Hersh Revelations Can Sink
Obama, Bush, and the Saudis
by Jeffrey Steinberg
May 18—Noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh just penned a ten thousand-word exposé of the Obama Administration’s fraudulent account of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama and his White House coterie of spin-meisters have just suffered another serious blow. Beyond that, the Hersh revelations have once again shined a spotlight on the prominent role of the Saudi monarchy in promoting and protecting international jihadist terrorism.
In a recent interview with the Real News Network, author Hersh revealed that the Saudi monarchy had paid an undisclosed, but significant amount of money, to the Pakistani government to keep Osama bin Laden under quasi-house arrest in Abbottabad, a Pakistani city dominated by major military facilities, from 2006 until his assassination by U.S. Seal Team 6 in May 2011. The Saudis insisted that the Americans must be kept in the dark about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Some leading circles in the Saudi Royal Family were apparently terrified that the Americans would get their hands on bin Laden, and learn the full story about the Kingdom’s role in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Pressure has been mounting for President Obama to finally declassify the 28-page chapter from the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which documented some of the evidence that leading figures within the Saudi royal family, including the then-Saudi Ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had bankrolled the 9/11 hijackers. President George W. Bush had originally classified the entire 28-page chapter, to protect the Saudis and conceal his own close personal ties to Prince Bandar. During his 2008 Presidential campaign, and on at least two subsequent occasions, Obama had promised 9/11 family members that he would declassify the chapter, but he has so far steadfastly refused to keep his promise.
The demand for declassification has been led by former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the original Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, led by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have introduced legislation in the last and current sessions of Congress to declassify the pages, and have held a series of high-profile news conferences to press the case. A Federal judge in Florida is now reviewing 86,000 pages of suppressed FBI files, further detailing the links of leading Saudi Royals to the 9/11 hijackers.
The Hersh revelations, that the assassination of bin Laden was the result of evidence provided by a walk-in former Pakistani military official, and that the killing raid was carried out with the full cooperation of top Pakistani military officials, has triggered a firestorm in Washington, where the Obama Administration has attempted desperately to discredit Hersh’s account, but to no avail.
A Clumsy Coverup
What the Hersh story reveals is a clumsy, lying cover-up by top Obama Administration officials, including the President himself. Among the key Hersh findings: Pakistani military authorities facilitated the raid on the bin Laden compound, to the point that the security guards, provided by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were withdrawn from the compound prior to the U.S. raid, and Pakistani air defenses were shut down to allow the two U.S. special operations helicopters to cross the border and travel over 100 miles through Pakistani airspace to reach the Abbottabad compound. President Obama violated the deal that had been made with Pakistan’s two top military commanders, then-Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and then-ISI Director General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, in arranging the bin Laden execution. It had been agreed that the U.S. would claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in Afghanistan, thus protecting and concealing the active collusion of the Pakistani authorities.
On cue, the Obama Administration and allied news organizations have taken the bait and launched a campaign of lies to discredit the Hersh account.
Between the continuing demands for the release of the Joint Inquiry chapter, and the controversy swelling around the Hersh accounts of the bin Laden killing, the role of Saudi Arabia in financing global jihadist terrorism has once again bubbled to the surface.
Hersh’s charges that the Saudis paid Pakistan to keep bin Laden under comfortable lock and key—and out of the reach of American authorities—add further weight to the demand that the full truth about the persistent Saudi role in the bankrolling of terrorism come out.
The Ugly Truth
In a January 2015 Capitol Hill press conference, Senator Graham, flanked by Representatives Jones and Lynch and representatives of the 9/11 families, warned that, so long as the suppressed truth about the Saudi role in 9/11 remained under wraps, the United States would be vulnerable to another devastating terror attack, and groups like the Islamic State would grow and spread internationally.
To provide you, the reader, with some further details of the known involvement of leading Saudi officials, financial institutions, and royals, in the spreading of jihadist terror, and to detail some of the most significant links between the Saudi and British monarchies in this effort, EIR presents the third installment[1] of a series of dossiers on the financial roots of global jihadist terror.
[1] “Charles of Arabia: The British Monarchy, Saudi Arabia, & 9/11,” EIR, May 23, 2014; and “King Faisal and the Forging of the Anglo-Saudi Terror Alliance,” EIR, June 27, 2014.
