Obama and Clinton Are Endangering All of Us

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Eric Zuesse.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/05/57448.html

I am a lifelong FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Democrat and therefore am anything other than prejudiced against the Democratic Party. But, that Party died when Bill Clinton became President and undid FDR’s regulations on the megabanks and FDR’s AFDC income program for children in poor families, and when Clinton replaced that with restoration of Wall Street’s control over America (like before FDR, only a more convoluted form of it).

However, the way in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endanger all people’s lives and property and health and welfare, has to do with something else, something that’s even more evil than what Bill Clinton did, and it’s the Obama-Clinton (that’s Secretary of State and now Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) foreign policy, to overthrow the leaders of nations who are allied with or supportive of Russia — such as most recently Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but before that Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, and before that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It’s no mere coincidence that all three had had cordial relations with Russia.

George W. Bush’s 2003 overthrow of yet another pro-Russian head-of-state, Saddam Hussein, had already done enormous damage not only to Iraq but to the U.S., and yet Obama and Clinton are at least as determined to surround Russia by enemies, as Bush was; and they now even support the installation, on-and-near Russia’s very borders, of a ‘Ballistic Missile Defense’ system that’s designed to disable Russia’s ability to retaliate against a U.S. surprise nuclear attack on Russia — the BMD is astoundingly aggressive, especially considering that whereas in 1991 the Soviet and then Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev terminated both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact on the basis of an understanding from George Herbert Walker Bush and his agents, that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”, this crucial promise from the U.S. government was violated by Bill Clinton’s extending NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland; and by Bush’s son Bush then extending NATO into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; and by Obama then extending NATO into Albania and Croatia and trying to bring into it also Ukraine and some other nations bordering or near Russia.

American President JFK didn’t allow the Khruschev regime to place nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. in Cuba in 1962, and Russian President Putin can’t stand the Obama regime to place nuclear missiles right on Russia’s borders, but it’s happening now, and it endangers us all — not only the Russian people.

Furthermore, with the support of both U.S. President Obama and his neo-conservative former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (famous for her psychopathic “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha!!” comment), NATO’s current Secretary General and other top people at NATO are now increasingly beating the drums for war against Russia, and are using for ‘justification’ of it the very same lie that both Obama and Clinton do, as Obama has stated it: Russia’s alleged ‘conquest’ of Crimea. As I have documented headlining “The Entire Case for Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies”, there was no such ‘conquest’, and even Western-sponsored polls of Crimeans both before and after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to reject the newly imposed February 2014 Obama-engineered coup-government of Ukraine and to rejoin Russia of which Crimea had been a part until involuntarily transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet dictator Khrushchev in 1954, showed the very same overwhelmingly high level of public support for rejoining with Russia that was shown in the plebiscite-results.

The U.S. government accepts the right of self-determination of peoples, so that the residents of Scotland can vote to separate from the UK if they wish, and the residents of Catalonia can vote to separate from Spain if they wish, but where it comes now to the right of the residents of Crimea, who had voted 75% for Viktor Yanukovych and who were disgusted by Obama’s overthrow of him, to separate from the newly-imposed Obama-coup-regime in Kiev (and even the head of Stratfor called it “the most blatant coup in history”), Obama and Clinton reject that same right for the Crimean people. Why do they reject it? They have to do this, in order to support NATO’s war-buildup against Russia, and support their surrounding Russia with extremely dangerous missiles. (In fact, Russia’s alleged ‘seizure’ of Crimea is even the ‘justification’ that Obama gives for his economic sanctions against Russia; so, he’s deep into lying about it.)

The expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders proves NATO’s (that’s to say, the U.S. aristocracy’s, and its subordinate national aristocracies represented in NATO) aggressive intent against Russia. Putin had done everything he could to have friendly relations with America, but now under Obama the relationship has plunged into clearly a pre-war situation, not only in Syria, and Ukraine, and elsewhere on Russia’s borders, but in American propaganda against Russia. The addition of installation now of BMD is flashing to all Russians the extreme-danger signal, and if Russia therefore launches a surprise nuclear attack against the U.S. at some time before the BMD becomes fully operational, the blame for it belongs to George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, and all who have lied so viciously against Russia and who so blatantly violated the promise that the George Herbert Walker Bush regime had made to Gorbachev in 1990.

Fair is fair, regardless of the particular nation, and unfair is unfair, regardless of the particular nation; and, in this case, clearly, the U.S. government has been extremely unfair to the Russian people, and so the Russian government’s patience with the lies of the U.S. government and of its NATO stooges, might have a limit that precedes activation of BMD — this would mean a Russian first-strike (and they won’t warn about it in advance). They don’t want to be sitting ducks. And they all know that only fools think that disabling an opponent’s ability to retaliate is only a defensive act. Any intelligent person knows that it can be also an extremely aggressive act. And the coup in Ukraine, which started to be organized in the U.S. Embassy in Kiev by no later than 1 March 2013 — a year before the coup itself — was an extremely hostile and aggressive act against not only Yanukovych, but also against Russia.

The way in which Obama and Clinton are endangering all of us is that, if Russia waits and the BMD (which itself is ‘justified’ only on the basis of lies) that’s now starting to be installed, turns out to work, then only Russia will immediately be reduced to nuclear char; but, if it doesn’t work, then both sides will be destroyed; and, if Russia doesn’t even wait to find out, but instead strikes first, then only the U.S. and maybe other NATO nations will immediately be destroyed; and, in any case, the level of nuclear contamination of the entire world, and the amount of earth that will be thrown up into the high atmosphere and generate a global freezing (“nuclear winter”) that will be just as extreme and far more sudden than the otherwise global warming, will make life not even worth living.

Obama and Clinton aren’t the only Americans who are pushing this needless vile brinksmanship, but it is needless; it’s entirely unnecessary, and, on the U.S.-NATO side, it’s based clearly upon lies; so, the U.S. government must repudiate it and halt the BMD, right now.

If there’s anything sane that’s still remaining in American politics, this issue will be the central issue of the 2016 Presidential campaign. Because, if things continue drifting in the way that they have been drifting, then the world-as-it’s-always-been-known will soon end, and what replaces it will become hell-on-Earth, everywhere. And America’s leaders will have been the cause of it.

Any Presidential candidate who doesn’t condemn both Obama and Clinton for it, has got no rational justification for receiving anyone’s vote. Because, if the next U.S. President doesn’t forthrightly repudiate and reverse this pathological policy, then we’d all better somehow join the aristocracy and buy deep nuclear bunkers, with years of supplies to outlast the first phases of nuclear decay. Except that the people who have already done so are fools for even wanting to live in such a post-war world. But at least they’re smart enough to recognize that things are heading in this direction.

The only solution to it is to avoid electing Presidents such as the ones we’ve been electing. Instead, to elect a President who condemns them — and for the sane reasons, not for other, insane, ones. Because this issue is too important to continue any insanity.

Obama Arrives In Saudi Arabia To "Reassure" His Close Ally That Nothing Has Changed

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/20/2016 08:42 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-20/obama-arrives-saudi-arabia-reassure-his-close-ally-nothing-has-changed
While Congress is scrambling to sweep the recently introduced Bipartisan bill that would allow US families to sue Saudi Arabia for Sept 11, Barack Obama has just landed in Saudi Arabia to reassure his close ally that all is under control.

President Obama with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef,
center, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in May 2015
As the WSJ reports, Obama arrived today in the Saudi kingdom for a brief trip "meant to provide reassurances to Gulf allies and to bolster his own foreign-policy legacy."

With just nine months left in office, Mr. Obama is aiming to steady what have become rocky relationships in the region and to tackle issues ranging from the fight against Islamic State to addressing Iranian aggression, along with easing tensions between Tehran and Saudi Arabia. But in Riyadh, the president will find frustrated allies who already have begun to look ahead to the next administration.

Obama plans to spend about 28 hours in the Saudi capital, holding talks with King Salman Wednesday afternoon and attending a Thursday summit hosted by leaders of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. This trip, perhaps the last to Riyadh during Mr. Obama’s presidency, serves as a bookend for an administration that once sought a “new beginning” for the U.S. and the Islamic world, but now is confronting the prospect of a tense conclusion to this chapter.
Of course, the main reason for the simmering Saudi tensions has been the thawing of US relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia's self-proclaimed biggest regional threat.
Meanwhile, from the NYT, here are some pointers on what Obama should not do during his visit: sell even more weapons to the belligerent kingdom in exchange for goodwill that only lasts as long as the status quo is not threatened.

When President Obama visits Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with representatives from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, he should avoid doing what he did at Camp David last May, the last time he met with them: promise more arms sales. Since Mr. Obama hosted that meeting, the United States has offered over $33 billion in weaponry to its Persian Gulf allies, with the bulk of it going to Saudi Arabia. The results have been deadly.

The Saudi-American arms deals are a continuation of a booming business that has developed between Washington and Riyadh during the Obama years. In the first six years of the Obama administration, the United States entered into agreements to transfer nearly $50 billion in weaponry to Saudi Arabia, with tens of billions of dollars of additional offers in the pipeline.

The Pentagon claims that these arms transfers to Saudi Arabia “improve the security of an important partner which has been and continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.” Recent Saudi actions suggest otherwise.

The Obama administration says that it has urged restraint from the Saudis, but that doesn’t appear to have worked. Human Rights Watch has reported that two Saudi strikes on a market in the Yemeni village of Mastaba in mid-March killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. This was just one in a series of Saudi strikes on marketplaces, hospitals and other civilian targets, attacks that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said may constitute war crimes.

Alas, Obama is in a bind: threaten to expose Saudi involvement in Sept 11, or dare to suggest that the US military-industrial supply chain into Saudi Arabia is slowing, and the response is already clear: a threat to dump hundreds of billions in US securities. Which is why Obama has zero leverage and will fold to any Saudi demand presented during his meetings today.

Obama Succumbs To Saudi Pressure, Will Veto Sept 11 Lawsuit Bill

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/19/2016 09:42 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/obama-succumbs-saudi-pressure-threatens-veto-sept-11-lawsuit-bill
Following Saudi threats to destabilize the financial system if the US were to enact a Bill that would allow an investigation into Saudi Arabia's support of September 11 terrorist attacks, many were watching closely how Obama would react. The president made it clear last night when as CNN reports, the White House threatened to veto the bipartisan bill to let families victimized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks sue Saudi Arabia while a GOP senator privately sought to block the measure.
The White House and State Department are bluntly warning lawmakers not to proceed with the legislation due to "fears" it could have dramatic ramifications for the United States and citizens living abroad to retaliatory lawsuits.
The President lands in Riyadh Wednesday for talks with Saudi Arabia over ISIS and Iran at a time of strained relations between the countries, making the bill's timing that much more sensitive.
The move comes as presidential candidates from both parties are seizing on the legislation to score points with New York voters ahead of Tuesday's critical primary there.
As reported over the weekend, one of the biggest supporters of the bill is none other than New York democrat Chuck Schumer, the likely next Senate Democratic leader, who has found himself pitted squarely against the Obama administration.
As CNN adds, the stepped-up lobbying against the legislation comes as it faces fresh roadblocks on Capitol Hill, with party leaders learning that a GOP senator is objecting to taking up the bill, according to a source familiar with the legislation. The senator's identity has not yet been revealed publicly.
Proponents of the measure, for their part, are intensifying their pressure campaign.
"If Saudi Arabia participated in terrorism, of course they should be able to be sued," Schumer said Monday. "This bill would allow a suit to go forward and victims of terrorism to go to court to determine if the Saudi government participated in terrorist acts. If the Saudis did, they should pay a price."
Obama, however, disagrees for whatever reasons.
As we reported yesterday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest fired back, warning that it would jeopardize international sovereignty and put the U.S. at "significant risk" if other countries adopted a similar law. "It's difficult to imagine a scenario where the President would sign it," Earnest said.
And that's the problem because to most Americans it is incomprehensible why Obama would roadblock something that is so critical to getting to the bottom of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.
As a reminder, the proposed Bipartisan Bill, which Schumer and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas are pushing, would prevent Saudi Arabia and other countries alleged to have terrorist ties from invoking their sovereign immunity in federal court.
Saudi Arabia has long denied any role in the 9/11 attacks, but victims' families have repeatedly sought to bring the matter to court, only to be rebuffed after the country has invoked legal immunity allowed under current law. However, as the White House itself admitted yesterday, it was the Saudis who were the source of Al Qaeda's seed funding.
"It makes minor adjustments to our laws that would clarify the ability of Americans attacked on U.S. soil to get justice from those who have sponsored that terrorist attack," Cornyn said of the bill, which is entitled the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

Not Just Obama
It's not just Obama who is holding back the Bill: a GOP senator is privately holding up the bill, an obstacle that would require Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to file time-consuming procedural motions to move past. He would need 60 votes to overcome the objection, but it is uncertain whether he will move on the measure before his colleague's issues are ironed out. Not surprisingly, the objector has yet to step up: "no senator has yet claimed responsibility for privately voicing the objection."

Under the rules of the Senate, any one senator can privately inform his or her party leadership of plans to place a "hold" to block legislation. His or her name would not become public unless a senator took to the Senate floor and tried to advance the bill, forcing the opponent to object. That scenario has not yet occurred as negotiations to find a way forward continue behind the scenes. Cornyn said that while several senators originally had placed holds on the measure, they had all relented save one.

Cornyn added that "part of the concern is that somehow this is a thumb in the eye to Saudi Arabia, a valuable ally," he said. So because it is a valuable ally its support of terrorism on US soil should be ignored.
* * *
While Saudi Arabia has not been directly and officially implicated in the 9/11 attacks - yet - 15 of the 19 hijackers were of Saudi descent. Moreover, there has long been suspicion about ties between the royal family of Saudi Arabia to al Qaeda, speculation that has only intensified as 28 pages of a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks remains classified. As pressure grows on Congress to let 9/11 victims' families pursue their claims against Saudi Arabia in federal court, Saudi officials are quickly pushing back.
Following the Saudi threat to dump its US denominated assets, including billions in US Treasurys, Cornyn was quick to dismiss the threat: "It's seems overly defensive to me and I doubt they can do it," he said in response. "I don't think we should let foreign countries dictate the domestic policy of the United States so, no, it doesn't bother me at all."

Presidential Candidates Get On The Action
Presidential candidates were also unmoved. Ahead of the New York primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voiced muted support to align themselves with the Cornyn-Schumer bill. Or rather Bernie did: Hillary appears to be on the fence, and while she said in a Sunday appearance on ABC that she had to study the bill and would not take a position, a spokesman later said she backs the bill.
Sanders, in a statement Sunday night, announced that he supports the bill and called on the Obama administration to declassify the 28 pages of the 9/11 report that could implicate Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, Trump evinced no concern about Saudi Arabia's threat to sell off U.S. assets. "Let 'em sell 'em," Trump said. "No big deal."
Trump added: "Hey, look, we protect Saudi Arabia. We protect them for peanuts. If we weren't protecting them, they wouldn't be there for a week."
However, for now just one person's opinion matters: the one shown on the left.

 
*So... behind this medallion is my Swiss account number???*

Politico Reports Bush Knew 2001 Terror-Attack Was Imminent and Wanted It

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/politico-reports-bush-knew-2001-terror-attack-was-imminent-and-wanted-it.html 

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

A stunning news-report at Politico on November 12th, titled “The Attacks Will Be Spectacular,” reveals that the then CIA Director George Tenet, and his anti-terror chief Cofer Black, say that they had told the White House this, but that the response coming back to them was “We’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.” As Politoco’s reporter, Chris Whipple, then explains: “(Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)”

It can’t get much more damning than that. Bush knew it was going to happen but did nothing to stop it. He didn’t even try to. In other words: His only actual concern at the time was for it to be done in such a way that his prior knowledge of it wouldn’t be provable — that his participation in it, his consciously allowing it to happen, would be deniable. He insisted on that deniability. He has consistently followed through with it.

Whipple then writes:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed.

This meeting was held in the White House. But it was with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor and close friend, not with Bush himself — deniability was Bush’s obsession, and, doing things this way would preserve it; if word of this meeting would ever get out, then Rice would be the only person with explaining to do. Deniability would be preserved; she was protecting the President, from accountability for allowing the attack — whenever it would come. Even an urgent matter like this didn’t draw Bush’s attendance, to speak with Tenet and Black and question them about this urgent matter.

Black and Tenet were stunned by her response. Black told Politico, “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

However, when the White House had said “We don’t want the clock to start ticking,” the answer to that mystery was already clear, and both Black and Tenet were intelligent people; they knew what the explanation was, but they also knew they’d be in danger if they were to say it publicly: The White House was planning to assert something like “We didn’t know it was coming,” once it had come. And, of course, that is precisely what the White House did say. And it continues to say: Bush’s successor has no interest in denying it, and President Obama even perpetrates his own lies upon the public, such as by his saying that the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria was done by Bashar al-Assad’s forces, instead of by forces that Obama supplied — and knew had actually done it — and such as his saying that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected (but, like virtually all of recent Ukrainian leaders, corrupt) President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was a democratic revolution there, instead of the American coup that it was, which his own Administration had started organizing in the Spring of 2013.

George W. Bush comes from an oil family, and this was an oil-based operation. Another of Bush’s buddies was “Bandar Bush”, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saudi royal who was at the time the Kingdom’s Ambassador in Washington, but who, subsequently became the Saud family’s chief international strategist. Wikipedia, for example, notes of him that, “After tensions with Qatar over supplying rebel groups [to take down Assad in Syria], Saudi Arabia (under Bandar’s leadership of its Syria policy) switched its efforts from Turkey to Jordan in 2012, using its financial leverage over Jordan to develop training facilities there, with Bandar sending his half-brother and deputy Salman bin Sultan to oversee them.”

President Obama continues protecting George W. Bush, and protecting the Saud family from being pursued for its being the world’s chief financial backer of jihadists (“terrorists”), by Obama’s keeping incommunicado in a federal prison the man who had served Osama bin Laden throughout as the bookkeeper for Al Qaeda and as the bagman who traveled especially to the Sunni homeland Saudi Arabia, but also to other Sunni Arabic kingdoms, collecting loads of cash multimillion-dollar donations for Al Qaeda’s cause of global jihad —cash from, among other people, Prince Bandar bin Sultan himself. The bookkeeper/bagman said that they paid their fighters high salaries. Those were at least as much mercenaries as they were jihadists. The bookkeeper/bagman also said, “without the money of the — of the Saudi you will have nothing.” The bookkeeper’s/bagman’s testimony became required in a court case that had been filed by 9/11 family members, and even the U.S. President wasn’t able to prevent it, or else was subtly signaling the Saudi King that the U.S. is the boss and can bring him down, if Obama should decide to do that. Only with the continued cooperation of the American press now would the secret of the funding of the interntional jihad movement remain a secret.

But the U.S. aristocracy certainly don’t want the President whom they own to do that; after all, the Sauds have always been extremely profitable for them. As Thalif Deen of Inter Press Service reported on 9 November 2015, “The biggest single arms deal – up to 60 billion dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia — has been described as the largest in U.S. history. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the nonpartisan investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, about $40 billion in arms transfers was authorised to the six Gulf countries between 2005 and 2009, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as the largest recipients.” The Sauds were buying more than all the other Sunni royal families together, even more than the Thanis, who control Qatar. Those two, and UAE, all being Sunni fundamentalist dictatorships, have contributed the most to bringing down the secular Shiite leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. America’s aristocracy also benefits by the Saud family’s long history of assisting the U.S. aristocracy in its long-held dream of taking control of Russia.

On 9 October 2001, just after 9/11, The New York Times  quoted Bandar Bush:

“Bin Laden used to come to us when America, underline, America, through the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia, were helping our brother mujahedeen in Afghanistan, to get rid of the communist secularist Soviet Union forces,” Prince Bandar said. “Osama bin Laden came and said `Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us.’ “

Though communism is over, the secularism in Russia’s government isn’t, and Russia has increasingly become a major competitor to the fundamentalist Sunni oil dictators, competing in international oil and gas markets (especially the European market); so, the jihadist dictatorships, and the United States, share common cause in replacing the government of Russia, for the mutual benefit of all of those nations’ aristocracies. 

And, besides, the investors in Lockheed Martin and other Pentagon contractors are greatly profiting from selling the weaponry etc. to do this job. The U.S. President is their best salesman. President Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015  thus points the finger of blame at Russia for 17 of the 18 times it employs the term “aggression.” That’s Obama’s assignment for the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department and they would never participate in aggression; and, so, too, the term “aggression” is never applied there to the U.S. itself. For example, our bombing of Libya to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi, an ally of Russia, was purely defensive, entirely in keeping with the traditions of the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department.

Here’s something else that Bandar Bush said there:

He acknowledged that the root of some of the rage in radical Islamic circles is economic, and that human rights was a luxury some Arab states cannot afford. “We want the right to eat for a lot of people. Let’s first finish that. Then we get to all your fantasies in America,” he said.

The Saudi King is the world’s wealthiest person, by far: he owns the Saudi government, which owns Saudi Aramco, which has oil reserves of 260 million barrels, which at $40/barrel, is, alone, a trillion dollars; and that’s just for starters. And it doesn’t include the purely private wealth of people such as Prince Bandar, or of Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud — the latter of whom is among the top stockholders both in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and in Citigroup (and in other large corporations). So, with that trillionaire King and those billionaire Princes, “human rights is a luxury Saudi Arabia cannot afford.”

And here’s something else that Bandar Bush said there:

“In a Western democracy, you lose touch with your people, you lose elections,” Prince Bandar said. “In a monarchy, you lose your head.”

So: the reason why Bush’s (and much of the rest of the U.S. aristocracy’s) buddy, Prince Bandar, doesn’t want democracy in Saudi Arabia, is that it’s a monarchy and each of the royals might therefore lose his head if his country were to become democratic. They want “the right to eat for a lot of people” in their Kingdom, but not “all your fantasies in America.” They need to build their own palaces instead. After they’ve had enough of that (which will be never), the Sauds will allow in ‘their’ country “human rights.”

This also is a reason why each one of the royals needs to pay heavily into the funds that the Saudi clerics — the most-fundamentalist of the clergies in any majority-Muslim country — designate as being holy, such as jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, which aim to spread their religion throughout the world. This reason had its origin in the deal in the year 1744, that the fanatical anti-Shia cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and the ambitious gang-leader Muhammad ibn Saud (the founder of Saudi Arabia) made, which established simultaneously the Saudi-Wahhabist nation and the Wahhabist sect of Islam, which is joined-at-the-head with Saud’s descendants. This deal was the most clearly and accurately described in the 1992 U.S.-Library-of-Congress-published book by Helen Chapin Metz, Saudi Arabia: A Country Study (and the highlighting of a sentence here is by me, not by Metz):

Lacking political support in Huraymila [where he lived], Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab returned to Uyaynah [the town of his birth] where he won over some local leaders. Uyaynah, however, was close to Al Hufuf, one of the Twelver Shia centers in eastern Arabia, and its leaders were understandably alarmed at the anti-Shia tone of the Wahhabi message. Partly as a result of their influence, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was obliged to leave Uyaynah, and headed for Ad Diriyah. He had earlier made contact with [and won over to his hatred of Shiia] Muhammad ibn Saud, the leader in Ad Diriyah at the time, and two of  [Saud’s] brothers had accompanied  [Saud] when he [in accord with Wahhab’s hate-Shiia teachings] destroyed tomb shrines [which were holy to Shiia] around Uyaynah.

Accordingly, when Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab arrived in Ad Diriyah, the Al Saud was ready to support him. In 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab swore a traditional Muslim oath in which they promised to work together to establish a state run according to Islamic principles. Until that time the Al Saud had been accepted as conventional tribal leaders whose rule was based on longstanding but vaguely defined authority.

Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab offered the Al Saud a clearly defined religious mission to which to contribute their leadership and upon which they might base their political authority. This sense of religious purpose remained evident in the political ideology of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.

Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud’s forces had established Wahhabism — and with it the Al Saud political authority — over most of Najd. 

So: Saudi Arabia was founded upon hatred of Shiia Muslims, and it was founded upon a deal that was made in 1744 between a Shiia-hating fundamentalist Sunni cleric Wahhab and a ruthless gang-leader Saud, in which deal the clergy would grant the Sauds holy legitimacy from the Quran; and, for their part of the deal, the Sauds would finance the spread of Wahhab’s fanatical anti-Shiia sect.

Whereas the U.S. aristocracy want to conquer Russia, more than anything else, the Saudi aristocracy want to conquer Iran, more than anything else.

Here is how Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal al-Saud was quoted on this matter on 27 October 2015 in Kuwait’s newspaper Al Qabas: 

The whole Middle-East dispute is tantamount to life and death for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from my vantage point, and I know that Iranians seek to unseat the Saudi regime by playing the Palestinian card, hence to foil their plots Saudi Arabia and Israel must bolster their relations and form a united front to stymie Tehran’s ambitious agenda.

The enemy, to Saudi aristocrats, isn’t Israel; it is Iran. They hate Iranians even more than they hate Russians. In fact, Talal also said there: “I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada (uprising).” Israelis hated Iranians as much as Iranians hated Israelis; and Prince Talal was welcoming Israelis aboard his mission to destroy Iran. So: both the Sauds and Israel are on the same side.

George W. Bush continued America’s war against Russia. On 29 March 2004, he proudly brought into the anti-Russian military club, NATO, 7 new members, all of which had previously been allied together with Russia in the U.S.S.R. and its NATO-mirror group, the Warsaw Pact. These 7 are: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Barack Obama continued that anti-Russia policy, on 1 April 2009, by adding Albania, and Croatia, and then by perpetrating a coup in Ukraine which turned that country rabidly anti-Russian and eager to join NATO. Obama also had the pro-Russian Libyan Muammar Gaddafi killed, and the pro-Russian Syrian Bashar al-Assad invaded by jihadists who are armed by the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The friend of the Arabic royal families, Osama bin Laden, was ultimately sacrificed to the greater goal of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, which has been to eliminate the pro-Russian secular leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and to provide (via 9/11, etc.) the public hysteria that has successfully enabled dictatorial laws to be passed in the United States Congress, and, increasingly throughout the rest of the U.S.-Saudi Empire.

Furthermore, the U.S. military industries have recovered from their stock-market slumps prior to 9/11, largely because of the success of the fear-Russia campaign, and of the increases in terrorism and the resulting public hysteria that enables a ‘democratic’ country to invade and invade so as to kill the jihadist fighters that ‘our friends’ the Sauds and other Sunni Arabic royal families actually finance.

The Saudis became extremely angry at Barack Obama for his negotiating seriously with the Iranians. For the U.S. aristocracy, the target to be destroyed isn’t Iran, but Russia. Obama represents the American aristocracy, not the Saudi aristocracy. Regarding that priority, the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies part ways.

This has been a very productive alliance. Perhaps, when George W. Bush surprised and even shocked his CIA by sending them the message, “We’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking,” he had already personally and privately discussed with his buddy Bandar Bush, how they might achieve the most important objectives of both the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies; and this was the plan that they mutually arrived at, well before the CIA had any knowledge of it. This seems to be the likeliest explanation of Bush’s puzzling response there, back on 10 July 2001.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Why Saudi Ties to 9/11 Mean U.S. Ties to 9/11

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Kevin Ryan

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/ 

Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples.

1. When two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, came to the U.S. in January 2000, they immediately met with Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy and an employee of a Saudi aviation company. Al-Bayoumi, who was the target of FBI investigations in the two years before 9/11, became a good friend to the two 9/11 suspects, setting them up in an apartment and paying their rent.
2. Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi then moved in with a long-time FBI asset, Abdussattar Shaikh, who was said to be a teacher of the Saudi language. Shaikh allowed them to live in his home for at least seven months, later saying that he thought they were only Saudi students. In an unlikely coincidence, both Al-Bayoumi and Shaikh also knew Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot of Flight 77. Although Shaikh was reported to be a retired professor at San Diego State University, the university had no records of him. He was then said to be a professor at American Commonwealth University but that turned out to be a phony institution. During the 9/11 investigations, the FBI refused to allow Shaikh to be interviewed or deposed. The FBI also tried to prevent the testimony of Shaikh’s FBI handler, which occurred only secretly at a later date. Despite having a very suspicious background, the FBI gave Shaikh $100,000 and closed his contract.
3. Journalist Joseph Trento claimed that an unnamed former CIA officer, who worked in Saudi Arabia, told him that Alhazmi and Almihdhar were Saudi spies protected by U.S. authorities.
4. After being appointed CIA Director in 1997, George Tenet began to cultivate close personal relationships with officials in Saudi Arabia. Tenet grew especially close to Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Bandar and Tenet often met at Bandar’s home near Washington. Tenet did not share information from those meetings with his own CIA officers who were handling Saudi issues at the agency. These facts are among the reasons to suspect that Tenet facilitated the crimes of 9/11.
5. Bernard Kerik, the New York City police commissioner at the time of 9/11, spent three years working in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. He then spent another three years in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s as the “chief investigator for the royal family.” It was Kerik who first told the public that explosives were not used at the World Trade Center (WTC) in a news conference. It was also his police department that was said to have discovered a passport that fell from one of the burning towers, providing dubious evidence identifying one of the alleged hijackers.
6. After 9/11, former FBI director Louis Freeh, whose agency failed to stop Al Qaeda-attributed terrorism from 1993 to 2001, became the personal attorney for Tenet’s dubious cohort, Prince Bandar. Sometimes called “Bandar Bush” for his close relationship to the Bush family, Bandar was the Saudi intelligence director from 2005 to 2015.
7. The company that designed the security system for the WTC complex, Kroll Associates, had strong connections to Saudi Arabia. For example, Kroll board member Raymond Mabus, now Secretary of the Navy, was the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Control of WTC security speaks to the question of how explosives could have been placed in the three tall buildings that were demolished on 9/11.
8. All four of the contractors that were involved in implementing Kroll’s security design for the WTC had done significant business in the Saudi kingdom. Stratesec, the company that installed the overall electronic security system at the WTC complex, had also managed security for Dulles airport, where Flight 77 took off, and for United Airlines, which owned two of the three other planes. For many reasons, the company’s managers should be primary suspects in the crimes of 9/11. Stratesec was in partnership with a large Saudi engineering and construction company to develop and conduct business in Saudi Arabia.
9. Another interesting connection between Stratesec and Saudi Arabia was that, in the years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec held its annual shareholders’ meetings in an office that was leased by Saudi Arabia. This was an office in the Watergate Hotel occupied by the Saudi Embassy (run by Prince Bandar).
10. The Bush and Bin Laden-financed Carlyle Group owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts and trained the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Several of Stratesec’s key employees, including its operating manager Barry McDaniel, came from BDM. In 1995, BDM’s Vinnell was one of the first targets of Al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.
11. One of the two major contractors hired to manage the cleanup of debris at Ground Zero—Bovis Lend Lease—had previously built the Riyadh Olympic stadium in Saudi Arabia.
12. The other primary cleanup company at Ground Zero—AMEC Construction—had just completed a $258 million refurbishment of Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, which is exactly where Flight 77 was said to impact that building. AMEC had a significant presence in Saudi Arabia for decades, working for the national oil company, Saudi Aramco.
13. In the 1990s, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), run by Dick Cheney’s protégé Duane Andrews, trained the Saudi Navy and instructed Saudi military personnel at its company headquarters in San Diego. SAIC had a greater impact on counterterrorism programs in the United States than any other non-government entity and it profited greatly from 9/11.
14. While SAIC was training the Saudi Navy, the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corporation was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.
15. Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten floors of WTC building 7, was taken over by Citigroup in 1998 after Citigroup was taken over by Saudi Prince Alwaleed, in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney joined the advisory board for SSB just after Citigroup’s takeover and they only resigned in January 2001 to join the Bush Administration.
16. The Saudi government was sued by thousands of 9/11 victim’s family members due to the suspicion that Saudi Arabia helped to finance Al Qaeda. The Saudis hired the law firm of Bush Administration insider James Baker to defend them in that lawsuit.
17. The 9/11 families’ lawsuit against Saudi royals was thrown out on a technicality related to the ability to sue a foreign government and, later, the Obama Administration backed the Saudis during the appeal.
18. The world’s leading insurance provider, Lloyd’s of London, filed a lawsuit alleging Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Lloyd’s dropped the lawsuit just days later without explanation.
19. After 9/11, it became clear that Saudi officials were supporting terrorism. For example, in the case of a would-be “underwear bomber,” it was revealed that the suspect was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence.
20. Saudi Prince Bandar has been accused of coordinating an international ring of terrorism in his role as Saudi intelligence chief. From Egypt to Libya, and now in Syria, evidence suggests that Bandar Bush has led a network of terrorists around the globe, with U.S. support.

Therefore it is not surprising that people who hear claims of Saudi involvement in 9/11 wonder why the discussion remains so limited and always avoids the glaring implications those claims should entail.
Now that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have “reset” their rocky relationship, calls by U.S. leaders to release the “28 pages” may very well die down. Since the new Saudi King came to the U.S. a few weeks ago, the two governments have rediscovered that they are “close allies” and many new deals are in the works. It remains to be seen what cards U.S. and Saudi leaders will play in the ongoing game of terror and deception but discussions of hijacker financing will probably be left behind.
Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.

The Bravery of Vince Bugliosi

Posted on June 10, 2015 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/ 

 

Vincent Bugliosi, generally noted as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter, is dead.
Vince had a remarkable skill as a prosecutor and a public speaker. He could be very persuasive. He could set aside everything but the most critical piece of information and then hammer at that piece like a sculptor. In doing so he could reach a wide audience in a persuasive manner without unnecessarily putting anyone off.
Bugliosi fit the profile of a whistleblower. He had long been part of the establishment. He prosecuted criminals. He wrote best-selling books defending insider opinion, claiming Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, O.J. Simpson was guilty, etc. He believed that before George W. Bush no president had ever lied about a war. He believed the U.S. government generally meant well. He considered agnosticism wiser than atheism, because who knows, there could be a god, how can you prove there isn’t? He considered revenge an enlightened emotion. In other words, Bugliosi was a reluctant radical.
He had written a condemnation of the Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush for the White House. How was he to know that speaking further truth about that same individual would meet a brick wall of bipartisan contempt? He didn’t know. He was used to being on television when he published a new book. He was used to glowing reviews, or at least reviews, in major newspapers. But most major newspapers didn’t mention Bugliosi’s book on prosecuting Bush for the war on Iraq until Bugliosi died this week. The New York Times had run an article on the lack of coverage, but not provided any coverage.
Bugliosi was shut out by corporate power when he suggested prosecuting a president for launching a war (and laid out a powerful legal argument for doing so). It was, in his view, a very mainstream American argument against a brand new horror never seen on the face of the earth before. He said not a word about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had been murdered; it wasn’t part of his legal case on which he focused like a laser. He argued for the prosecution of Bush for the murder of U.S. troops sent to Iraq and killed there. Bugliosi explained:
“A robber, for instance, was convicted of first degree murder under the felony-murder rule where, as he was leaving the store in which he had robbed the owner, he told the owner not to say a word or he’d be harmed, and fired into the ceiling to scare the owner. The shot, after two or three ricochets, pierced the head of the owner, killing him. In fact, the felony-murder rule applies even where the defendant is not the killer! There have been cases where the proprietor of the store fired at a robber, missed him and hit and killed a customer. And the robber was convicted of first degree murder of the customer.”
Legally, it’s unusual. Morally, it’s grotesque. Effectively, it would have ended U.S. wars, prevented the creation of ISIS, left Honduras and Ukraine with their elected governments, kept new bases out of the Philippines, Japan, Guam, Australia, and two dozen African Nations, allowed Libya to live, allowed recovery to begin in Afghanistan, prevented the drone wars that President Obama created in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and the subsequent Saudi destruction of Yemen, halted shipments of U.S. weapons to Israel, Egypt, and countless Clinton-donor nations, quite possibly spared Gaza two serious attacks, and conceivably have created the momentum to prosecute torture and other lesser crimes rather than continuing the charade of re-banning it over and over.
But none of that was to be. Bugliosi was abandoned by the Democrats who didn’t want Bush prosecuted. Bugliosi was forsaken by the corporate media that didn’t want war questioned. Bugliosi was ostracized by his own people: prosecutors. He asked for one prosecutor in any place in the U.S. from which a U.S. troop had been sent to Iraq to die. He volunteered to assist that prosecutor for free. Not a single one could be found willing to even try.
But Vince made new friends, used alternative media, spoke to peace groups, created a best-seller without any help from corporate media, and produced an independent film about the process. He was a man who had, no doubt, long found anger useful in his work, and I think he began to grow a little more angry all the time. I don’t think he stopped believing in the founding fathers, the American way, or the value of the “good” wars. But he acquired a little bitterness. He lashed out at people who protested torture, when war was what needed protesting.
And he had a point there. He always had a point. He was perhaps the most skilled person alive at having a point, and now he’s gone. And now his powerful voice is only in that film and that book and the amateur videos filmed at countless events. He has our gratitude and respect. He will be deeply missed in a way that thousands of authors and prosecutors sitting right now on their plump posteriors will never be.