The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks seems the right moment to remind people how even very solid, careful reporting of apparent “deep politics” links in the attacks has never entered the larger American conversation. The story of the Saudi connection to a house in Sarasota, Florida, is must reading. It also is useful to consider given the established role of Saudi intelligence in the Syrian uprising.
Secrecy Reveals Little Official Curiosity—or Coverup?
These stunning revelations—said to be based on the work of the swarm of FBI agents who descended on the gated community in the fall of 2001—would surely have generated headlines worldwide if they had become known after 9/11. But the FBI, for reasons unknown, failed to provide the information to Congressional 9/11 investigators or to the presidential 9/11 commission, and thus it has remained a secret for the past decade.
In response to the Herald article, the FBI has issued a statement saying that the occupants of the house had been tracked down and interrogated, and were found to have no connections to the hijackers. It is not clear when these interrogations are supposed to have taken place, or whether they were conducted by the FBI or by Saudi intelligence. But given the FBI’s poor track record for candor in the matter, the statement is being viewed with some skepticism.
Inside the House
Adding to these doubts is an ineffective effort by the Bureau to woo the house owners back to Florida. According to Scott McKay, a lawyer for homeowners’ association of the gated community, known as Prestancia, the FBI attempted to convince the Ghazzawis they needed to come back in person to sign documents related to unpaid back dues to the association. This attempt proved unsuccessful when the Ghazzawis simply arranged to sign the documents elsewhere. These facts, reported by The Herald, raise questions about the U.S. government’s determination to interview the couple: Esam Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized in Lebanon—by a U.S. official no less—the vice consul at the US embassy in Beirut. His wife’s signature was also notarized—elsewhere in the United States, in Riverside County, California.
The emergence of this information chagrined Bob Graham, the former Florida U.S. Senator. Graham was Senate Intelligence Committee chair (and a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination) and served as co-chair of the congressional joint inquiry into 9/11. “At the beginning of the investigation,” he told The Herald, “each of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was asked to provide all information that agency possessed in relation to 9/11.” Graham noted that the Bureau also failed to turn over information connecting the hijackers to other Saudis living in California, which his own investigators later discovered on their own.
Just as strange, when Graham’s congressional investigators turned over a large body of information on the hijackers they had assembled to the presidential 9/11 Commission, it seemed uninterested. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”
About the new discovery in Sarasota, Graham said it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11.”
All Eyes on Prince Sultan
Of special interest is the Ghazzawis’ boss, the chairman of EIRAD Holding Co. Ltd., Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud. He is a prominent and powerful member of the ruling Saudi royal family who is expected to become crown prince, and thereby in line to become king. Born in 1956, which makes him approximately the same age as the Ghazzawi brothers, Prince Sultan bin Salman is a grandson of King Abdul Aziz (commonly referred to as Ibn Saud), founder of modern Saudi Arabia.[1]
[pullquote]1. Saudi lineages are complicated due to men being named for their ancestors. For example, Prince Sultan (Prince Sultan bin Salman) should not be confused with his uncle, also known as Prince Sultan (Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud), who is Defense Minister and Crown Prince, or his late cousin Prince Sultan bin Faisal.[/pullquote]
Prince Sultan’s family is of enormous importance in today’s Saudi Arabia. His father, Prince Salman, has been the governor of the province of Riyadh (the city of Riyadh is the Saudi capital) since 1962, and is considered an arbitrator among the frequently warring members of the Saudi royal family, with its 4000 princes. Salman is the second youngest of the so-called Sudairi Seven, an extremely powerful alliance of full brothers jockeying for power in the country.
Prince Sultan bin Salman
A leading advocate of teaching Saudis to fly, Prince Sultan is the founder and Chairman of the Board of the Saudi Aviation Club, and Chairman of the King Khaled International Airport (KKIA) Supervisory Committee. Since 2000, he has also headed Saudi Arabia’s tourism commission, placing him among a handful of the King’s grandsons to hold ministerial rank. One of his missions as head of the tourism commission is to repair the damage to Saudi Arabia’s image caused by the 9/11 attacks.
In a document released by Wikileaks, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith, characterizes Prince Sultan this way: “With a powerful father who is the Governor of Riyadh and a strong candidate to be the next crown-prince, Sultan is well positioned to move up the Saudi government ranks… Sultan has visited almost every state [in the U.S.]. He joked with the Ambassador that ‘perhaps the only states he has not yet visited are the Dakotas.’ ” (He is extra well connected, with one brother serving as the deputy oil minister)
Prince Sultan is closely allied with Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, the former longtime ambassador to the United States, who is often called “Bandar Bush” for his friendly relationship with the Bush family. Sultan and Bandar have worked together for years to promote Saudi interest in aviation.
The Bushes and the Royals
The Bush family have long been regarded as friendly with the prince’s family and their associates. Prince Sultan’s NASA mission is perceived as having been orchestrated by George HW Bush as a favor to the Saudis. Associates of the Bush family have many connections with the Prince’s family. Prince Sultan’s father’s legal counsel is William Jeffress Jr, of Houston-based Baker Botts LLP, where James A. Baker III, longstanding advisor to the Bush family, including both Presidents Bush, is a senior partner. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Baker held the post of Senior Counselor for the Carlyle Group, a global asset management firm which is heavily invested in military contracting stocks; among Carlyle’s large investors were the bin Ladens. (In a curious coincidence, Baker watched the live television coverage of the attacks from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, where he and representatives of Osama bin Laden‘s extended family were attending the Carlyle Group’s annual conference. In another odd coincidence, President George W. Bush himself was in Sarasota, reading to schoolchildren, at the very time the Sarasota-area-based terrorists were hijacking the planes. Indeed, he was a short distance from the home the Ghazzawis had recently abandoned.)
President Bush’s actions in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon assaults with regard to the Saudi royal family have long been known but have yet to be fully explored. Shortly after the attacks, President Bush permitted an exception to the ban on air traffic so that planes could take prominent Saudis out of the country. One of those leaving on the flights was the late Prince Ahmed bin Salman, brother of Prince Sultan.
In a 2004 letter to the New York Times, Prince Sultan responded to allegations surrounding those flights, and pointed to a conclusion in the 9/11 commission report: ”Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights.” (Another Saudi who left the US after 9/11 was the architect Abdel Wahed El-Wakil, who had a base in Miami and serves as an advisor to Prince Sultan.)
Allegations of Saudi Royal Complicity
Prince Ahmed with his horse
Sultan’s brother Prince Ahmed was the most westernized of the Saudi set. He raised racehorses in Kentucky and was the owner of the 2001 Kentucky Derby winner, with the perhaps unfortunate name “War Emblem.” Allegations concerning Prince Ahmed emerged in the 2003 book, Why America Slept, by the bestselling author Gerald Posner. Posner says that intelligence sources told him how in March, 2002, under interrogation (but before he was waterboarded 83 times in August), Al Qaeda’s purported chief of operations, Abu Zubaydah, relaxed and began cooperating. Tricked into thinking he was in Saudi custody, Zubaydah asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi Royal family, who he said was his contact. He provided, from memory, the man’s private home and cell phones. This contact, according to Posner, was Prince Ahmed.
Zubaydah is alleged to have said that Osama bin Laden had cut a deal with a top Pakistani military official, Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, who was close to Islamist elements in Pakistani intelligence. According to this account, the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki, signed off on this, and agreed to provide aid to the Taliban in Afghanistan and not to go after Al Qaeda so long as the terrorist group kept its gun sights trained away from the Saudi royals.
In this version of events, Zubaydah is said to have also implicated Prince Sultan, along with another cousin, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, as Al Qaeda backers, and to have claimed that the Pakistani Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir and Saudi Prince Ahmed knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks.
Though the interrogators were skeptical of these claims, Zubaydah often proved credible. Information he provided led to the capture of a senior al-Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia. Zubaydah would only talk when he thought he was in Saudi hands. When U.S. personnel, no longer posing as Saudis, confronted him, Zubaydah said he had made up his earlier statements. But investigators found no basis for believing the information to be false—and even found material that corroborated his claimed ties to high level Saudis. Not surprisingly, the Saudi and Pakistani governments insisted his claims were false in all respects.
One of the key figures named by Zubaydah, Prince Turki, had been removed from his position as Saudi intelligence chief on September 1, 2001, ten days before the attacks. Thus, he was apparently not in that post on the critical day. Yet, his removal was a temporary absence from the highest levels of Saudi leadership, and not necessarily an indication that he had fallen into serious disfavor. The next year, he was named Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, just as a shift in focus from Al Qaeda to Iraq was being pitched to the British. If Zubaydah’s claims are at all credible, the removal of Turki from an official position shortly before the attacks surely warrants additional analysis— as does the Ghazzawis’ hasty flight from the U.S. right in the same time frame.
According to the book The Eleventh Day, by Summers and his co-author Robbyn Swan, Zubaydah is not alone in asserting a Saudi-Al Qaeda deal:
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
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Prince Ahmed and another royal, Prince Sultan bin Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulazziz, were among the fifteen Saudis spirited out of the US, with President Bush’s approval, on September 16, 2001, via Lexington, Kentucky—i.e., out of Prince Ahmed’s U.S. backyard. Prince Sultan bin Fahd is the nephew of Prince Ahmed and Prince Sultan, and the son of Prince Fahd bin Salman (see below) who died unexpectedly shortly before the 9/11 attacks.
“It appears as if they didn’t want to be around to be questioned as to what role they had played and the best way to avoid that was to get out of the country,” former Senator Bob Graham told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
As author Craig Unger notes in his book, House of Bush, House of Saud, FBI agents were stationed at all points of departure for the group of Saudis who massed in Lexington before departing the country, yet there’s no evidence they were asked any questions at all.
Ironically, Posner, who is regularly cited by the corporate media for his views on the JFK assassination (he is a leading defender of the conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman), is largely ignored for his work on the Saudi-9/11 connection, where he does posit high-level involvement. Posner is a highly controversial and at times perplexing figure, but he insists he has solid intelligence sources, and the thrust of his claims have meshed with those of The New York Times intelligence reporter and best-selling author James Risen. As Risen wrote in his book State of War,
Ever since the September 11 attacks, the trail back from al Qaeda to Saudi Arabia has been an intriguing path, but one that very few American investigators have been willing to follow. . . . [B]oth before and after 9/11, President Bush and his administration have displayed a remarkable lack of interest in aggressively examining the connections between Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Saudi power elite. Even as the Bush administration spent enormous time and energy trying in vain to prove connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to help justify the war in Iraq, the administration was ignoring far more conclusive ties with Saudi Arabia. Those links are much stronger and far more troubling than has ever been previously disclosed, and until they are thoroughly investigated, the roots of Al Qaeda’s power, and the full story of 9/11, will never be known.”
Prince Fahd bin Salman died six weeks before 9/11 attacks
Several of those alleged to have had knowledge of this putative scheme and its enormous implications met with untimely ends shortly after Zubaydah’s interrogation. In June, 2002, three months after Zubaydah’s capture, the man he identified as his controller, Prince Ahmed, died of what officials said was a heart attack while asleep. Another brother of Ahmed’s and Sultan’s, Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulazziz, died of a heart attack on July 25, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. The death of Fahd, who preceded his brother as head of EIRAD, is described in a Riyadh-datelined article by Middle East Newsfile, as follows:
Prince Fahd died suddenly. Prince Fahd did not show any symptoms of any ailment. He had, however, made an appointment with a dentist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh to check a toothache.
A cousin, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died when his car crashed en route to Salman’s funeral. Zubaydah had supposedly implicated Prince Sultan bin Faisal, and another royal, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir. as Al-Qaeda supporters. All these men were in their forties. Still another key figure in Zubaydah’s monstrous scenario met an untimely death. On February 20, 2003, Mushaf Ali Mir, the Pakistani air force chief, his wife and fifteen others, were killed in a plane crash.
Not a hint of the above information appeared in the released portion of the presidential 9/11 commission report. It is not known whether any of it was in the 28 pages of material about Saudi connections that the Bush Administration censored on national security grounds.
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