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Saudi Arabia really might have funded 9/11

Trutherism encompasses a wide range of counterfactual, incoherent, or otherwise fringe claims about what "really" happened on 9/11. It includes exotic claims like space beams and holo-planes. It also includes more mundane claims like MIHOP and LIHOP.

"Saudi Arabia funded the attacks" is a variant of MIHOP, with some amount of LIHOP depending on what the theory has to say about what the US knew and when the US knew it.

Do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?
 
Trutherism encompasses a wide range of counterfactual, incoherent, or otherwise fringe claims about what "really" happened on 9/11. It includes exotic claims like space beams and holo-planes. It also includes more mundane claims like MIHOP and LIHOP.

"Saudi Arabia funded the attacks" is a variant of MIHOP, with some amount of LIHOP depending on what the theory has to say about what the US knew and when the US knew it.
Exactly this. Belongs in 9/11, where the LIHOPians and experienced debunkers can weigh in. This is all old stuff.

Just because the 9/11 forum is "icky" to someone doesn't mean it's not the appropriate place for the discussion.
 
Do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?

And now you're Just Asking Questions. This is generally contra-indicated as a strategy for keeping your threads out of the CT section.

Meanwhile, I'll repay your question with a much better one:

What counterfactual, incoherent, or otherwise fringe claim was Congress making when they passed that law?
 
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And now you're Just Asking Questions. This is generally contra-indicated as a strategy for keeping your threads out of the CT section.

No, JAQing is where you lay out a bunch of breadcrumbs to strongly suggest something outlandish and frame them as mere questions.

I'm saying that the claim "The money that funded 9/11 came from the government of Saudi Arabia" is a mainstream claim now. I see the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act as strong evidence the claim is closer to consensus than fringe.

So again: do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?
 
No, JAQing is where you lay out a bunch of breadcrumbs to strongly suggest something outlandish and frame them as mere questions.

I'm saying that the claim "The money that funded 9/11 came from the government of Saudi Arabia" is a mainstream claim now. I see the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act as strong evidence the claim is closer to consensus than fringe.

So again: do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?

Try reading it again this time with my bolding instead of yours..

On September 28, 2016, Congress enacted the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), overriding a presidential veto for the first and only time during Obama's presidency. The Act allows Americans to sue foreign states for playing a role in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. While JASTA was written in general terms, it was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for its suspected role in those attacks. The Act received widespread bipartisan support despite the administration's consistent stance that the Act would harm U.S. economic, diplomatic, and national security interests.
 
Try reading it again this time with my bolding instead of yours..
That does not at all alter the fact that "it was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia".
 
The funding came from the government:


If I give you $20, and you turn around and give $10 to a terrorist, did "the money come from me"? Even if I had no idea that you would do that with the money?

To quote Omar Little from The Wire", "Money ain't got no owners, only spenders". People embezzle government funds all the time, so why is it surprising that terrorists might have embezzled some?


No, there is no direct line from "SA was the entity funding the charities which were/are funding al-Qaida" to the holographic planes.

Or, do you think members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are on the road to Trutherdom?

Do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?



Yeah, maybe a little bit. We have an actually, honest-to-god conspiracy theorist in the White House, and the Republican party has been pandering to the CT crowd for years now. Why would it be surprising that they'd keep on pandering to them?
 
No, JAQing is where you lay out a bunch of breadcrumbs to strongly suggest something outlandish and frame them as mere questions.
And that's exactly what you're doing here. The "something outlandish" is the claim that the Saudi government had an official policy of funding the 9/11 attacks. You're trying to gain credibility for the claim by saying Congress supports the claim. But instead of stating your reasoning outright, you're trying to back into it via leading questions.

I'm saying that the claim "The money that funded 9/11 came from the government of Saudi Arabia" is a mainstream claim now.
Where has Congress made that claim?

I see the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act as strong evidence the claim is closer to consensus than fringe.
"Fringe" doesn't actually mean, "minority view" in this context. A fringe claimant could convince a majority to support his claim, but it wouldn't magically improve the quality or truth value of his reasoning. ETA: And this is another hallmark of CT-ism. You're gearing up to have a slapfight over incidental terminology, when you should be addressing the several concerns raised about the quality of your argument.

So again: do you think congress was engaging in "trutherism" when they passed the law that "was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia"?
I think they were engaging in politics, which often looks a lot like trutherism, except that it's done by those in power, rather than by those resiling against those in power.

Depending on what claims they were actually making (as opposed to the claims you wished they made), and the evidence they put forth for those claims, I might say they were engaging in trutherism as well. Congress is not magic, after all. But since you're trying to get by with sly implications, instead of stating that information outright, I don't have an opinion, other than that with each post you make, it becomes increasingly clear that you are engaging in trutherism. The fresh discovery of old news. The attempts at leading questions. The conflation of disparate points. The elision of requested information. Etc. Elegabalus was right.
 
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If I give you $20, and you turn around and give $10 to a terrorist, did "the money come from me"? Even if I had no idea that you would do that with the money?

To quote Omar Little from The Wire", "Money ain't got no owners, only spenders". People embezzle government funds all the time, so why is it surprising that terrorists might have embezzled some?


Yeah, maybe a little bit. We have an actually, honest-to-god conspiracy theorist in the White House, and the Republican party has been pandering to the CT crowd for years now. Why would it be surprising that they'd keep on pandering to them?

I don't think the way terrorists got money from the government of SA was or is embezzlement. The CFR says:

Pushed by international pressure--and still smarting from the bin Laden rebuff--Saudi Arabia severed official ties with the Taliban following 9/11.

It was Democrats who co-sponsored and voted for JASTA, too. See:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/2040/cosponsors
 
And that's exactly what you're doing here. The "something outlandish" is the claim that the Saudi government had an official policy of funding the 9/11 attacks.

Except that's not what I claimed. It wasn't an official policy. Their policy was to fund charities with no oversight to prevent the funds being used for terrorism.

Also, stuff like this:
https://www.hudson.org/research/137...rrorism-saudi-arabia-s-educational-curriculum
The State Department has long treated the subject of Saudi Arabia’s textbooks with kid gloves. Each year, these textbooks directing religious hatred, violence and war indoctrinate six million Saudi students and reach untold millions of others as they are spread far and wide in the Muslim world by a state that claims moral authority as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. Yet, their role in advancing Islamist extremist ideology has not been taken seriously as a U.S. national security concern. Since 9/11, the State Department has barely raised the issue and at times has even worked to cover up their toxic content. It has not held the Saudi government to its repeated promises to the United States to reform its textbooks.
 
The House of Saud is a huge royal family, and the Saudi state that they control has an even more huge bureaucracy in which “Wahhabi”-Salafi Sunni Islam plays the dominant role (as it does in all parts of Saudi society and culture). Additionally, zakat, or charity, is one of the five pillars of Islam, and the Saudi Kingdom sure has both the money and the religiosity to fund pretty much anything Salafi-Wahhabi-related (and other things too, like say, lobbying firms in Washington, DC and other Western capitals). When this is combined with the bin Laden family’s decades-long wealth, power, prestige, and close relations with the House of Saud along with the widespread fame and admiration afforded to Osama bin Laden specifically within Saudi Arabia (and much of the Islamic world, for that matter) originally for his role in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, the widespread individual and collective Saudi funding (and other support) of people with indirect and direct ties to al-Qaeda and likeminded Salafi jihadist organizations is entirely unsurprising.

The most important Saudi royals and businessmen (the former tending to also be among the latter) - and even many senior clerics - recognize that this is a problem, and they have taken some steps toward rectifying it, to their credit. But still: good luck changing the core aspects of Saudi society - and again, much of the Islamic world, especially those whose minds are most deeply penetrated by Salafi-Wahhabi variations of Islam - from which people like Osama bin Laden and 15 of those infamous 19 men all too readily spring up in our current era.
 
That's apparently the subject of part of the 9/11 Commission Report that was redacted, and Graham has read that.

No. It was the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Graham was the chair of that committee at the time, so he's obviously aware of the contents. I note that at the second link he downplays the report's value:

GRAHAM: Paul, let me first say thank you for this opportunity to continue our previous conversation. Also, to put this in context, the 28 pages were written in the fall of 2002. A lot of things have happened since 2002, and we have better perspective and insights.

Second is that the 28 pages were largely written based on information gathered about three of the hijackers who lived in Los Angeles and San Diego. There was not much information available in the fall of 2002 relative to the other 16 hijackers, who lived primarily east of the Mississippi in states like Florida, Virginia, New Jersey. We now know more about those other hijackers.

They uncovered some suspicious stuff:

Now coming back to the question of Bandar, the 28 pages discussed the fact that one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates, a man named Abu Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan shortly after 9/11. Among his effects was a notebook of telephone numbers. Two of those numbers related to Prince Bandar. One of them was to his mansion/second home in Aspen, Colorado. The other was to his bodyguard in Washington, D.C. That’s all we know about those numbers. The second is that Bandar was alleged to have provided funding for an intermediary who was close to one of the persons in San Diego who was providing assistance and support to the three hijackers who lived there.

The San Diego story is definitely intriguing--basically two of the hijackers met somebody in a restaurant who agreed to put them up in an apartment. The two were high-level AQ operatives who kind of stand out as they were not pilots, but also not muscle hijackers like the ones who entered the country closer to the attacks.

But as far as I can tell none of the funding was direct. Keep in mind that the entire operation probably cost less than $500,000, and AQ had millions flowing through it. IIRC their charitable front group was called Social Services and it promoted itself as providing support for Muslims in Afghanistan.
 
That last part is important. Travel, housing, flying school, plane tickets and some box cutters didn’t require government funding. It wasn’t that much money.
 
That last part is important. Travel, housing, flying school, plane tickets and some box cutters didn’t require government funding. It wasn’t that much money.


And let's put this into context.

The King Faisal Foundation: http://www.kff.com/

Since 1976, they've donated "over 1.9 billion Saudi Riyals to support its pillar programmes, philanthropic projects and educational scholarships".

That translates to just over $500 Billion USD

https://www.google.com/search?clien....64.psy-ab..0.11.1138...33i21k1.0.bX_RBQmwRMQ

Over about 40 years, that's about 12.5 million USD per year.

So the $500,000 or so that AQ spent on 9/11 is about 4% of donations of one (1!) Saudi charity, in just one year.

So a plan to embezzle even a fraction of a percent, over several years, would provide more than enough to fully fund 9/11, just from this one charity.

Is it so hard to believe that AQ could have pulled that off, even without official Saudi support?
 
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NYT: Saudis and Extremism: ‘Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters’

More than a few rich Saudis promote Wahhabism. The US looks the other way because ... oil.
The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.

This is not new.

I'm sure I have a number of posts about this from a decade ago.
 
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NYT: Saudis and Extremism: ‘Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters’

More than a few rich Saudis promote Wahhabism. The US looks the other way because ... oil.

This is not new.

I'm sure I have a number of posts about this from a decade ago.



And this is the fundamental point, really. There's more than enough reason to be pissed off at SA, without trying to tie them into 9/11 as an active supporter. They've been sending a flood of money to all sorts of Islamic nutbags for decades, enabling the nutbags to pull off any number of capers.

With all that money flowing out, it would be more surprising if a few percent didn't end up in AQ's hands.
 
So a plan to embezzle even a fraction of a percent, over several years, would provide more than enough to fully fund 9/11, just from this one charity.

Osama didn't have to embezzle the money. He had built up a network of contacts over the years both as the son of the wealthiest contractor in the Arabian peninsula, and later as the supposed freedom fighter in Afghanistan. I don't know how charitable donations are treated in Saudi Arabia, but I suspect the reporting requirements are a little less stringent than what we might expect in the US.

Although early reports after 9-11 that estimated Osama's wealth in the hundreds of millions were probably far off, the fact remains that he apparently received the equivalent of $1 million US annually from his father from 1970-1994. That's a lot of money for a man who reportedly lived an ascetic personal lifestyle.

The hijackers themselves were fairly frugal; one of the last preparations that Mohamed Atta performed on September 10th was to wire the remaining funds of about $10,000 back to AQ.
 
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I would say it's safe to assume that if 9/11 had happened under a President who's family didn't have close ties to the House of Saud, the aftermath of the attack would have been quite different.
 
That Al Qaeda was established by the Saudi government ( along with the Kuwaitis) is a matter of acknowledged fact- read The Looming Tower.
However, Bin Laden went off the rails after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, and was subsequently disowned by both the Saudi government and his own family, so to suggest that '"the Saudis" funded 9/11 is incorrect.
The 28 pages mention a Saudi prince who gave funding and logistical support to the hijackers. Given the presence of pockets of strong anti-American feeling in Saudi Arabia, that one of them should be part of the ruling family is not really surprising. Again, I don't think this can be expanded into an idea that 9/11 was a project of the saudi government. Al Qaeda tried to assassimate the Saudi Defence Minister after all, and committed a number of other attacks in the country. Bin Laden was no fan of the Sauds, and they didn't like him either.
 
I would be very interested in knowing more about the intermediaries (“middlemen”) between Saudi royals and other “VIPs” (wealthy non-royal businessmen, including members of the bin Laden family) and al-Qaeda operatives, including Osama bin Laden himself. I suspect these people would mainly be al-Qaeda fellow travelers in the religious ministries of Saudi embassies and consulates around the world - including in the US, along with intelligence officers and agents with suspicious associations.

The other thing not mentioned here is that a lot of the suspected/alleged Saudi financial support for bin Laden and his network was facilitated by the wives and sisters among the bin Laden family and other powerful families, maybe including some of the royals themselves. Kind of hard for an American or other Western counterterrorism investigator to demand to see the financial transactions of a Saudi woman without having the Saudi government angrily slam the door in the investigator’s face. :P

Betwen that and hiding any “official” state support for terrorism in the religious ministries and erm, charitable organizations that the Saudi royals sponsor, as well as good-ole fashioned Saudi intelligence “spooks” and cutouts, I’d say it’d be pretty much impossible to get a full handle on what is already an incredibly sensitive subject.
 
Again, I don't think this can be expanded into an idea that 9/11 was a project of the saudi government.

It wasn't a project of the Saudi government, but the funding for the attack certainly seems to have come from the Saudi government, albeit indirectly.
 
For the last 3 or so weeks, I have been in a "debate" with a guy on Facebook, who initially claimed that the redaction of the 28 pages (now redacted), hid, by orders of President Bush, two allegations that the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, carried out two acts of "planning and orchestrating" 9/11. And claims that the declassification of the 28 pages "forged" the "victims bill" (JASTA). The "two acts" he refers to, he "supported" by showing little screenshots from the 28 pages: One talked about how Bandar and his wife transfered money to a Saudi in San Diego, who passed on money to two of the hijackers. The other is the finding of phone numbers in Abu Zubayda's (?? Name recollected from imperfect memory) indirectly related to Bandar, one being to a company in Colorada that did business for Bandar.

I called him on three false or unsupported claims:
  1. The 28 pages allege neither that Bandar "planned" nor that he "orchestrated" 9/11 - merely that he had indirect financial ties and potential communications lines to the hijackers
  2. There is no hint that the redaction was carried out on Bush's orders, or even just with his knowledge
  3. Since JASTA passed the Senate before the declassified 28 pages were published, it is clear immedately that the declassification cannot have been a cause of JASTA passing Congress.
Ok, this earned me plenty of insults and getting called a paid agent for the Bush/Cheney/Obama/whatever conspiracy. Despite him and me probably agreeing basically that Bandar's shenanigans out to have been scrutinized to the bare bone a long time ago, and that whoever actually andd knowingly supported AQ and the 9/11 attacks in Saudi Arabia ought to get hunted don and brought to justice - even if a Prince or two are among that lot.

But the guy insists on overplaying his cards and on maintaining the hyperbole.


So here's the lesson: Take what is documented - all of it - critically but openly; and refrain both from overplaying the cards we have in our hands AND from assuming it's a losing hand anyway and giving up.

Too many in this forum are too quick, in my opinion, to dismiss out of hand hypotheses that true higher-ups in the Saudi power elite - I am talking government and Princes level - have knowingly co-conspired and willingly enabled 9/11. There IS initial evidence that, specifically, Prince Bandar had a hand in it all, and there IS some evidence that whatever was known about those ties before 9/11 has been handled in such a sorry way that closer scrutiny is warranted.

I have always felt that the likes of paloalto are onto something real; but unfortunately they overplay their cards, and insulate themselves from scrutiny by coming with a besieged-castle mentality.
 
That Al Qaeda was established by the Saudi government ( along with the Kuwaitis) is a matter of acknowledged fact- read The Looming Tower.
However, Bin Laden went off the rails after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, and was subsequently disowned by both the Saudi government and his own family, so to suggest that '"the Saudis" funded 9/11 is incorrect.
The 28 pages mention a Saudi prince who gave funding and logistical support to the hijackers. Given the presence of pockets of strong anti-American feeling in Saudi Arabia, that one of them should be part of the ruling family is not really surprising. Again, I don't think this can be expanded into an idea that 9/11 was a project of the saudi government. Al Qaeda tried to assassimate the Saudi Defence Minister after all, and committed a number of other attacks in the country. Bin Laden was no fan of the Sauds, and they didn't like him either.

The decision to attack the U.S. directly lead to a split within Al Qaeda in the months before the attack. UBL and KSM grossly miscalculated the US response. Since this was an actual conspiracy to destabilize US support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, bin Laden deliberately chose Saudis to be the hijackers in hopes that the Americans would take it out on Riyadh, which would have - in theory - inflamed the Arab world, and plunged the entire Arab Peninsula into war...they got it 1/3 right.

As far as the CIA/FBI failure, we know the key piece of information the FBI needed to know stopped at one manager's desk at Langley and died there. Nobody wants to name this person, but it's only a matter of time. The CIA's defense will be to point to the FBI's Phoenix Memo, and INS letting hijackers over-stay their visas, and the US Ambassador to Yemen's incompetence relating to the FBI investigation, or lack their of, for the USS Cole bombing. Plus nobody telling the NSA to flag key communications for review. This is the list of US intelligence failures right here, and they have been hinted at since 9/12/2001 if you knew where to read.
 
[*]There is no hint that the redaction was carried out on Bush's orders, or even just with his knowledge

Why do you think this says what it says, though?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolution/428/text

Whereas President George W. Bush classified 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 2001;

About half of the cosponsors are Republicans, so I don't think that's just partisan tomfoolery...

eta: also:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-911-classified-report-steve-kroft/
Porter Goss, who was Graham's Republican co-chairman on the House side of the Joint Inquiry, and later director of the CIA, also felt strongly that an uncensored version of the 28 pages should be included in the final report. The two men made their case to the FBI and its then-director Robert Mueller in a face-to-face meeting.

Porter Goss: And they pushed back very hard on the 28 pages and they said, "No, that cannot be unclassified at this time."

Steve Kroft: Did you happen to ask the FBI director why it was classified?

Porter Goss: We did, in a general way, and the answer was because, "We said so and it needs to be classified."

And:
https://therealnews.com/stories/bgraham0907pt2
So who’s the coach?

GRAHAM: Well, I think the coach is the president of the United States. He’s the only one who could have commanded agencies, from the Department of State to the Treasury Department, to the intelligence community, to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, to all act in the same manner, because they are all ultimately responsible to the president.
 
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Why do you think this says what it says, though?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolution/428/text



About half of the cosponsors are Republicans, so I don't think that's just partisan tomfoolery...

Ok, fair enough :blush:

Two things though:
  1. My debate opponent - I have been asking him for three weeks to make true claims and back them up with evidence that actually support the claims - that is pretty much the only point I have been making for 3 weeks: That a good, convincving debater presents true claims with strong evidence without needing the opponent to ask for it. He never even tried to find, let alone show, evidence that "President George W. Bush classified 28 pages". It was his claim, and thus his burden of evidence. I did not research the evidence for him.
  2. I think this language needs to be read as "the Office of President George W. Bush" - I do not believe that George the Lesser actually sat down, personally, with a black felt pen, meticulously scratching out 28 pages he personally didn't like to see published.
 
Ok, fair enough :blush:

Two things though:
  1. My debate opponent - I have been asking him for three weeks to make true claims and back them up with evidence that actually support the claims - that is pretty much the only point I have been making for 3 weeks: That a good, convincving debater presents true claims with strong evidence without needing the opponent to ask for it. He never even tried to find, let alone show, evidence that "President George W. Bush classified 28 pages". It was his claim, and thus his burden of evidence. I did not research the evidence for him.
  2. I think this language needs to be read as "the Office of President George W. Bush" - I do not believe that George the Lesser actually sat down, personally, with a black felt pen, meticulously scratching out 28 pages he personally didn't like to see published.

Yeah, I don't even see him being enough of a big reader to have been the one with the redaction pen.

It does seem far more likely than not that there was an order from Bush to Mueller to make sure nothing was released that would result in calls for any members of the royal family to brought in for interrogation. Something along those lines. Which is not necessarily diabolical if Axxman is correct in that "bin Laden deliberately chose Saudis to be the hijackers in hopes that the Americans would take it out on Riyadh."
 
So still no real evidence that the Saudi Government was behind 9/11?
It was funded with SA government money via charities. It wasn't their intelligence agency or ministry of defense that plotted it, though.
 
A couple of things that are absent from this conversation is the fact that Al Qaeda was plotting the overthrow of the Saudi Royal Family, and carrier out strikes in the kingdom after 9-11. When you talk about the Saudi Royal Family you're talking about 15,000 people, 2,000 of which are multi-millionaires. A U.S. Army Division runs between 10,000 and 15,000 personnel. So when some guy from the 101st Airborne rapes and murders a stripper this does not mean that the 101st Airborne was behind it.

So yes, Saudi's funded 9-11, but not as a matter of official policy, and more along the lines of Crazy Uncle Aziz lacking judgement.

Second, and this is something I never see pointed out on this forum anywhere:

The FBI's 9-11 Investigation is still classified, and has never been released to the public. If Skeptics and CTists want to unite behind a common cause getting that report out into the open would be a big help. I'm pretty good at estimation of content and I don't have a clue what the FBI found that makes their sphincters pucker on this topic.
 
The FBI's 9-11 Investigation is still classified, and has never been released to the public. If Skeptics and CTists want to unite behind a common cause getting that report out into the open would be a big help. I'm pretty good at estimation of content and I don't have a clue what the FBI found that makes their sphincters pucker on this topic.

The CIA's, too. I linked to a quote of Sen Graham talking about that earlier in the thread:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/28-pages-saudi-prince-bandar-9-11/index.html

Graham now wants the FBI and CIA documents pertaining to the questions raised in the 28 pages to be released as well.
"It's going to now be the task to find out, did the ... (9/11) commission, did the FBI, did the CIA, or any other entity of the United States government in fact do" a comprehensive inquiry into the Bandar connection?" Graham asked. "If so, what did they conclude in their further investigation?"
 
It seems the Saudi government money and people in the Saudi government's money are being conflated. Anyone know how money for running the country is divvied up?

Funding extremism isn't evidence of planning or knowing about 911. Without evidence of more direct involvement, seems like growing extremists and funding is the extent of involvement, which is bad enough.
 
Another complicating factor for sorting out government vs. personal finances would be the Islamic money exchange system of HawalaWP. Essentially, you give a guy some money in Dar-Es-Salaam and someone else can go pick up the money in Detroit -- no wire transfer, no bank records, etc. I'm sure that there have been crackdowns since 2001, but at that time it would have been pretty free-wheeling.

Here is more info on the financing:

Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland: A MONEY TRAIL?

Last thing - Saying that a member of the Saudi royal family was involved means essentially nothing. There are more than 15,000 of them, with around 2,000 having the kind of money that could have financed the 9/11 attacks.
 
senator selling book gets attention with headlines

No, there is no direct line from "SA was the entity funding the charities which were/are funding al-Qaida" to the holographic planes.

Or, do you think members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are on the road to Trutherdom?

what holographic planes?

Hey uncle Mohammad, I need money for flight training, I want to be a pilot.

15 Saudis did 9/11 along with four other really gullible murderers.

The big question I have, is how many of the 19 murderers knew it was "last day"? How do you find 19 idiots to commit suicide?

On a brighter note, I think another pilot terrorist was denied a visa, he never made it to the USA - did they have four more idiots to go with him?

Back to the OP - If an uncle pays a kids tuition, funds all the kid's college expenses; and the kid decides to kill as many on campus as possible, OH noes, Uncle funded the killings? Oops, no, the Uncle funded room and board, and tuition. darn, thought the senator who was selling books had a point... nope
 
...
Last thing - Saying that a member of the Saudi royal family was involved means essentially nothing. There are more than 15,000 of them, with around 2,000 having the kind of money that could have financed the 9/11 attacks.

Well, the Saudi embassy, lead by Prince Bandar, is implied in several lines of evidence. Prince Bandar is not one of the 15,000 also-theres, he is the long-time ambassador to the USA, and later head of the Saudi intelligence system. He was surely top-50 among the Princes and government officials. Plus, he is often portrayed as a good personal friend of GW Bush - who surely wasn't good friend with 15,000+ members of the royal family.
 
A couple of things that are absent from this conversation is the fact that Al Qaeda was plotting the overthrow of the Saudi Royal Family, and carrier out strikes in the kingdom after 9-11.

Ahem.

That Al Qaeda was established by the Saudi government ( along with the Kuwaitis) is a matter of acknowledged fact- read The Looming Tower.
However, Bin Laden went off the rails after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, and was subsequently disowned by both the Saudi government and his own family, so to suggest that '"the Saudis" funded 9/11 is incorrect.
The 28 pages mention a Saudi prince who gave funding and logistical support to the hijackers. Given the presence of pockets of strong anti-American feeling in Saudi Arabia, that one of them should be part of the ruling family is not really surprising. Again, I don't think this can be expanded into an idea that 9/11 was a project of the saudi government. Al Qaeda tried to assassinate the Saudi Defence Minister after all, and committed a number of other attacks in the country. Bin Laden was no fan of the Sauds, and they didn't like him either.

You even replied to this post.
 
And also, "very sophisticated plot"? "people who couldn't speak English"? Those again are almost straight out of the 9/11 truther handbook.

The only difficult part of the plan was getting pilots who could fly the planes well enough to hit the buildings, and we know exactly how they did that. We've seen interviews with the people who ran the schools they attended, and literally all they had to do was sign up, pay the tuition, and attend the classes. The rest of it was just buying 19 tickets on four different flights, which literally any travel agent could have done.

And people who don't speak English well get by in the US every damn day, some of them doing jobs far more complicated than getting a taxi to the airport, and getting on a plane. Heck, the US might just be the easiest place in the world for them to do that. I'd be surprised if an airport in Japan had someone on staff who could speak Arabic, but the US? With the number of first and second generation immigrants they have, it might be more surprising if the airport didn't have someone around who could speak Arabic if needed.

All they really needed was the money to do it. The rest of their "support" could have been handled by just a few people who knew English a bit better, at most. They succeeded not because of some "sophisticated" James-Bondian "network", they succeeded because they identified a weakness in our security that was easy to exploit.

And that's what the people in charge really don't want to admit. They got outplayed, pure and simple.

Bravo. I always considered the attacks to be low-tech and requiring relatively little money. Getting the attackers ID seemed the biggest hurdle. I think Atta had a driver's license that said he was Oscar Diaz? So some logistics there, but very low-tech considering the outcome.
 

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