‘convenient lies’ by anthony freda
The most comprehensive coverage I’ve read so far is by Bill Van Auken at wsws.org, although I haven’t taken the time to do more than scan the piece by Leopold and Kaye Tweeted below. They do, however, call hooey on the Official 9/11 Commission’s whitewash of the fact that Saudi government (‘Our Partners in Peace’) officials weren’t directly implicated (Saudi citizens mebbe, mumble mumble..). It doesn’t seem as though the Trotskyites’ essays are labeled Creative Commons, so I’ll paste in the beginning, and hope you’ll read the rest.
“The public release Friday afternoon of a section of the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, which had been kept secret for 13 years, has provided fresh evidence of a deliberate coverup of the role played, not only by the Saudi government, but US intelligence agencies themselves, in facilitating the attacks and then covering up their real roots.
The 28-page segment from the report issued by the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” provides abundant and damning evidence of extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers—15 out of 19 of whom were Saudi nationals—in the period leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.
The Obama White House, the CIA, the Saudi monarchy and the corporate media have all tried to portray the documents—released on a Friday afternoon to assure minimal exposure—as somehow exonerating the Saudi regime of any culpability in the 9/11 attacks.
“This information does not change the assessment of the US government that there’s no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi individuals funded al-Qaeda,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary said Friday, boasting that the main significance of their release was its proof of the Obama administration’s commitment to “transparency.”
In reality, the 28 pages have been kept under lock and key since 2002, with only members of Congress allowed to read them, in a Capitol Hill basement vault, while prohibited from taking notes, bringing members of their staff or breathing a word of their content.
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, maintained this secrecy for several reasons. First, it was concerned that the documents would jeopardize its relations with Saudi Arabia, which, after Israel, is Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East, a partner in bloody operations from Afghanistan to Syria to Yemen, and the world’s biggest buyer of American arms.
Even more importantly, it was concerned that the 28 pages would further expose the abject criminality of the US government’s role in facilitating the attacks of 9/11 and then lying about their source and exploiting them to justify savage wars of aggression, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq. These wars have claimed over a million lives. The false narrative created around the September 11 attacks remains the ideological pillar of the US campaign of global militarism conducted in the name of a “war on terror.”
Media reports on the 28 pages invariably refer to the absence of a “smoking gun,” which presumably would be tantamount to an order signed by the Saudi king to attack New York and Washington. The evidence is described as “inconclusive.” One can only imagine what would have been the response if, in place of the word “Saudi,” the documents referred to Iraqi, Syrian or Iranian actions. The same evidence would have been proclaimed an airtight case for war.
Among those who were involved in preparing the report, John Lehman, the former secretary of the navy, directly contradicted the official response to the release of the previously censored section. “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”
Similarly, former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who chaired the committee that carried out the investigation, suggested that the information released Friday was only the beginning. “I think of this almost as the 28 pages are sort of the cork in the wine bottle. And once it’s out, hopefully the rest of the wine itself will start to pour out,” he said.
What clearly emerges from the newly-released document, which is titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” is that there were multiple indications of funding and support for the 9/11 hijackers and Al Qaeda in general, but that investigations were either shut down or never initiated because of the close ties between Washington and the Saudi monarchy, and between US and Saudi intelligence.” (again, the rest is here.)
Commenters ask why there is no mention of Israel/Mossad in the report, and nothing about the collapse of building #7, etc.
Emptywheel’s focus was that she either hadn’t known, or had forgotten that the ‘FBI Established Saudi Task Force Just before Joint Inquiry Release’.
“That means over a year elapsed before the FBI really started investigating this angle. It goes on to reveal FBI was not focusing any counterintelligence resources on Saudis before 9/11, because “FBI received ‘no reporting from any member of the Intelligence Community’ that there was a [redacted] presence in the United States.” A very heavily redacted passage implies that’s because they were an “ally” [scare quotes original].
She has sections of the pdf posted, but I can’t reproduce them.
“It goes on to note that CIA did have records of such ties (we knew that); it makes no mention of NSA, though they knew of Saudi ties as well.
The report even reveals that Robert Mueller learned about the Saudi role in the attack from the Joint Inquiry.
This is fairly unbelievable, but all too believable.”
(I find it completely unbelievable, myself.)
She also linked to this scathing indictment by Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow of the Jersey Girls fame: ‘29 Pages Revealed: Corruption, Crime and Cover-up Of 9/11’, including this:
“To be clear, the 9/11 Commission did NOT fully investigate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Staff Director Philip Zelikow blocked any investigation into the Saudis. Zelikow even went so far as to fire an investigator who had been brought over from the Joint Inquiry to specifically follow-up on the Saudi leads and information uncovered in the Joint Inquiry. I will repeat — the investigator was fired. In addition, Zelikow re-wrote the 9/11 Commission’s entire section regarding the Saudi’s and their connection to the 9/11 attacks. Former 9/11 Commissioners John Lehman, Bob Kerrey, and Tim Roemer have all acknowledged that the Saudis were not adequately investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Thus, for any government official to hang their hat on the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report — when Commissioners, themselves, have admitted that the Saudis were not fully investigated, is absurd and disgraceful.
For example, one glaring piece of information was not mentioned in either the 9/11 Commission or the Joint Inquiry’s 29 pages — the information regarding Fahad Thumairy and Khallad bin Attash found in both an FBI report and a CIA report —that are now declassified. Both reports indicate that Fahad Thumairy — a Saudi Consulate official—helped bring Khallad bin Attash into the United States in June of 2000 so he could meet with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi. Thumairy escorted bin Attash — a known al Qaeda operative — through INS and Customs at LAX evading security and any possible alarm bells. Again, this information is found in both a CIA and FBI report.” (the rest is here.)
Jeff Kaye had Tweeted a couple of his and J. Leopold’s past exposés yesterday, one: ‘New Documents Suggest DoD Watchdog Covered Up Intelligence Unit’s Work Tracking 9/11 Terrorists’; Thursday, 08 September 2011 22:00 Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold, Truthout
More from the Dynamic Duo that peers into the Abyss for us:
From their piece above, this point pops out again:
“”What often gets lost in those theories is that the 28 pages were based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material that came to the FBI,” Kean and Hamilton wrote in an op-ed in USA Today this past April. “That material was written up as possible leads for further investigation, and the 28 pages were a summary of some of those reports and leads as of the end of 2002 — all of them uninvestigated.”
Jeffrey gives fair warning:
How many world citizens have died now in this 9/11 War on Terror? How many are in Diaspora, how many DU generations will there be in Iraq? It was worth it, wasn’t it? Or will they come for us one day and say: Enough?
Bonus: because I can, and because: the ‘resurrected’ fascist Narenda Modi/s. Remember not long ago Tulsi Gabbard had quit her position on the DNC and endorsed Bernie Sanders? There were quite a few headlines and petitions to the effect that he should immediately name her as her Veep. Ooopsie.
(OTOH, Jalini called Obomba ‘progressive’ or some such…) yow!
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
hi time to bedforshire here in EST? i don’t know WD, is this our gen’s JFK assassination (sorry, i know i’m dating myself w/that comment)? yes & no. yes, in that there’s lots of stuff one can get distracted on (bldg 7? i don’t know…), no in that 9/11 is THE justification for a world of hurt, quite unlike the earlier shooting in Dallas. (lol. as if JFk was the only dude ever shot mysterio-style in Dallas.) anyway, way yes on BV Auken’s comment that if it’d been iraq or whatever under the microscope, it’d be a totally different conversation.
date away, lol; i’m a geezerette myownself. ;-) explain: ‘hi time to bedforshire here in EST?’, if you will.
the parallels i see is the whitewash of the warren commission report, plus the Empire’s deep state players getting another free ride…at least for now, and my goodness: bob graham? i tried to find the more recent interview w/ him TRNN had up, but couldn’t find it again as i was cobbling this post together.
#building #7 is the key to the truther group’s claims that the twin towers was wholly an inside job, as in: only a major demolition at or under the ground would have caused the implosion, only reason i know that small bit is that a diarist/commenter named ‘public’ would get on my diaires at my.fdl and rave at me for NOT saying that…or something. it was another credo: it would change everything. but those folks must spend all their time on proving that. yanno: all the financial records were there, yada, yada.
mi amigo anthony freda seems to believe so, and he was elated that the PTB accepted his artwork to that effect for the 9/11 museum. iirc, he has one with a single bullet going thru jfk, then bobby, then mlk…if that’s the timeline.
and of course the weird cover-up over all this began on 9/12 when no flights were permitted…except to get any and all saudis out of the US of A. then cuz the saudi G couldn’t be implicated: bin laden (if i’d heard ‘tora bora’ outta john kerry’s mouth one more time, i’d a…well, yanno.
but to consider that the first drones were unleashed at mullah omar, then became commonplace so quickly… heh,da wiki claims that the war in afghanistan *ended* when isaf/nato boogied out of it in 2014, my stars.
but just think that this purposeful ‘failure of intelligence (no real investigation, pffff) has led to the never-ending war on terra’, shock and awe, defilement of ME holy lands by Babylon’s occupations…more Muslim enemies (‘why do they hate us? they hate our freedom!’)
anyhoo, i was glad to see that there was more in the report than i’d expected, given the small bit of coverage i’d first seen on saturday, and no, i haven’t read the #28 pages. ;-).
EST-eastern time zone, not that other thing. befordshire-bed.
oh god, there’s tons of iffy stuff re That Day. no need to even dust off the patriot act it was so ready to go. maybe this is a cop out, but i tend to look at this from its effects backwards and am content to say, re bldg 7 & whatever, i don’t put anything past these assholes. if they are willing to use this event to lie the country (& world) into wars in afghanistan & iraq, what won’t they do? there’s nothing they won’t do. nothing. hello anthrax. whether bldg 7 had explosives is not by any means a matter of indifference, but i’m not gonna spend my time on it. excellent point on parallels to the warren commish. just google “WTC bombings NYT FBI” and see how even the NYT has to acknowledge some kind of FBI involvement, even as they backpeddle w/the “fog of spycraft” BS.
curious about your friend anthony freda. very interesting. is this a co-optation of “conspiracy culture”? who’s pulling the trigger after all, both in the artwork & in the decision to use this art? partial revelations of “what’s really going on”, if that’s what this is, are really useful, a la Edward Snowden, much of whose info was revealed in the CIA-sponsored, NSA-bashing, 1998 film “Enemy of the State” (hello spyculture.com). now getting OT, but you get people’s wheels spinning, worrying about the wheels w/in wheels, while for many people injecting an element of fear & paranoia about unknown dark-side actors. “don’t go looking for monsters,” as nietzsche advised. don’t go sniffing around & sampling the witch’s brew or dance w/the devil. partial revelation of method for a magician can be a big part of the act, to lure some in & scare others away.
in any case, the senate didn’t have to release this report, did they? so why did they? why now?
ah; it was the ‘hi time bedfordshire’, i guess i thought was ‘time to hit the rack’.
dunno on the timing, someone at auken’s mentioned this as a limited hangout, no explication for what or why, though. perhaps enough senators were clamoring for it, stirring up the other Rabble, i dunno, but they also thought they could control it, and then claim “see? obama = transparency, and “the saudis wanted it out to show they had no part in it”. pffffft. but then, the msm isn’t paying any attention to this, are they? and whoa! the conventions are about to kick off!!!
russ tice, if i have his name right, had blow the whistle on the nsa, but the answer to that was always: ‘snowden brought the documents’. well, he did, but afik, the only changes to the spy laws have been to make them even more horrific, esp. w/ social media monitoring and recording. but you made me laugh remembering that at that big town hall in NZ with kim dotcom and the others, snowden said all he ever wanted was a conversation, and if the people voted for continuing the massive gathering of communications, it was OK w/ him. well…yay-usss; people should be able to vote away their constitutional rights, no? ;-)
turns out, and i went a-hunting, freda’s one piece that’s in the museum, is titled ‘9/11 questions’. i found another one he hadn’t sent me that i’ll switch out for the art at the top of the OP; it’s fine.
http://www.creativeresistance.org/the-magic-bullet/
http://www.creativeresistance.org/9-11-questions/
love the 9/11 collage. not sure about the other one. as mysterio deaths, yes. & i guess the K bro’s could mouth off about civil rights b/n swapping poor marilyn around.
so now, a la Blair & the Chilcott Report, we get to be totally dismissive and say, “oh of course, Saudi involvement is old news”? a morsel of gristle for anyone still paying attention while the rest move on to fatter fare w/the MSM? it’ll be fun to see the superstate’s response to any prospective lawsuits again S.A.
excellent on the (so tired now) chilcot report. ha, dinnae know about the koch boys and marilyn, tho. law suits? bite yer tongue!
more isis, more quadrennial circuses, the rump’s new charges against clinton (not that he’s wrong). but pepe and b, and from what i’ve seen seem to agree in the main: a coup that wasn’t really a putsch. interesting, although there are a few things vis a vis the us/nato and turkey that don’t fit into the theme altogether.
pepe’s is a really fun read (including familiarity w/ the players and history), and not too much tequila behind it, either.
:)
‘The Attempted Coup in Turkey: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Teflon Sultan‘
oh gawd, there’s lots of weird stuff around the kennedys, who were not saints by any stretch. quite the other thing, in fact.
i read the pepe 1st thing. Rumor volat. hard to know wth is going on.
making nice w/Russia can’t have helped him, but is that counterbalanced w/making nice with The Only Democracy in the Middle East(tm)? but is he making overtures to Assad in Syria? & the Kurds and Erdogan’s obvious support for ISIS and…maybe just charting some measure of an *independent* course gets a shot fired across the bow? seems pretty clear that the coup plotters really could have killed him when he was flying around, if they had wanted to. ????? lots of if’s and what have you’s…
no, not saints, and it’s likely i know a smattering of ‘how much not’, but they were our generation’s first evidence as to how easy it was to dispatch an inconvenient leader. well, okay; mebbe jimmy hoffa, lol.
ah, i can’t remember the pule pieces that didn’t fit, as ever. stuff just melts out of my brain. but new silk roads, was that the signal from the iranian minister of another realignment? i wish i could see some of it from higher in the sky, i admit.
what the hell are frau frumpy’s nightmares like? yep, she backed him like crazy. is the ‘death penalty’ for the alleged coup plotters and judges really a thing? did the sultan off swat have some sort of anti-EU realignment epiphany? and dagnabbit, i do wish i knew more about the several kurdish group acronyms. i should have kept up, but…as w/ syria, i’d felt forced to choose what not to know given my dearth of time.
dunno if this will be a thing or not; who’s gonna wade into them, will they matter, esp. to the kurds ad assange intimates? cool tweak on michaelangelo’s ‘the creation’ in any event. or…sacrilegious? ;-)
and if you’re in need of a laugh…
https://www.rt.com/usa/351715-mike-pence-daughter-photo/
(picking up here). eh, the wiki would be of more interest to turkey itself probably. and yes, the RT was pretty funny. seems the daughter can’t stand the father. but how amateur hour! his team photoshopping her into that photo shows you who the real vampire is.
anyway, while having my thin gruel for supper that would embarrass oliver twist (j/k), i listened to the corbett report on turkey. of course not sure about everything they said, but there were several points:
1) the fake or staged coup idea: when does the MSM *ever* talk about this kind of stuff, that states might fake something hugely dramatic and revolutionary? the MSM trotting this out is very suspicious and is a pronounced sign of official Western hostility to Erdogan. 2) nukes at Incirlik: who knew? it’s not surprising if you think about it, but again, why talk about somthing now that has been largely/entirely unknown? b/c ISIS might take over the nukes? uh huh, sure. more likely setting the stage to take out Erdogan, if necessary. 3) people in the streets saving the state: i was really skeptical of this trope but didn’t something similar happen in syria? despite lots of disaffection from assad, when it became clear that foreign actors were trying to overthrow the gov’t, people rallied around the gov’t. is that what happened here? 4) this gulen fellow: i have no idea about this, but given his US support, he’s some kind of deep state operative (see wiki link below). the corbett gang said this guy is filthy rich, is deep in both charter school mvt in the US, has deep ties to the Clinton Fdtn, and that his international “movement schools” serve as recruiting stations for Islamist radicals (contra the benign image of him & his movement schools in wiki.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BClen_Movement_Schools 5) the notion of Erdogan seeking asylum in Germany as a psyop against the Turkish people? to demoralize them? 6) The Turkish military more or less takes its orders from NATO, not from the prime minister.
i don’t buy all of these the same, b/c Erdogan is such a gigantic pendejo, but putting them all together…he may have preempted the coup or forced them to play their hand, but i think it was an actual coup attempt by NATO. if so, that’s a serious sign of desperation. desperation about what? Turkey turning to Asia/Russia & away from Europe?
mmmm. see the tweets at the end of this diary for now:
https://cafe-babylon.net/2016/07/14/blacklivesdidntmatter/
i can also see the logic that nato would have arranged a smarter, even if fake coup, but i do hear you. i’m just at the end of my eyesight today, so it’s hard to read even moderately well. i apologize for my limitations, including creeping dementia. soon i will need to shut down the site and…do something else with my life. knit cookies?
oh, in the twitteverse,, i’d seen something labeled ‘this is gulen’s cia rep. i didn’t click the link.:
don’t even joke about shutting down the site! well, take care of yourself.
prolly ol’ hat to you, but new to me and here it is, some sweet nostalgia:
even at my.fdl (how long ago was that?) folks had been gettin’ snotty with my forgetfulness, so this is harder now. but promise me, okay? you’ll give me the heads-up when it’ time for me to go into my twilight? (into the West…?)
i loved the tune and the remix was really fun, and new to me as well. now you’ll call me crazy, but there was some note of pathos in there that made this one ping for me. what would we ever do w/o fine music?