What the White House Wants to Hide

What exactly is so sensitive that the Bush White House wants to keep hidden within CIA files of extracting information from terror suspects? The answer may be found in the following excerpt from my book “The Terror Conspiracy,” written in 2002 and finally published in full in 2006:

In the days following September 11, many major media pundits correctly pointed out that a ragtag bunch of fanatics could not have successfully pulled off the large-scale and well-coordinated attacks by themselves. They must have had the sponsorship of some state, they argued. It was this rationale that provided the foundation argument for the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.

One captured al Qaeda chief may have provided a startling answer to the question of who actually provided state sponsorship for the 9/11 attacks—most likely working hand-in-hand with cosponsors in the US as well as other US-connected foreign intelligence agencies including the Israeli Mossad and/or the Pakistani ISI (i.e., the Mossad and the ISI being the central intelligence agency equivalent in each country).

This “smoking gun” case links al Qaeda directly to Saudi Arabia. It came to light in late March 2002, with the capture of Abu Zubaydah in a middle-class suburb of the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. On April 2, 2002, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer described Zubaydah as the most senior member of al Qaeda captured to that point and stated, “He will be interrogated about his knowledge of ongoing plans to conduct terrorist activities. This represents a serious blow to al Qaeda.”

But instead it appears to have been a serious blow to the Saudis. According to a new book by Gerald Posner entitled Why America Slept, Zubaydah turned out to be tightly connected with ranking Saudis, including members of the royal family.

Posner, a noted debunker of JFK assassination conspiracies, supported the official version of pre-9/11 intelligence failures in this new book, arguing that despite all the tax dollars spent, federal agencies simply couldn’t connect the dots. Posner has admitted being close to friendly CIA sources, which make his ensuing revelations that much more shocking.

According to Posner, when attempts to pry information out of Zubaydah with drugs failed, the al Qaeda chief was flown to an Afghan facility remodeled to look like a Saudi jail cell. Two Arab American Special Forces operatives, disguised as Saudis, then confronted Zubaydah. The idea was to scare him into revealing al Qaeda secrets. Recall that al Qaeda reportedly detests the Saudi royalty.

Yet, when faced by the faked Saudi interrogators, Zubaydah expressed relief rather than fear, according to Posner. He seemed genuinely happy to see them and offered them telephone numbers for ranking Saudi officials. One number was for Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a westernized nephew of Saudi King Fahd and a equestrian whose horse, War Emblem, won the 2002 Kentucky Derby. Zubaydah said Prince Aziz would vouch for him and give the interrogators instructions. The disguised Americans were shocked to find the unlisted Saudi numbers valid.

The Saudi Arabian-born al Qaeda leader then proceeded to outline his Saudi connections. He explained that one such contact in Saudi Arabia was intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, who met with Osama bin Laden in 1991 and agreed to provide bin Laden with funds in exchange for his pledge not to promote a jihad war in Saudi Arabia. He said his royal Saudi contacts operated through Pakistani Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, a man with close ties to Muslims inside Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI has long been suspected of providing al Qaeda with arms and supplies. And according to Posner, this convoluted pipeline was blessed by the Saudis. Zubaydah went on to claim that 9/11 did nothing to change the relationships between the Saudis, Pakistanis, and al Qaeda. He claimed that while both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew in advance of the attacks, they did not know the specific targets. They also would have been hesitant to reveal their secret agreements. [Abu Zubaydah: Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, (New York: Random House, 2003); Johanna McGeary, “Confessions of a Terrorist,” Time (Sept. 8, 2003)]

Posner also noted that not long after Zubaydah’s revelations were passed along to the Saudis, the men mentioned by Zubaydah all died within days of each other. Prince Ahmed died of a heart attack at age 43 on July 22, 2002, while two princes, Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al Kabir both were killed in car wrecks within a week of each other. Pakistani Air Marshal Mir died in a plane crash during clear weather. Posner told Time the deaths, most convenient to anyone desiring to keep the Saudi–Pakistani–al Qaeda axis hidden, “may in fact be coincidences.” [Posner quote: Ibid.]

Despite this remarkable information tying al Qaeda to Saudi royals and Pakistani intelligence published in a major US news magazine, very little of such coverage has made its way to the American public.

With the confession of the top al Qaeda chief, it becomes abundantly clear why the Bush White House wants this information kept from the public. People might begin to wonder about the close business and social connections between the Saudis and the bin Laden family in particular and the Bush family. After all, someone in high authority allowed bin Laden family members to fly across the US during the “no fly” period following the 9/11 attacks. Such authority had to come from the White House.

By Jim Marrs