May 12, 2016

Missing 28 Pages From 9/11 Commission Report Should Be Revealed




McCarthy was the prosecutor of the Blind Sheik, who directed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. This lengthy article makes the connections arguing for the release of the hidden 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission report. 

[From article]
national security is principally about keeping Americans safe, not winning court cases. Sure, winning in this instance meant justice was done and some terrorists were incarcerated. How safe, though, had we really kept Americans? For all the effort and expense, the number of jihadists neutralized was negligible compared to the overall threat. The attacks kept coming, as one might expect when one side detonates bombs and the other responds with subpoenas. As the years passed, the tally of casualties far outstripped that of convicted terrorists. When 9/11 finally happened, killing nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans, al-Qaeda credited none other than the Blind Sheikh with issuing the fatwa — the sharia edict — that authorized the attack. We had imprisoned him, but we had not stopped him.
[. . .]



American counterterrorism, even seven years after 9/11 (and fully 15 years after the jihadists declared war by bombing the World Trade Center), had bored its head ever deeper in the sand. It consciously avoided the central truths driving the terrorist threat against the United States. The most significant of these is that violent jihadism is the inexorable result of the vibrance in Islam of sharia supremacism — a scripturally-rooted summons to Muslims to strive for conquest over infidels until Allah’s law (sharia) is established everywhere on earth.
[. . .]
The conquest for which it strives, moreover, is not necessarily to be achieved by violence. Sharia supremacism is, nevertheless, a mainstream interpretation of Islam. Inevitably, it leads some believers to carry out jihadist violence, and an even greater number of believers to support the jihadists’ objectives, if not their methods.
[. . .]



Since 1993, the bipartisan American ruling class, throughout administrations of both parties, has refused to acknowledge, much less grapple with, this central truth of the threat we face. It has insisted, against fact and reason, that Islam is a monolithic “religion of peace,” and therefore that there can be no causal connection between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims. It has fraudulently maintained that jihadist violence is not jihadist at all [. . .] Terrorist attacks must be airbrushed into “violent extremism,” shorn of any ideological component — as if the killing were wanton, not purposeful. The fact that the attacks are so ubiquitously committed by Muslims (who explicitly cite scriptural chapter and verse to justify themselves), is to be ignored — as if all religions and ideologies were equally prone to inspire mass-murder attacks if believed too fervently.
[. . .]
of Americans slaughtered on 9/11 by 19 jihadists, 15 of them Saudis. The government must disclose the 28 pages of the 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks that it has shamefully withheld from the public for 14 years. Those pages outline Saudi complicity in the jihad.
[. . .]



The Saudis are the world’s chief propagator of sharia supremacism, sharia being the law of the Sunni kingdom. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, a literalist interpretation of Islam rooted in scripture dating back 1,400 years, is the dominant belief system. For decades, the House of Saud has played a double game with the West: 1) feigning moderation while promoting and internally enforcing this repressive fundamentalism, which brutally discriminates against women, non-Muslims, and Muslim minorities; 2) posturing as a staunch counterterrorism ally while exporting their ideology
[. . .]
In Sarasota, Fla., Abdulazziz al-Hijji, a well-connected Saudi oil executive, abandoned his home with his wife, Arnoud, and their small children in August 2001, just weeks before the attacks. They fled to Saudi Arabia. The departure was obviously abrupt: The family left behind three cars, furniture, jewelry, food, etc.
[. . .]
A 2002 report pried from the FBI indicates that a member of the al-Hijji family attended Huffman Aviation, the same Venice, Fla., flight school as the 9/11 hijacker-pilots who attacked the Twin Towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. (A third hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, who piloted the plane that heroic passengers forced to crash in Pennsylvania, trained at a flight school a short distance away.) According to published reports, Escondito Circle security records indicate that cars connected to the hijackers were seen at the al-Hijji home.
[. . .]
Upon entering the United States, [Saudi hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar] frequented the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles, whose sharia supremacist imam, Fahad al-Thumairi, just happened to be an accredited diplomat at the nearby Saudi consulate.
[. . .]
Bayoumi is a native Saudi who worked for years in the Kingdom’s defense ministry before moving to the U.S. in 1994. The defense ministry continued to pay him a salary while he held a series of no-show jobs in the San Diego area. For over a year prior to 9/11, he also received an extra stipend of approximately $3,000 per month
[. . .]



Like Abdulazziz al-Hijji, Bayoumi suddenly left the United States to return to Saudi Arabia in the weeks before the 9/11 attacks. By then, Midhar and Hazmi had moved on to Virginia,
[. . .]
the Justice Department developed a passport-fraud case against him and an arrest warrant was issued. As I’ve outlined here, Awlaki was thus placed under arrest when he arrived at JFK International Airport in New York on October 10, 2002, on a flight from Riyadh. Remarkably, the Justice Department intervened to direct that he be un-arrested and allowed to enter freely . . . in the company of the Saudi government representative who was conveniently on hand to assist him. For years, our government implausibly claimed that the arrest warrant had been vacated because the case was weak. Subsequently, FBI and Justice Department officials fessed up to Congress that the government knew Awlaki was returning to the United States ahead of time, and that the warrant for his arrest had not been vacated when he arrived — the decision was mysteriously made to allow him to go free, in the custody of his Saudi handler.
[. . .]
In 1972, in cooperation with the Saudi government, the Muslim Brotherhood established the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in Riyadh. WAMY’s stated purpose was to “arm the Muslim youth with full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other systems.” It grew into the world’s largest Muslim youth organization, operating in over 60 countries. As I outlined in The Grand Jihad, WAMY is intolerant of non-Muslims, supportive of violent jihad, and boldly anti-Semitic. It has been banned in Pakistan, where it shared office space with the Benevolence International Fund, an al-Qaeda charitable front founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. WAMY has also been accused by the governments of India and the Philippines of abetting terrorism.
[. . .]



On the night before the 9/11 attacks, those two hijackers, joined by a third, Midhar, checked into the Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport. That same day, Saleh Hussayen, a Saudi government official then touring the U.S. offices of WAMY and other Saudi concerns, left a different hotel in which he was staying and, for reasons that have never been explained, checked into the very same Residence Inn. Coincidence? Well, after the three hijackers attacked the Pentagon, the FBI tried to interview Hussayen. But, as an FBI agent later testified, Hussayen “feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him.” Though the agent wanted Hussayen to be barred from fleeing the U.S. until she could conduct the interview, higher-ups rebuffed her recommendation. Hussayen was allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.
[. . .]
Abdullah Awad bin Laden and his brother Omar, who shared a Falls Church home, were among several prominent Saudis — including several other bin Laden family members — whom our government permitted to be whisked out of the United States in the hectic days immediately following 9/11. At the time they scurried out, before anything resembling a competent investigation of potential terror ties could have been carried out, the skies were still closed to American travelers.
[. . .]
Washington’s bipartisan insistence that the Saudi regime is a vital counterterrorism ally of the United States is a delusional byproduct of its willful blindness to sharia supremacism — the ideological driver of violent jihadism and the oil-rich kingdom’s most consequential export. The point of the post-9/11 investigations was to hold every culpable actor and negligent government agency accountable. No American citizen or government official, not even the sitting president, was spared. It is time for Washington to stop running interference for the Saudis while the Saudis run interference for the jihadists. At long last, let’s see the 28 pages.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434144/9-11-report-28-pages-saudi-arabia-terrorism-connections-should-be-released

Willful Blindness and Our Saudi ‘Friends’
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 16, 2016 4:00 AM 
@ANDREWCMCCARTHY

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