Exposed: British `BAE' Hand Behind Terror
by Jeffrey Steinberg
June 27—A lawsuit filed by the families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has forced out a treasure-trove of documents, proving what Lyndon LaRouche has been saying for years: Behind the 9/11 attacks was the hand of the British Empire, working through allied Saudi factions. In effect, 9/11 was the work of the "BAE Al-Yamamah" Anglo-Saudi imperial apparatus, which forms the core of the ongoing British Sykes-Picot control over the entire Persian Gulf and extended Southwest Asia.
According to a news account in the New York Times June 24, attorneys representing the 9/11 families have received thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents, detailing Saudi royal family financing of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, prior to the 9/11 attacks. Some of those documents, including U.S. Treasury Department reports, were obtained through Freedom of Information Act suits; but other documents, including confidential U.S. and German intelligence reports, were leaked to attorneys for the families, and a court battle has ensued over whether that material can be made public. Copies of some of those still-classified materials were passed to the New York Times, further complicating the government's ability to bury the new revelations.
On June 22, according to the Times, some of the 9/11 family members met with President Obama, and they reported that he promised to go public with a controversial 28-page segment of the Congressional 9/11 investigation report, that the Bush White House had classified as top secret. As EIR has reported for years, the sealed 28 pages deal with funds that went from former Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to two Saudi intelligence officers in California, who used the money to finance two of the 9/11 hijackers.
And this is where the London BAE story comes into play. As has been widely reported, Prince Bandar received at least $2 billion in payoffs for his role in the Al-Yamamah arms-for-oil deal, first signed by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Saudis, in 1985. Under the terms of the Al-Yamamah barter deal, a $100 billion offshore slush fund for covert intelligence operations was established; this fund has been linked to the Bandar payoffs and, by extension, to 9/11. While the documents obtained by the lawyers for the 9/11 families primarily deal with Saudi "charitable" funds going to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the real story is the BAE/Al-Yamamah slush fund. According to a senior U.S. intelligence official, there is strong evidence that some of the BAE kickbacks to Bandar were used to bankroll at least two of the 9/11 hijackers—but that investigation was suppressed by the Bush-Cheney White House for years.
On June 29, 2007, EIR provided a roadmap of the Bandar-BAE-9/11 nexus, identifying Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdar as the two hijackers who received crucial backing from Saudi Arabian intelligence officers, from the moment they arrived in Los Angeles, around New Year's Day 2000. The two Saudi intelligence officers, identified to EIR by sources involved in the 9/11 investigation, Osama Basnan and Omar al-Bayoumi, received between $51,000 and $73,000 from Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa, beginning in December 1999. A significant portion of those funds went to Alhazmi and Almihdar, to set them up in an apartment, and enroll them in flight school. For a short period of time, prior to the 9/11 attacks, Saudi intelligence agents Basnan and al-Bayoumi lived in the same San Diego, Calif. apartment complex, Parkwood Apartments, as the two hijackers.
Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time of the 9/11 investigation, has assailed the FBI for failing to fully pursue the Saudi-9/11 money trail. Both he and co-chair Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) bitterly complained that the FBI would not allow committee investigators to question the FBI agents who had conducted the original interviews with Basnan and al-Bayoumi, shortly after 9/11.
As LaRouche observed today, the Saudi circles in bed with London in the Al-Yamamah program are part of a British imperial scheme, that jeopardizes every nation in the extended Persian Gulf and Southwest Asian region. "Regardless of their nationality, and whether they know it or not, these Saudi players are the enemies of every Arab and Muslim nation. They are tools of the British Empire, which every self-respecting Arab and Muslim despises."
