al-Bayoumi's wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The money came in the form of cashier's checks, purchased from Washington's Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family. The checks were sent to a woman named Majeda Ibrahin Dweikat, who in turn signed over many of them to al-Bayoumi's wife (and her friend), Manal Ahmed Bagader. The Feds want to know: Was this well-meaning charity gone awry? Or some elaborate money-laundering scheme? A scam? Or just a coincidence?”

According to then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who served as a co-chair of the 9/11 Congressional inquiry that preceded the 9/11 Commission, during the period of Alhazmi and Almihdhar’s [the two hijackers] arrival in the US, Bayoumi had an “unusually large number of telephone calls with Saudi government officials in both Los Angeles and Washington.” (Graham and Nussbaum, 2004, pp. 168-169)

Bayoumi moved to London in 2001 and lived there until his arrest immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Following his release, Bayoumi returned to Saudi Arabia, where he was interviewed in October 2003 by the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, and Senior Counsel Dieter Snell.

FULL TEXT

Labels: 9/11, fbi, foia, george hw bush, informant, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Omar al-Bayoumi, president george w bush, prince bandar, saudi arabia