By Jeff Steinberg
After the House of Representatives followed the U.S. Senate by passing the JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act) bill by unanimous voice vote, President Barack Obama has announced that he will veto the bill—setting up a head-on confrontation between the President on the one side, and the U.S. Congress, the 9/11 families and the American people on the other. JASTA would allow the survivors of 9/11 and the families of the 2,997 people killed in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center to finally have their day in court to confront the Saudi Monarchy for their role in supporting the terrorists.
President Obama has so far announced his plans to veto JASTA, which arrived on his desk on Monday, Sept. 12, the day after the 15th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil in history. He has ten business days—until Sept. 23—to either sign the bill or send a veto message to Congress. Already, leading Senators and Representatives from both parties have made clear that they have lined up more than enough votes to obtain a 2/3 majority in both Houses and thus override an Obama veto. The White House is teaming up with the Saudis and other states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to arm-twist members of the Senate and House to change their votes and accept the President’s veto.
Terry Strada, a leading spokesperson for the 9/11 families (her husband Tom Strada was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11) has announced that there will be a protest outside the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 20 to demand that Obama either signs the bill into law or casts his veto to allow Congress to do its patriotic duty and override his shameful action.
Lyndon LaRouche commented on Sept. 15 that he expects Obama to veto JASTA “because he is an agent of the British System.” He takes his orders from the British Monarchy, and London has as much to lose in an honest trial in U.S. Federal Court as their Saudi underlings. A prominent member of the British House of Commons has written recently in the Daily Telegraph that under JASTA, the British Monarchy can be sued as well as the Saudis, because of London’s longstanding support for the very same terrorists behind 9/11.
The evidence of the Anglo-Saudi hand is overwhelming. The 28 pages from the original Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, co-chaired by former Senator Bob Graham, clearly revealed the central role of Prince Bandar bin-Sultan in the 9/11 attacks. Bandar, who was Ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and was so close to President George W. Bush that he was nicknamed “Bandar Bush,” financed at least two of the 9/11 hijackers via Saudi intelligence officers in the San Diego area, and he had ties to top Al Qaeda leaders, as revealed in the 28 pages.
Bandar is himself a British agent. In 1985, he and Margaret Thatcher engineered the Al Yamamah oil-for-arms deal, through which the British and the Saudis amassed a secret, offshore slush fund in excess of $100 billion, to finance global terrorism, regime change, and assassinations.
In a speech at a major conference on the 9/11 attacks at the Cooper Union campus in Manhattan on Sept. 10, EIR senior editor Jeffrey Steinberg pointed out that Bandar was no Wahhabi fundamentalist. “He had a greater affinity for single malt scotch and Cuban cigars than for Islam,” Steinberg told the audience of 300 9/11 activists. “Bandar was acting as an agent of the Saudi Monarchy in providing the critical support to the hijackers, and he was doing it on behalf of the Bush-Cheney Administration,” Steinberg declared. He reminded the audience that in Jan. 2001, Lyndon LaRouche’s national spokesperson, Debra Freeman, had testified against the nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General, on the grounds that the incoming Bush-Cheney Administration was committed to imposing a police-state dictatorship on the United States and would look for the first opportunity to stage a Reichstag Fire incident to get to that goal. “That was a forecast that, unfortunately, came true nine months later,” Steinberg said. “Bush and Cheney suppressed the 28 page chapter, that showed the Saudi Monarchy’s hand behind the 9/11 hijackers, in order to make sure nothing stood in the way of their plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.”
In addition to passing JASTA by a veto-proof majority, there are other urgent actions that must be taken to finally get to the full truth about 9/11. There are literally millions of pages of government documents from the investigation into 9/11 that remain classified to this day. A Federal Judge in Florida is reviewing 80,000 pages of long-suppressed FBI files on another high-ranking Saudi businessman who hosted three of the 9/11 hijackers, including alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta. To date, no documents have been released on the 9/11 cells that were operating in Paterson, NJ or Herndon, VA in the year leading to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Sen. Bob Graham, Rep. Walter Jones and other leaders of the fight for the truth about 9/11 have demanded that the government release all of these secret files. As Graham told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, the release of the 28 pages “popped the cork on the bottle, and now we must see the entire contents.”
The American people want the truth to come out. During the weekend of Sept. 9–12, approximately 4,000 people turned out for memorial concerts in New York City and Morristown, NJ where the Schiller Institute NYC Community Chorus performed Mozart’s Requiem, to commemorate and honor those who lost their lives on 9/11 and the many thousands of first-responders who have since died or contracted grave illnesses as the result of their heroic response to the 9/11 tragedy. For those heroes and for all people, the truth about those horrible events has no statute of limitation.
The full wrath of the American people must now be directed at President Obama, to force him, despite his actual loyalties, to do the right thing and sign JASTA into law. If Obama is so filled with treasonous hatred for the United States that he issues a veto, the Congress must stand up with a single voice and pass the measure by an overwhelming majority—and then take the proper Constitutional action against Obama.
If Barack Obama does go ahead and vetoes JASTA, this should lead to his immediate impeachment. Any President who puts the interests of the British and Saudi Monarchies ahead of those of the American people is prima facie guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and must be immediately removed from office. Otherwise, the Constitution itself loses all meaning.
