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

by 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.

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.

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