Former Gov. Bob Graham goes on 60 Minutes to talk about Saudi/911 hijackers connections

[Octafish]

108. Some will do anything for the oil.

Remember the guy who got told to zip his lip when he blew the whistle about the passports from Saudi Arabia?

The Twenty-Eight Pages

BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT
The New Yorker, SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

EXCERPT...

Bayoumi and a friend drove from San Diego, where they lived, to L.A. Bayoumi then went to the Saudi consulate, where he spent about an hour meeting with an official in the Ministry of Islamic Affairs named Fahad al-Thumairy, whom he considered to be his spiritual adviser. (In 2002, Thumairy was stripped of his diplomatic visa and deported, because of suspected ties to terrorists.) Afterward, Bayoumi and his friend drove to a halal restaurant in Culver City. Bayoumi later told investigators that, while eating there, he happened to overhear two men—Hazmi and Mihdhar—speaking Arabic with Gulf accents. He struck up a conversation with them and soon invited them to move to San Diego. He set them up in the same apartment complex where he lived. Because the hijackers-in-training did not have a checking account, Bayoumi paid their security deposit and first month’s rent (for which they immediately reimbursed him). He also introduced them to members of the Arab community, possibly including the imam of a local mosque, Anwar al-Awlaki—later to become the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Another Saudi who was in San Diego at the time, Osama Basnan, also befriended Hazmi and Mihdhar. As it happened, Basnan’s wife was receiving charitable gifts from Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa. The payments—as much as seventy-three thousand dollars over a period of three years—were supposed to fund the treatment of a medical condition that Basnan’s wife suffered from. According to pleadings in the lawsuit against the Saudis, some of that money went to support the hijackers in San Diego. The F.B.I. has not found any evidence that the money got into the hands of the hijackers, however, and the 9/11 Commission found no links to the royal family.

“We assert that purported ‘charities,’ established by the government of the Kingdom to propagate radical Wahhabi ideology throughout the world, served as the primary sources of funding and logistical support for Al Qaeda for more than a decade leading up to the 9/11 attacks,” Sean Carter, one of the lead attorneys in the lawsuit, told me. “Not coincidentally, these so-called charities were themselves regulated by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which from its formation, in 1993, assumed primary responsibility for the Kingdom’s efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/twenty-eight-pages

War and its inherent instability are good for one thing: Jacking up the price of crude. When it's at $100 a barrel, the Kingdom's credit at the casino may be $10 Trillion. When it's at $10 a barrel, cash up front time.

Greg Palast spelled it out:

And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward.

Thank you for another outstanding OP and thread, seafan. You are the opposite of television: People get smarter after reading your stuff.