Saudis Fire Back, Blame US for 9/11

Saudi legal expert gets it half right

The Saudis, angered by the Senate’s unanimous vote approving a bill allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue their country, have tapped Saudi legal expert Katib al-Shammari to come up with an explanation for what happened on September 11, 2001.

The text was originally published by the London-based Al-Hayat daily and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a disinformation outfit linked to Israeli intelligence. It places the blame for the attack squarely on the United States. The Saudis are portrayed as victims.

Exploiting the research of 9/11 activists and investigators, al-Shammari begins by stating “all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings… Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation—they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions.”

MEMRI, which specializes in discrediting Palestinian and Arab media, does not provide a full translation, only snippets. The following points are of particular interest:

1. The U.S. created, in public opinion, an obscure enemy—terrorism—-which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes, and also became the sole motivation for any dirty operation that American politicians and military figures desire to carry out in any country. [The] terrorism [label] was applied to Muslims, and specifically to Saudi Arabia.

Left out of this explanation is the fact Saudi Arabia worked as an active partner with the United States in creating terrorism in the Middle East and South and Central Asia. Pakistan was an active partner as well. The CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), under the direction of Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, worked with Saudi Arabia and a number of other nations, including Britain and China, to train and fund over 100,000 Afghan and foreign Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Following the expulsion of the Soviets, elements from the Mujahideen—specifically the Saudi contingent under Osama bin Laden—morphed into al-Qaeda. Afghan factions coalesced into the Taliban.

The Saudis were not simply neutral partners attempting to eject the Soviets. They vigorously proselytized their brand of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, by establishing schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Money from wealthy Saudis and charities flooded in and fueled the explosive growth of the madrassas and also mosques in the West. Based on ultra-conservative salafiyah, the ideology of primitive Islam, Wahhabism is reactionary and intolerant of not only Shia Islam, but other religions as well, including Christianity. The madrassas created during the Afghan War preached this hatred and intolerance.

“For instance, in one madrassa in Pakistan, I interviewed 70 Malaysian and Thai students who are being educated side by side with students who went on to the Afghan war and the like. These people return to their countries, and then we see the results in a short while,” writes Vali Nasr, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Diego. “At best, they become hot-headed preachers in mosques that encourage fighting Christians in Nigeria or in Indonesia. And in a worst case, they actually recruit or participate in terror acts.”

A release of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks demonstrated just how deeply the Saudis are involved in funding terrorist organizations. “Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba—but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton,” Declan Walsh wrote for The Guardian in 2010.

Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are also involved in the network funding and supporting worldwide Wahhabi terror, according to the documents.

Katib al-Shammari again:

2. Utilizing this incident [9/11], the U.S. launched a new age of global armament. Everyone wanted to acquire all kinds of weapons to defend themselves and at the same time battle the obscure enemy, terrorism – [even though] up to this very moment we do not know the essence of this terrorism of which the U.S. speaks, except [to say that] that it is Islamic…

True enough, but once again, disingenuous. In 2015, despite evidence it is committing war crimes in neighboring Yemen, the U.S. agreed to sell Saudia Arabia $1.29 billion worth of arms, including over 10,000 bombs, munitions, and weapons parts produced by Boeing and Raytheon. The sale included 5,200 Paveway II “laser guided” and 12,000 “general purpose” bombs and also bunker busters.

Left unsaid by the Saudi legalese expert is the fact it is “illegal under U.S. and international law to transfer weapons to human rights abusers, or to forces that will likely use it to commit gross violations of human rights,. There is documented evidence that such abuses have been committed by almost all of U.S. allies in the region,” Raed Jarrar, government relations manager for the American Friends Service Committee, told Common Dreams in November.

Saudi Arabia came in second after India as an importer of weapons between 2011-2015, according to Sipri.

Al-Shammari more or less accurately explains how the national security state invented a new cold war scenario after the fall of the Soviet Union and “began to see Muslims as their new enemy.”

Once again, the full truth is neglected. For the Saudis, a new cold war against Muslims is fully acceptable, so long as the Muslims in question are Shia and the main target is the rival Iran. What is unacceptable, in fact worthy of economic reprisals, is the inability on the part of the United States to keep the lid on Saudi involvement in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Until recently, the government was able to keep documents hidden.

On April 11, as pressure built to release the classified “missing 28 pages” excised from the 838 pages of the Joint Inquiry report on the attack, Infowars posted 20 examples of Saudi complicity in the attacks.

It’s hardly surprising al-Shammari did not mention any of the 20 examples. He is, after all, an official apologist for a terrorist state, a ruthless kingdom engaged in war crimes, promoting global jihad, and sponsoring acts of terror.

The MEMRI partial translation will be used by neocons and defenders and promoters of the war on terror to further implicate the Saudis who were, in the not too distant past, partners in the project to destabilize the Middle East, largely for the purpose of extending and expanding the reach of Wahhabism.