Boston Bombing: Anglo-Saudi
Terror Machine Strikes U.S.
by Jeffrey Steinberg and Stu Rosenblatt
April 29—In reaction against the Obama Administration's rush-to-judgment declaration that the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing was the work of two brothers who were radicalized by reading Internet sites, and who had no ties to global terrorist networks, some Members of Congress are demanding a thorough probe of the accused bombers, and the role of the FBI in one of the most deadly terrorist acts on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Were such an investigation to take place, in spite of Obama White House and FBI interference, Americans may be given a long-overdue view into the Anglo-Saudi apparatus that has been responsible for nearly every act of global terrorism over the past several decades. This is the apparatus which was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the Sept. 11, 2012 assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel were killed.
Appearing April 28 on Fox News, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, declared that, after consulting with security professionals, he was convinced that the bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were far too sophisticated to have been constructed based on Internet diagrams alone. He noted that the bombs were similar to those used frequently by terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Both McCaul and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who appeared with him on Fox, demanded answers about the recruitment and training of the bombers, and about what global networks the two young Chechens had been tracked into.
In an April 20 letter to the Director of the FBI, the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Reps. McCaul and Peter King (R-N.Y.), the previous head of the Homeland Security Committee, also demanded an accounting by the FBI of its failure to act on leads provided by Russian security services, well over a year before the Boston bombings. Russian officials alerted the FBI in 2011 that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers, should be investigated for ties to violent jihadist networks operating in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Similar warnings were provided by Russian officials to both the DHS and the CIA, and Tsarnaev was actually placed on a CIA watch list of suspected terrorists whose travels abroad should be monitored.
In their letter, McCaul and King cited at least five previous incidents, since the beginning of the Obama Administration, in which the FBI failed to pursue terror suspects, and in some cases, actually protected suspects as informants and agents provocateurs (see article, p. 23).
Two Tracks, Two Threats
In a very real sense, the Congressional demands for full disclosure from both the FBI and the Obama Administration define two separate, but critical tracks, of any serious investigation.
First and foremost, the Boston bombing, in which three people were killed, and many more grievously injured, demands an end to the coverup of the Anglo-Saudi guiding hand behind virtually all global terrorism. A serious probe into the apparatus behind decades of irregular warfare in the Caucasus region, Central Asia, Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Near East, and North Africa—an apparatus already implicated in the Boston bombings—would open up the entire British-Saudi alliance, and also lay bare the coverup by the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, a coverup which itself constitutes an impeachable crime.
At the same time that the full exposure of the Anglo-Saudi global terror machine is the top priority, it is also high time that a thorough probe of the criminal misconduct of the FBI be undertaken. The last time that Congress seriously looked into the abuses of power by the FBI, was back in the 1970s, when the Pike and Church committees in Congress, the Rockefeller Commission, and a Joint Congressional Inquiry into the Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations, found the FBI guilty of widespread abuses of power, including illegal spying on American citizens.
The long-delayed probe of Anglo-Saudi terrorism will also unravel a longstanding British penetration of U.S. national security institutions, which has drawn the United States into British colonial adventures around the globe, particularly in the Arab and Islamic world, that have transformed the U.S.A. into a hate object for some of the very people who previously saw the U.S. as the role model for liberation from the yoke of colonial repression and looting.
A Hundred-Year Marriage
While British domination over the Persian Gulf region dates back to the 18th Century, when the ports of the Gulf were the way-stations and security outposts of the British East India Company's vital trade routes to the Indian Subcontinent, a marriage between the British and Saudi monarchies was forged. This took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, and the British and French divided the Middle East under the Sykes-Picot treaty.
In 1921, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill had the following words of praise for the House of Saud in remarks delivered before the British House of Commons. They are, he said,
"austere, intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty, and that they hold it as an article of duty, as well as faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette."
Churchill, in conclusion, praised King Ibn Saud for his unswerving loyalty to Britain.
From 1917-53, the year King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud died, British Intelligence's man on the scene was Harry St. John Philby, the legendary "Arabist" and father of the triple-agent Kim Philby. According to British historian Mark Curtis, the elder Philby's assignment was to
"consult with the Foreign Office over ways to consolidate the rule and extend the influence of Ibn Saud."
In 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, the British government forged a strategic investment partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that also merged Anglo-Saudi geopolitical objectives. In a series of high-level diplomatic exchanges between 1973 and 1975, culminating in an October 1975 meeting between then-Crown Prince Fahd and Queen Elizabeth II, London became the financial center for the Saudi oil empire. "Former" British SAS commandos were deployed in large numbers into Saudi Arabia to train the National Guard, and to establish direct control over the security mechanisms protecting the Saudi Royals.
1975 was also the year that British Intelligence's Dr. Bernard Lewis was permanently redeployed to the United States. While teaching at Princeton University, Lewis became the leading Middle East policy advisor to a host of American national security policymakers, including Zbigniew Brzezinski and Dick Cheney. Prominent American neoconservatives of the last 30-plus years, including Michael Ledeen and Harold Rhode, were parrots for what came to be known as the "Bernard Lewis Plan." The essence of the plan was for Western powers to support the spread of Islamic fundamentalism across the southern tier of the Soviet Union, from the Caucasus, to Central Asia, to the western provinces of China.
The Afghan mujahideen project, under which Britain, the United States, and Saudi Arabia poured hundreds of billions of dollars in arms into the hands of Wahhabi and Salafist "freedom fighters" battling to drive the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1990, directly spawned al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and scores of other radical jihadist terror fronts.
Al-Yamamah
The Anglo-Saudi alliance—and joint sponsorship of global terrorism—entered a new phase in 1985, with the "Al-Yamamah" ("The Dove") oil-for-arms deal between London and Riyadh. The deal was brokered by Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the longtime Saudi Ambassador in Washington, and the son of Saudi Arabia's Defense Minister Prince Sultan.
As EIR revealed in an exclusive exposé,[1] the Al-Yamamah deal established an offshore black operations fund worth hundreds of billions of dollars, skimmed from the lucrative sales of Saudi oil on the world spot market. Saudi princes pocketed tens of billions of dollars in kickbacks from the deal, which continues to this day, despite major corruption probes in Britain and the United States in the last decade.
In a revealing authorized biography of Prince Bandar, Anthony Simpson boasted,
"Although Al-Yamamah constitutes a highly unconventional way of doing business, its lucrative spin-offs are the by-products of a wholly political objective: a Saudi political objective and a British political objective.
"Al-Yamamah is, first and foremost, a political contract. Negotiated at the height of the Cold War, its unique structure has enabled the Saudis to purchase weapons from around the globe to fund the fight against Communism. Al-Yamamah money can be found in the clandestine purchase of Russian ordnance used in the expulsion of Qadaffi's troops from Chad. It can also be traced to arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupying forces."
Al-Yamamah funds not only armed the Afghan mujahideen and bankrolled several African coups; payoffs from the British arms cartel BAE Systems to Prince Bandar, laundered from the Bank of England through Saudi Embassy bank accounts at Riggs National Bank in Washington, found their way directly into the hands of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdar. The two San Diego-based hijackers were bankrolled and protected by two agents of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Osama Basnan and Omar al-Bayoumi. The men received between $50,000 and $72,000 from Prince Bandar during the period that the 9/11 terrorists were under their sponsorship.
When the Joint Congressional Inquiry staff probing the security failures leading to 9/11 unearthed the money trail from Bandar to the terrorists, and included it in a 28-page chapter in their final report, President George W. Bush ordered the entire 28 pages redacted from the report and placed under national security seal.
Right up to the present, President Barack Obama has maintained the coverup of the Anglo-Saudi hand behind the financing of 9/11.
Benghazi, Syria, and Beyond
If there is any doubt that the Bandar funding of at least two of the 9/11 terrorists was part of a systematic Anglo-Saudi policy, and not an inadvertent act of charity to Saudi nationals in need, just consider the aftermath of the 9/11 coverup.
After leaving his post in Washington, Bandar returned to the Kingdom, and was named National Security Advisor to King Abdullah. In July 2012, the Prince was named Director of the Saudi GID. Senior U.S. diplomatic and intelligence sources have confirmed that, from his posts as national security advisor and GID head, Bandar is directing a far-flung terrorist operation, currently focused on the funding of al-Qaeda fronts in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to overthrow the Assad government in Syria; waging irregular warfare against Hezbollah in Lebanon; and running a terrorist destabilization of Iraq.
Two of the Bandar-funded jihadist groups, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the al-Nusra Front in Syria, have recently merged into a united neo-Salafist terror apparatus, now armed to the teeth to wage permanent terror war throughout the Near East and North Africa.
While the Obama Administration at the top is committed to protecting this Anglo-Saudi terror machine at all costs, not everyone in the U.S. government has gone along with the protection racket. At the outset of the first Obama Administration, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton established a joint task force with the Treasury Department, to crack down on Saudi funding of jihadist terrorists.
In a Dec. 30, 2009 State Department cable, in preparation for a visit to Riyadh by Richard Holbrooke and David Cohen, the co-directors of the joint task force on terrorist financing, Clinton wrote that
"donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Continued senior-level USG engagement is needed to build on initial efforts and encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide."
Documentation presented in lawsuits against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by survivors and relatives of victims of the 9/11 attack makes clear that the "donors" referred to in the Clinton cable are all either members of the royal family, officials of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, or heads of charities all sponsored by the Saudi Monarchy.
While there is no magic bullet solution to the growing plague of international terrorism, and while the recent Boston Marathon bombings show that there is no place to hide from the scourge, the indispensable first step toward eradicating this plague is to break the coverup and expose the top-down Anglo-Saudi hand behind world terrorism.
EIR has been the publication of record, exposing the British role in all global terrorism and illegal drug trafficking—the other primary source of funds to the worldwide terror machine. The Anglo-Saudi alliance must be broken, and the Bush and Obama administration officials who willfully covered up the terror trail must also be brought to justice. The pages that follow offer a small piece of the available evidence of this ongoing crime against humanity.
[1] See Jeffrey Steinberg, "Will BAE Scandal of Century Bring Down Dick Cheney?," EIR, June 29, 2007.
