National security expert: Saudis no U.S. ally
Will Obama release evidence of kingdom complicity in 9/11?
Published: 12 hours ago
Almost 15 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the American people still don’t know the full truth of what happened that terrible day. Now, President Obama is considering declassifying 28 pages of information in the 9/11 Commission Report that could show Saudi Arabia was a key player in the attacks.
Hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mindhar may have received assistance from Saudi officials after entering the United States, according to a “60 Minutes” report broadcast Sunday. The officials culpable could include a diplomat at the Saudi consulate known to hold extremist views.
The Saudi embassy in the U.S. has officially denied the “60 Minutes” report, calling it a “compilation of myths and erroneous charges.”
Yet, it isn’t the first time such charges have surfaced. In January 2015, U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a lead author of the 9/11 Commission Report, held a news conference calling for declassification of the redacted pages. He also claimed the redacted pages would “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the attacks.
He is not alone in his view of Saudi Arabia. Philip Haney, a recently retired Department of Homeland Security officer, agrees the Islamic kingdom is a sponsor of terrorism and can hardly be called an American “ally.”
“During my career as a counter-terrorism analyst, I frequently encountered evidence of Saudi and United Arab Emirates support of Islamic terrorism via the funding of vast numbers of Salafi, or fundamentalist, Sunni Madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he told WND. “As confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, these Madrassas remain known recruitment and training centers for groups such as al-Qaida, the Taliban and Lashkar e-Tayyiba, the group involved in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.”
Haney is the author of the upcoming book “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.”
He said that to continue “calling any country with such a long history of support for known terrorist groups a reliable ally is contrary to the primary purpose of our elected officials, which is to protect our country from threats, both foreign and domestic.”
Has our own government already surrendered to Islamic jihad? A national security insider uncovers the terrible truth. Philip Haney’s “See Something, Say Nothing” is available for pre-order from the WND Superstore.
Haney was a Customs and Border Protection officer who served tours of duty at the National Targeting Center on its Advanced Targeting Team. Haney won numerous awards and commendations from his superiors for meticulously compiling information and producing actionable reports that led to the identification of hundreds of terrorists.
But Haney faced fierce opposition from a politically correct administration that made him the subject of nine investigations. He chronicles his experiences, which include his remarkable nexus to the San Bernardino and Boston Marathon investigations – in “See Something, Say Nothing.”
Promise to relatives
Haney believes the truth will never be known unless the full 9/11 Commission Report is released to the public.
“Without access to the redacted documents, we will never be able to adequately answer the question of Saudi complicity with the hijackers,” he told WND. “However, members of both the House and Senate who have seen the documents have plainly expressed their conviction that Saudi Arabia provided some degree of financial support to at least two of the Saudi citizens directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.”
The Obama administration has said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is reviewing the documents for possible declassification. The president recently refused to commit himself to releasing the redacted pages. However, he reportedly promised relatives of 9/11 victims in 2009 and 2011 he would release them.
Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., introduced a bill in December 2013 cosponsored by 10 other Republicans and 11 Democrats calling on the president to release the full report. The law firm Cozen O’Connor is also pushing litigation to hold Saudi Arabia partially responsible for the 9/11 attacks, with one of the firm’s attorneys appearing in the “60 Minutes” report. The release of the redacted pages could prove crucial to any eventual legal battle.
Haney argues the evidence of possible Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks was held back because the George W. Bush administration thought it needed the Saudi government’s help in fighting terrorism.
“From my perspective as a retired CBP officer, one of the main reasons the documents were classified was to ‘encourage’ the Saudi government to assist the U.S and the West in the ‘War on Terror,'” he said. “However, as we have seen with the benefit of hindsight, the American definition of terrorism is quite a bit different than the Saudi definition, and the threat of global terrorism is higher today, by several magnitudes, than it has ever been in modern history.”
Costly partnership
Haney charged that the American people are still endangered by the toxic alliance between the American and Saudi governments.
“In my opinion, another cost of this partnership has been the huge increase in the numbers of visas issued to Saudi students since 9/11,” he said. “It is well known that this program is riddled with fraud, yet the numbers continue rising each year.”
According to a report from Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review, student visas from Saudi Arabia have increased tenfold since 9/11. The explosion in visas for Saudis has been called a threat to national security because Saudi Arabian nationals accounted for 15 of the 19 hijackers in the attacks.
Haney sees a familiar pattern in how the federal government is so eager to conceal information that may be regarded as politically incorrect, especially if it implicates Islamic nations or Islamic extremism.
“The entire saga of the missing 28 pages, which should have been made public long ago – along with the rest of the 800-page 2003 report by the 9/11 Commission – is very similar to the ongoing efforts of the government to ‘modify,’ purge, redact and/or eliminate, i.e., censor, any fact-based intelligence information from our law enforcement systems that may have been ‘inconvenient,’ or may have contradicted the government’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties-based Counter Terrorism Policy,” he said.
“As seen in an April 05, 2016, letter to FBI Director James B. Comey Jr. from a coalition of ‘civil rights’ groups and Muslim organizations, these aggressive efforts to influence our law enforcement agencies because of political considerations continue to this very day.”
Ultimately, Haney argues the American people deserve to know the truth about the terrorist threat to the nation. And that especially applies, he said, to 9/11.
“Whatever help we were hoping to get from the government of Saudi Arabia has obviously not come through,” he told WND. “The kingdom is hardly an ally of the United States. I don’t know why we are coddling a country and a government that all too often acts more like an enemy.”
Read more at
http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/national-security-expert-saudis-no-u-s-ally/#14O8W0w4Myz1geO9.99
