Two men conducted a 9/11/01 'dry run' in 1999 with tickets from Saudi government

[burfman]

48. The NY Times take on the release

What could possibly go wrong with having the Saudi's as our good buddies?


In 9/11 Document, View of a Saudi Effort to Thwart U.S. Action on Al Qaeda


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/us/28-pages-saudi-arabia-september-11.html


Some excerpts from the article:

....

It details contacts between Saudi officials and some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and the discovery of a telephone number in a Qaeda militant’s phone book that was traced to a corporation managing an Aspen, Colo., home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

The document, 28 pages of a congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is also an unflattering portrayal of the kingdom’s efforts to thwart American attempts to combat Al Qaeda in the years before the attacks.


....

In particular, some investigators remain puzzled by the exact role played by Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi consular official based in the Los Angeles area at the time of the attacks. They believe that if there had been any Saudi government role in the plot, it probably would have involved him.

Mr. Thumairy was the imam of a mosque visited by two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and some American government officials have long suspected that Mr. Thumairy assisted the two men — Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid al-Midhar — after they arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000.

An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of” of Mr. Alhamzi and Mr. Midhar “during their time in the Los Angeles area,” but the F.B.I. has been unable to piece together other details of the movement of the two men during their early days in the United States.

Two investigators for the Sept. 11 commission interviewed Mr. Thumairy for several hours in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, in February 2004, but he denied having any ties to the hijackers — even after being presented with phone records that seemed to link him to the two men.

The 28 pages discuss the role that Mr. Thumairy is said to have played, as well as a number of possible connections between Qaeda operatives and Saudi officials. One section of the report details how a phone number in a telephone book found with Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 by the C.I.A., was traced to a corporation in Aspen, Colo., that manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar.

.....


There's also this interesting article that was published last month:

A Saudi Imam, 2 Hijackers and Lingering 9/11 Mystery

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-sept11-classified-28-pages.html