Federal Court Grants Immunity To Sponsors Of 9/11 Attacks

Three days ago I wrote:

A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity...

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

The terrorists have won. The federal courts are now ruling that they are all beyond the law.

No doubt the perpetrators of 9/11 will be afforded the same immunity.

That last bit was a cynical throwaway line, wasn't it?

No.

And it only took two days for the prediction to come true.

I hate when that happens.

Yesterday, according to Reuters, a federal court ruled that

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, four princes and other Saudi entities are immune from a lawsuit filed by victims of the September 11 attacks and their families alleging they gave material support to al Qaeda...

Why? Because foreigners are protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act unless their country is "designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. State Department", and Saudi Arabia is not so designated. So there.

Criminal investigators say, "follow the money" because they know it will lead them to whoever sponsored the crime.

Criminals try to hide the money trail to prevent investigators from finding out what happened.

The US government has once again cut off an investigation into what really happened on 9/11.

That's why they use cutouts, so they can do things like this.

Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything

And this.

Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War

And this.

Gatekeepers Bury Dancing Israeli Movers And Bogus Art Students On DN!

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Nuclear Proliferation To A Radical Islamic State? All Part Of The Job For BushCo

It seems almost impossible that the Bush administration, while threatening to wage war in order to prevent Iran from enriching uranium, could simultaneously give enriched uranium to another radical Islamic country.

Or perhaps I should rephrase that: If it seems impossible, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

But Chris Floyd has been paying close attention all along, and he has the goods on "Uranium Enrichment: The Bushes, The Saudis and The Bomb". It's a long piece, even by Floyd's standards. But it's well worth reading. Follow some of the links, too, for an education you won't soon forget.

One Tick Closer: Cheney Visits Saudi Arabia; Saudis Prepare To Radiate

Chris Floyd's site has been hacked too much; it's up again at the moment but who knows for how long?

In event of emergency, Chris will post at his original blogspot site, Empire Burlesque Now dot blogspot dot com.

Here, by kind permission of the author, is his latest piece.

Worried Yet? Saudis Prepare for "Sudden Nuclear Hazards" After Cheney Visit

I. One Tick Closer to Midnight

Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports. The German-based dpa news service relayed the paper's story.

Simple prudence -- or ominous timing? We noted here last week that an American attack on Iran was far more likely -- and more imminent -- than most people suspect. We pointed to the mountain of evidence for this case gathered by scholar William R. Polk, one of the top aides to John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to other indicators of impending war. The story by Okaz -- which would not have appeared in the tightly controlled dictatorship without approval from the top -- is yet another, very weighty piece of evidence laid in the scales toward a new, horrendous conflict.

We don't know what the Saudis told Cheney in private -- or even more to the point, what he told them. But the release of this story now, just after his departure, would seem to be a clear indication that the Saudis have good reason to fear a looming attack on Iran's nuclear sites and are actively preparing for it.

II. A Nuclear Epiphany in Iran?

And they certainly should be bracing themselves. A U.S. attack on Iran will come suddenly, and if it is indeed aimed at destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities -- a "threat" being talked up again with new urgency by both Cheney and Bush lately -- it has the potential for unimaginable consequences. As we noted here in a previous piece:

Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.

Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was approved months ago, and is now in operation. The planes are already on continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the Iranian border, as Sy Hersh reports in the New Yorker, and waiting only for the signal from President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear weapons on some 400 targets spread throughout the condemned land.

And when this attack comes – either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or else as the precusor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq – there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he picks up the phone, he says, "Go" – and in twelve hours' time, up to a million Iranians could be dead.

This potential death toll is not pacificist hyperbole; it comes from a National Academy of Sciences study sponsored by the Pentagon itself, as The Progressive reports. (Although Bush's military brass like to peddle the public lie that "we don't do body counts" of the enemy, in reality, like all good businessmen they keep precise accounts of their production outputs: i.e., corpses.) The Pentagon's NAS study calibrated the kill-rate from "bunker-busting" tactical nukes used to take out underground facilities – such as those which house much of Iran's nuclear power program.

Another simulation by scientists, using Pentagon-devised software, was even more specific, measuring the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan, the magazine reports. This small expansion of the Pentagon franchise would result in stellar production figures: three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Bush has about 50 nuclear "earth-penetrating weapons" at his disposal, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Nor is the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran mere "liberal paranoia." Bush himself pointedly refused to take the nuclear option "off the table" this week. But what's more, Bush has made the use of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his "National Security Strategy of the United States," issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming the criminal principle of "pre-emptive" attacks on perceived enemies which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess, Bush declared that "safe, credible and reliable nuclear forces continue to play a critical role" in the "offensive strike systems" that are now a key part of America's "deterrence."

In the depraved jargon of atomic warmongering, a "credible" nuclear force is one that can and will be used in the course of ordinary military operations. It is no longer to be regarded as a sacred taboo. This has long been the dream of the Pentagon's "nuclear priesthood" and its acolytes, going back to the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, a strong faction within the American power structure has been afflicted with a perverted craving to unleash these weapons once more. An almost sexual frustration can be discerned in their laments as time and again, in crisis after crisis, their counsels for "going nuclear" were rejected – often at the very last moment. To justify their abberant desire, they have relentlessly demonized an ever-changing array of "enemies," painting each one as an imminent, overwhelming threat, led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, fit only for destruction. Evidence for the "threat" is invariably exaggerated, manipulated, even manufactured; this ritual cycle has been enacted over and over, leading to many wars – but never to that ultimate, orgasmic release.

Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of American power...they have found a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard strutting in the Oval Office. Under their sinister tutelage, Bush has eviscerated 40 years' worth of arms control treaties; officially "normalized" the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear states; rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan; and is now destroying the last and most effective restraint on the spread of nuclear weapons: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The treaty guarantees its signatories – such as Iran – the right to establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran – whose nuclear program undergone perhaps the most extensive inspection process in history – must end its lawful activities. Why? Because the country is led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with weapons they may or may not have....

So the NPT is dead. As with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is coming...The obvious, murderous insanity of such a move in no way precludes its implementation by this gang – as their invasion of Iraq clearly shows.

The nuclear sectarians have waited decades for this moment. Such a chance may never come again. Will they let it pass, when with just a word, in just twelve hours, they can see their god rising in a pillar of fire over Persia?

Click here for the article in its original context, with live links.

Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything

Destroyed Tapes

According to Gerald Posner at Huffington Post:

On December 5, the CIA's director, General Michael V. Hayden, issued a statement disclosing that in 2005 at least two videotapes of interrogations with al Qaeda prisoners were destroyed. The tapes, which the CIA did not provide to either the 9/11 Commission, nor to a federal court in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, were destroyed, claimed Hayden, to protect the safety of undercover operatives.

It was the lamest excuse in the world, but it got Posner riffing.

One of the al Qaeda suspects whose tapes were destroyed ... was Abu Zubaydah [photo], the top ranking terror suspect when he was tracked and captured in Pakistan in 2003. In September 2006, at a press conference in which he defended American interrogation techniques, President Bush ... mentioned Abu Zubaydah by name.

Bush acknowledged that Zubaydah, who was wounded when captured, did not initially cooperate with his interrogators, but that eventually when he did talk, his information was, according to Bush, "quite important."

Posner describes a ruse used by the Americans to get Abu Zubaydah to talk to them.

The wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.

Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them.

Are you with us so far? Abu Zubaydah was being protected by a high-level Saudi royal.

What does that mean? Maybe what you think, maybe not!

Here's Posner again:

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire.
...

Several hours after [Zubaydah] first fingered Prince Ahmed ... some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

Keep in mind that this is coming from Posner and the "Rosetta Stone" may need considerable translation after he gets through with it. Still, his report contains information of great interest. (And that's my emphasis, above and below.)

[Zubaydah] named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.

Pay close attention now.

All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead.

What does that mean? Maybe not what you think.

Posner has more details:

As for the three Saudi princes, the King's 43-year-old nephew, Prince Ahmed, died of either a heart attack or blood clot, depending on which report you believe, after having liposuction in Riyadh's top hospital; the second, 41-year-old Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died the following day in a one car accident, on his way to the funeral of Prince Ahmed; and one week later, the third Saudi prince named by Zubaydah, 25-year-old Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, died, according to the Saudi Royal Court, "of thirst." The head of Pakistan's Air Force, Mushaf Ali Mir, was the last to go. He died, together with his wife and fifteen of his top aides, when his plane blew up -- suspected as sabotage -- in February 2003. Pakistan's investigation of the explosion -- if one was even done -- has never been made public.

The death of the third Saudi is particularly stunning. Not a lot of 25-year-old princes die of thirst.

Connecting The Dots

I've written once or twice in the past, incorrectly (as I now see it), that the unwritten rule of 9/11-related journalism in post-democratic America seems to be "You can point out as many 'dots' as you like, provided that you link them together with a false narrative."

I was wrong about the rule. A "false narrative" isn't good enough. You can point out as many 'dots' as you like, provided that you link them together with an acceptable false narrative.

For example ...

Peter Lance tells the shocking tale of Ali Mohamed, an al Qaeda agent who worked with Egyptian intelligence and then a succession of American national security agencies. As Lance describes it, Ali Mohamed was a brilliant enemy -- sharp enough to infiltrate all these top-level national security agencies! (Lance can't call it what it looks like: Ali Mohamed was an al Qaeda liaison to American and Egyptian intelligence).

Or think of Christopher Ketcham finally breaking into "the alternative media" (i.e. Counterpunch, Democracy Now!) with the story of the "dancing Israelis". These were the "employees of an Israeli moving company" who were caught photographing themselves celebrating the destruction of the twin towers on the morning of 9/11 -- and later turned out to be Mossad agents! As Ketcham tells it, and Alexander Cockburn pats himself on the back for it, the story finally "comes out" as "the Israelis were probably spying on the terrorists". (Well then why were they dancing? It looks a lot more like the Israelis were running the terrorists! But Ketcham cannot say that.)

Gerald Posner has been doing well so far, laying out the dots. But watch what happens next:

Zubaydah is the only top al Queda operative who has secretly linked two of America's closest allies in the war on terror -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to the 9/11 attacks.

"You're getting hot!" as the kids would say.

Gerald Posner leads us to the very brink before he feels the heat:

Why does Bush, and the CIA, continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military, from the implications of Zubaydah's confessions?

But then he gets out of the kitchen in a hurry, veering off into the realm of utter nonsense:

It is, or course, because the Bush administration desperately needs Pakistani and Saudi help, not only to keep Afghanistan from spinning completely out of control, but also as counterweights to the growing power of Iran. The Sunni governments in Riyadh and Islamabad have as much to fear from a resurgent Iran as does the Bush administration.

So there you go: a false narrative that's more ludicrous than it is plausible:

We were attacked by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan ... so we retaliated against Afghanistan and Iraq ... because we were afraid of Iran!!

Were Posner not so inclined to see all his dots through the official prism, he might not even ask

Why does Bush, and the CIA, continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military?

... or having asked, he might answer in an entirely different way.

The Hidden Assumption

The hidden assumption is one everybody has to make, if they want to get published, although there is no evidence at all to support it. The assumption stays hidden by necessity; if any writer explained that his or her analysis were based on this assumption then critical readers (if any) might be inclined to request supporting evidence. And since no such evidence exists (and in fact a great deal of counter-evidence exists), the question would be somewhat inconvenient.

The problem with hidden assumptions in general, of course, is that if they're wrong, they can mess up everything that depends on them -- and, because they're hidden, you'd never know it. And that's just what's happened to our media -- even many very non-mainstream reporters buy into the hidden assumption.

If you have a hidden assumption and it's wrong, then when you go to connect the dots you will not be able to do so. You'll only get partway there, and you'll be left asking "unanswerable" questions like "Why does this happen?" and "What does that mean?"

In this case the unanswerable question is of the form "Why does X protect Y and Z?"

Without the hidden assumption, other observers -- people looking at the same dots but not through the same prism -- can see that X, Y and Z are cooperating quite nicely, thank you very much.

The hidden assumption that poisons all mainstream (and much "alternative") analysis is the idea that the Bush administration and the CIA didn't want 9/11 to happen.

If you just throw away the prism -- drop the hidden assumption and look at the dots on their own -- the picture gets a lot clearer.

Indeed it becomes quite apparent that Bush and the CIA continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military because they cooperate so nicely!

Dead Cutouts

The basic idea of a cutout is that it insulates and isolates the perpetrators from their dirty deed. Rather than do something yourself, you hire an operative to do it for you. Or even better, you get somebody else -- a cutout -- to hire him. Then the operative won't even know who he's working for, let alone why he's being asked to do whatever it is that you're asking him to do.

Once the job is done, it's easy to destroy the chain of evidence: if you can't eliminate the operatives, you simply eliminate the cutouts. Poof! Now there's no trail leading back to the perpetrators!

It's not all that complicated, and it's been done successfully many times before, so it's a poor investigator who ignores the possibility...

Not to be overly racist or anything, but white guys with Ivy League backgrounds can't exactly go to the Middle East and recruit terrorists. So they work at a distance -- by proxy -- through cutouts.

And it doesn't take much imagination to conceive the notion that the Pakistani military and Saudi royals would make fabulous cutouts. It's almost impossible to overestimate the plausibility of the denial they can provide. Who would ever guess that the terrorists were actually working for the Americans? Not even most "intelligence analysts"!

Well, some might guess, eventually ... but not many ... and it would take them a long time ... and by then it might already be too late ... because the chain of evidence can be so easily broken ... well, guess what?

Pay close attention now:

All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead.

The cutouts are gone; the trail is dead; long live the usurpers!

One End Or The Other

But the trail is not so dead after all. You can still follow it, from one end or the other.

You can start in Washington. People who don't want certain things to happen don't react with statements like "Lucky me, I hit the trifecta" when they do happen. Not even once. Certainly not over and over.

Or you can start in Saudi Arabia. If you look at the visa applications served up by the 9/11 terrorists, you can see how much inside help they were expecting. And the help they were expecting -- the help they got -- wasn't coming from the Saudis.

Essential insight into Saudi "complicity" comes from Mike Springmann, who spent many years working for the State Department. For eighteen months he was the visa officer at the American Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. There, Springmann did the required short and sweet interviews with visa applicants. Some of them fell far short of meeting the requirements and Springmann would refuse them visas. And every now and then -- even though the final decision was supposed to be his -- he would be overruled.

Springmann came to find out that almost everyone in the Consulate at Jeddah was either working for the Clandestine Service or else married to someone who was. Intelligence infiltration of diplomatic stations is commonplace, of course, but Springmann says it was "all but three" out of "about 20" at one point, and such overwhelming numbers are very unusual.

Springmann was being overruled because the CIA was recruiting terrorists throughout the Middle East and sending them (via Jeddah) to the US for training, before inserting them into Afghanistan (via Pakistan).

The same system could have been used to insert terrorists into the US for an operation, couldn't it?

But the system described by Springmann is no longer in service, so there's no need to be concerned. Right? Wrong! They've changed it since Springmann's time, making it even easier to get wannabe-terrorists into the USA.

Here's how it works now: If the applicant comes through Jeddah via a trusted travel agency, there's no need for an interview. All such applications are granted.

In other words,

Dear Terrorist: Welcome to the USA, and have a nice flight!!

Mike Springmann explained to Alex Jones how it works:

Mike Springmann: According to the Los Angeles Times, fifteen of the nineteen people, the Saudis who were allegedly responsible for flying planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, they got their visas from the Consulate at Jeddah. Now, according to a journalist I know in Florida, this was done through a new wrinkle in the visa procedures there. At the time I was running the visa section, I personally interviewed at least one member of the family or just about everyone who wanted to travel to the States. They had switched things so that the [visa applications] would be submitted, in many instances, through travel agencies, that were approved by the Consulate. And, according to a conversation that I had had with [former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Special Agent] Celerino Castillo, some years ago, on an article I was researching, it was old agency ploy to put passports of his people in with legitimate trade groups or travel groups coming from travel agencies and send them to the Consular section.

Alex Jones: Couldn’t somebody, if it’s just a name at a travel desk or a travel agency, just show up with a fake ID and then board?

Mike Springmann: Yeah, you could do that. The way it was explained to me is that they would go to the travel agency and say I want to go to the United States - either get me a visa, I have to visit relatives there, I have business there, etc. And they would simply send a package of passports and visa applications over to the Consular section. And because they came from a reputable source, people didn’t look too closely at it, I guess.

The retaliation against Mike Springmann for speaking this freely has been unusual; and the careers of the people who were overruling him have been unusual too. You can read more about all of this at my new "other" blog, "Visas For Terrorists: Springmann of Arabia", where I have been busy squirreling away articles by and about Mr. Springmann as well as documents supporting what he's said in those articles.

After a while the unusual begins to seem a bit more explicable. After a while, the hidden assumption becomes visible, and at that point it falls away -- pulled down by the weight of its own absurdity.

Or as Springmann himself says:

Face the Facts, Stupid ... It’s Government Policy

~~~

[further reading]

Springmann: A Sin Concealed – The Visas for Terrorists Program

Springmann: WHEN YOU PASS "GO", YOU COLLECT MORE BODIES

NRO : Visas that Should Have Been Denied

Springmann: Consul General Filled Out Visa Applications For Pakistanis With Forged Passports

[and much much more at]

Visas For Terrorists: Springmann of Arabia