The Chris Moeller Archives

Those who attacked and their defenders

The fifth anniversary of the September 11th assault on the United States should bring with it time for sober reflection, and that thoughtful sobriety cannot exist without the acknowledgement of the culpability of the Bush Administration and a political and business culture in the U.S. that served, first, to indirectly finance the assault, and then to intentionally undermine the pursuit of justice for its victims. The monsters who attacked us don't just hide, as best we can guess, in the rugged mountains along the Afghan/Pakistan border. They live among us in the more enlightened secular world, in palatial European estates and chalet-style mansions resting upon the Rocky Mountains. They fund terrorist training camps while allowing the enslavement of their wives, sisters, and daughters, and shuttle our politicians from palace to palace purchasing protection for their unconscionable crimes. They are the Saudi royal family.

The royals live in the lap of Earthen luxury thanks to a planet coked-up on petroleum. Despite an unpopulist, western-style appetite for excess and middle-eastern-style "sin," they maintain their lavish livestyles appeasing the powerful orthodox clerics of their kingdom with the subjugation of women and the fueling of anti-western and anti-semitic rhetoric. Under their reign, school textbooks teach that Jews drink the blood of children. Women remain physically segregated until marriage, remain covered head to toe in public at all times, are forbidden to marry outside the Muslim faith, and at least in one instance, are stoned to death for the crime of being raped. Homosexuality is punished by beheading.

Leaders in the Bush Administration, though not alone among Washington's power brokers, have always looked the other way on the clerics' female and gay butchering, and one day shortly after September 11th, 2001 agreed to also strengthen their political and financial partnership (read: oil) by taking out Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq and the Saudis' greatest regional rival. This new priority for the United States military effectively ended the 9/11 victims' pursuit of justice in the capture of Osama bin Laden. In February 2002, President Bush pulled most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts out of the Afghan mountains and away from the hunt for bin Laden in preparation for war with Iraq.

The royals' role in the September 11th attack is indisputable, and the House of Saud is indisputably linked to the Bush family political and business dynasty. Their most-westernized representatives, Prince Bandar and his wife Princess Haifa, before writing checks to Saudi "charities" who were teaching lunatics how to turn airplanes into missiles, invested millions of dollars in the construction of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. Pappy Bush's family, friends, and business connections had already taken to calling the Prince "Bandar Bush," because of their long association and deep affection, and they continue to make low-key house calls to the royals' D.C. townhouse for comfort and support.

The widows of 9/11 have been denied by their government the right to sue the House of Saud for losses despite evidence (bank statements) of direct funding of the attack, and the entire section of the 9/11 Report dealing with Saudi involvement remains classified indefinitely. The Bushies have attempted to re-cast Hussein and Iraq as partners in the hijacking plot, even though Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen and so were 15 of the other murderers buried among the innocent at the site of this morning's memorial in lower Manhattan.

Pakistan, hailed by the Bush administration as another ally in the war on terror, and a country in which female rape victims have to produce four male witnesses to avoid being charged with adultery, continues its obstruction of 9/11 justice, announcing last week that a peace deal and amnesty agreement had been struck with tribes in its northern mountain region long suspected of harboring bin Laden and his lieutenants.

These facts should be on everyone's mind on this solemn anniversary. Our president, speaking to the nation tonight from the Oval Office will continue to talk about justice for the 9/11 victims and fighting terrorism around the world, but his words betray the dead. Not only did he and his co-horts help to fund and legitimatize the tyrannical, and, at best, blisteringly negligent Saudi royals before the attacks, they then sold out the victims of September 11th after the fact by continuing to protect their personal and lucrative business interests above all other pursuits. It goes beyond hypocrisy past vicious insult into the realm of criminal activity. You can't fight the "Islamo-fascists" while simultaneously lining their pockets.

posted by CM @ 1:17 PM