Marjorie Cohn
Tag: 9/11
Saudi Spy Linked to Prince Bandar Assisted 9/11 Hijackers
Newly released FBI documents reveal a California-based Saudi spy assisted some of the 9/11 hijackers in finding housing in San Diego, and that there was a “50/50 chance” he had “advanced knowledge” of the attack. Omar al Bayoumi had claimed he incidentally befriended the two hijackers but was not involved in their planning. The FBI report found Bayoumi regularly shared his intelligence with Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, who was so close to former President George W. Bush that he earned the nickname “Bandar Bush.” The report was written in 2017 but only declassified last week.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 17, 2022
9/11 and the Saudi Connection
None of the issues still lingering 20 years after the 9/11 attacks have been as persistent — or as emotionally wrenching for the families of the victims — as the question of whether Saudi Arabia provided funding and other assistance for the worst terrorist attack in American history.
Of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.
Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.
“What are they hiding? What is the big secret?” Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, asked in an interview. “We’ve been operating on
— source theintercept.com | Eric Lichtblau, James Risen | Sep 11 2021
How Patient Zero of CIA’s Torture Program Still Held at Gitmo
when he was first captured, he was interrogated by two FBI agents: Ali Soufan and a man named Steve Gaudin. And immediately they were getting good, actionable intelligence, so potent indeed that CIA Director George Tenet was thrilled, until he found out that there were FBI agents doing the interrogation instead of CIA agents, which you would think, “What difference does it make, so long as you’re getting the information?” But he moved very quickly, George Tenet did, to try to put CIA operatives on the ground to do something different, a more brutal interrogation program, which was initially experimented on and then, over time, was codified into law by Bush administration officials
he was a psychologist who worked for something called the Air Force SERE school, which was designed to prepare some of our own soldiers for the depredations of authoritarian regimes, people who might torture us. He tried to retrofit those resistance techniques into interrogation techniques, which was really both a nonsensical thing but also an offense, in my view, against the psychological profession.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 10, 2021
Grave Abuses of the First War on Terror
Mohamedou Slahi is an extraordinary person with a harrowing past and a remarkable, still-unfolding story. The interview I conducted with him on Saturday, which can be viewed below, is one I sincerely hope you will watch. He has much to say that the world should hear, and, with a new War on Terror likely to be launched in the U.S., his story is particularly timely now.
Known as the author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary — a memoir he wrote during his fourteen years in captivity in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo — he is now the primary character of a new Hollywood feature film about his life, The Mauritanian. The first eight years of Slahi’s imprisonment included multiple forms of abuse in four different countries and separation from everything he knew, but it afforded no charges, trials, or opportunities to refute or even learn of the accusations against him.
— source greenwald.substack.com | Glenn Greenwald | Mar 8, 2021