Saudis Stay in Spotlight

Thank you Dennis, and thanks Helga, and thank you Congressman Walter Jones and also Ramsey Clark.

There is in fact, one dove that I can think of in the world, that actually deserves to be shot, and that dove, is Al Yamamah, which is the Arabic word for “the dove,” and also happens to be the name of the project, through which, for the last 30 years or so, the British and the Saudis have been amassing the offshore slush funds that have been the major source of financing, to all of the world terrorism that Helga identified in her presentation as one of the two great horrors that have been bestowed on the world by the British Empire, and which still represent the greatest threat: The danger of thermonuclear war at the high end, and the danger of terrorism as a source of mass population reduction at the low end of the violence spectrum.

Now, I think that in the words of Congressman Jones, you may have detected the fact for the first time in quite some time, there’s some passion in Washington about something that really is important, for the survival of the United States and the world. What I would say to you today, is that the pathway for realizing what Helga called for, in her keynote address, namely for the United States to accept the offer that was presented recently in Beijing by Chinese President Xi Jinping, for the United States to join not just the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), but the whole emergence of a new just paradigm for the world. If the United States can break free from the power of the British Empire, which is manifested not only in the overarching power of Wall Street over our political institutions today, but I would say is equally demonstrated by the fact that Presidents Bush and Obama have gone far beyond what anybody would consider to be rational in covering up the 28 pages. These are both examples of the power of the British Empire today.

Much of what is in the 28 pages, per se, is fairly well known, at least portions of it that are very damning to the Bush family, and to the Saudis, are fairly well known. Senator Graham, in 2004 wrote a book called Intelligence Matters and by using anecdotal accounts of the work of his Joint Select Committee on 9/11, he was able to get a lot of the story out. So, for example, we know that two agents of Saudi intelligence, located on the West Coast were the official greeters of the first two 9/11 hijackers when they arrived in the United States, in early 2000. They were financed by those two Saudi intelligence agents, they were set up in housing, and for security purposes, they were set up in residence at the home of an FBI informant. They were provided the funds to go through the flight training, and every step along the way, they were provided with all of the resources they needed.

It’s become pretty obvious to anybody who has actually tried to dig into the details of 9/11, that 19 individuals, 15 of them Saudis, who did not speak English, could not have conceivably carried out that attack, without substantial logistical assistance, and there’s evidence on a certain level that agents of the Saudi government were involved in providing that assistance. So that aspect of it — name, rank, serial number — of the people involved in that, both the Saudi intelligence officers and the terrorists themselves is fairly well known publicly. It’s also now known that the FBI covered up 86,000 pages, of evidence that there was a similar Saudi support cell backing up the terrorists in Sarasota, Florida, so that the group down there, including Mohammed Atta, were able to operate freely because they had, similarly, a support apparatus with lots of money that was behind them. And so a lot of those details are going to come out.

The real importance of getting the 28 pages released, though, is something quite different, because there’s some mythologies that need to be busted up. And the best opportunity that we have right now, the critical flank for getting to the underlying, deeper truth, not just about 9/11, but about the nature of the real political control over the United States, is buried in those 28 pages, so long as when they come out publicly, the full implications of what they tell, are fully realized. We know, for example, Ambassador “Bandar Bush,” that was his unofficial name, Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the Saudi Ambassador to Washington for decades, and was considered to be the adopted son of President George H.W. Bush, and the adopted brother of President George W. Bush. You can find on the internet, hundreds of photographs of Bandar and the Bushes, hanging out together. It’s also known that Bandar was a source of some of the funds that went through Saudi intelligence, directly into the pockets of the 9/11 hijackers.

And so, some of those elements are well known and the critical thing is that, once those leads come out, once the official content of those 28 pages comes out publicly a number of things are going to be clear. Number one, it’s going to be clear that the real issue, behind why President Bush, and now for the last six years President Obama, have desperately refused the demands of the 9/11 families, the demands of Congress to release those 28 pages, when everyone who has read them, knows that there are no genuine national security secrets to be protected, is going to be a lot more clear.

The first fiction that I expect and I can assure you, those of us here, will guarantee that this fiction is busted once and for all, is that the whole idea that there are countries of the Persian Gulf, the whole idea that Saudi Arabia exists, the whole idea that Bahrain exists, the whole idea that Kuwait and Oman and the U.A.E. and Qatar, actually exist as real countries, is a pure British fiction. These countries have never existed as independent entities, in any way, shape, or form, that we think of as a genuine, sovereign country.

And we’ve written extensively about the Al Yamamah deal, the Dove deal, which began in 1985, between Prince Bandar and Margaret Thatcher, that continued under Prince Bandar and Tony Blair, and every subsequent British government since then. It was a barter deal in which the British gave armed equipment, fighter planes, radar systems, military hardware, to the Saudis, and the Saudis paid in oil. And the amount of oil that they gave, when sold on the international spot market, generated literally hundreds of billions of dollars in excess cash, after BAE Systems was paid, after all of the usual bribes were given to the relevant Saudi princes, there were hundreds of billions of dollars left over. And the British themselves and Bandar himself, openly admit that that has been the largest offshore, unregulated secret source of black funds to finance terrorism, in the world today. It still exists. It’s still operational.

But the story itself goes back long before Prince Bandar was born, long before the Al Yamamah deal. In point of fact, the British Empire has controlled every country of the Persian Gulf, and by official British accounts, they openly acknowledge that Britain ran all of these countries, officially, through a series of treaty agreements, beginning in 1763, and extending officially through 1971.

So, in other words, you’ve had centuries in which the policies of these countries were dominated by the British.

Now, the story goes back a little bit earlier, because in 1661, the British East India Company expelled the Portuguese from the Persian Gulf because the Persian Gulf was the critical stop along the way to India. And the battle for empire in Europe centered around who would control India.

And so, I think it’s very notable that the starting date from which the British themselves say that they ran the entire Persian Gulf, is 1763: That’s the year that the British won the Seven Years’ War and defeated all of their European rivals and at that point, took undisputed control over India, and through India, they took undisputed control of the Persian Gulf. I’ll just give you a few examples: In 1820, the British signed what they call the General Treaty of Peace, and this solidified the fact that the British actually selected the particular tribes in each of the countries of the Persian Gulf, that would be installed in power. And those tribes, the al-Khalifa tribe, the al-Thani tribe, the Saudi tribe, are still to this day, the ruling families in the six countries that makes up the Persian Gulf Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

The actual head of state of the Persian Gulf region, from the time of that treaty was the Viceroy of Bombay in India, and under whom there was a resident agent of the British East India Company located in various cities, first in Iran and later in Iraq. And they were the actual sovereigns. The actual name, that the British head of operations in the Persian Gulf was referred to, he was called, “the uncrowned King of the Persian Gulf.”

In 1853, there was a follow-on treaty signed between Britain and all of the tribal leaders of all of the countries that still exist under the same borders today in the Persian Gulf. It was called the Treaty of Maritime Peace in Perpetuity. In 1892, there was a corollary to that treaty called the Exclusive Agreement, which basically gave the British absolute veto power over any territorial transfers; it gave the British control over all foreign relations; and in return for that, the British guaranteed that they would be the armed force to provide security for all of the Persian Gulf states.

In 1922, even after the end of the First World War, during the epoch of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, the agreements were extended to give the British control over all resources of the Persian Gulf region, and by that point, obviously, “resources” very much meant “oil.” Much of this was under royal charter, under the control of the British East India Company directly, during the 19th century in particular. But as late as April 1st, 1947, the British Foreign Office officially assumed control over the foreign affairs of all of the countries of the Persian Gulf, under a new treaty, in which a power-sharing arrangement was reached, with British security backup, the tribal sheikhs were given control over the internal affairs, and the British controlled foreign policy, they controlled military policy, they controlled the international commerce, meaning the British had actual sovereign control over the oil flows, and basically, the British courts had extraterritorial jurisdiction over all non-resident Muslims. So in other words, any foreigners operating throughout the Persian Gulf were operating under British Crown law and there were British courts that existed in the area to make sure that that was enforced.

By the way, I should say that in the British archives, you can go there and find a series of annual reports covering elements of the British controls, year by year, over this region, one of which was called the “Annual Memorandum of the Cultivation of Opium in Persian.” So you’re dealing with the Opium Wars policy, all along.

Now, in 1971, the British were so confident, with Henry Kissinger as both Secretary of State and soon-to-be National Security Advisor as well under Nixon, that they “nominally, surrendered their absolute, top-down control over the Persian Gulf. And it was short-lived, but nevertheless, they temporarily thought that it was more important to let the Americans foot the bill, since costs of military operations were getting a little bit more expensive.

In 1985, with the establishment of the Al Yamamah deal, they clearly decided that they had to be in on the ground and running things as a result of the relationship between the British and nominally Saudi empires.

Now, things are changing: On April 29th, 2013, the preeminent military think-tank for the British Crown, the Royal United Services Institute [rusi] published a report called, “A Return to East of Suez: U.K. Military Deployments to the Gulf.” I’ll just read you a couple of sentences quote from it. They say, “Just as U.K.’s withdrawal in 1971 created a security vacuum that drew the U.S., somewhat unwillingly, further into the affairs of the Gulf, the U.S.’s cooling of its engagement seems to be drawing the U.K. back in. We seem to be witnessing the slow transformation in the U.K. military postured towards a tentative return at this early stage, to the pre-1971 strategy of rooting Britain’s presence in the southern Gulf through agreements with its traditional allies in Abu Dhabi and Dubai without outlying anchors in Bahrain and Oman, and with close political and economic ties with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that could be upgraded to the military level if necessary.” So, in other words, they’re back. And really, the truth is, they never left.

So, when you look at the implications, from this historical standpoint, of the role that the Saudis are now nakedly playing as the patrons and sponsors, of virtually every form of jihadist Sunni Wahhabi terrorism in the world, and fold in the fact that the other major source, of international terrorism, is the international drug trade run by the British through institutions like HSBC and the follow-on institutions of the old British East India Company’s Opium War policy, then you see very clearly, that what we’re dealing with here, if we go to the heart of what these pages really tell us — let’s not worry about the literal “words”; we already know a great deal about what the literal words tell us, but let’s look at the implications, let’s take the opportunity of getting these 28 pages released, and released in such a way that we guarantee that the truth, the underlying truth, that the real source of 9/11 — yes, it’s Saudi, but explicitly, it’s also British.

Why is the Bush family so desperate to cover up 9/11? And what does the Bush family have in common with President Obama, who remains equally desperate to cover up 9/11? I can assure you this is not about Saudi Arabia. This is not about a bunch of people running around the Persian Gulf, still to this day riding on camels. This is about the British. And the 9/11 events, and the content of the 28 pages, opens up a window into the historical truth.

At the event a week ago Wednesday in Washington, D.C., that Congressman Jones referenced in his brief remarks earlier, Sen. Bob Graham made a number of very clear, unveiled references to the British. I can assure you that he’s aware that this Al Yamamah factor, the British factor in 9/11 is significant. Two years ago, he wrote a novel called Keys to the Kingdom, and of course, in a novel, you’re free to say a lot of things you can’t say if you’ve been privy to classified information; you can give real name, rank, serial number. But he goes through, as the centerpiece of the entire narrative, the Al Yamamah deal and the fact that the Saudis and the British are basically wedded at the hips, and that’s really the nature of the source of international terrorism today.

Now, Prince Bandar, who does not actually have a reputation for being the brightest bulb in the marquee, made the kind of typical mistake of arrogance that you would come to expect from someone who considers himself to be a protected asset of a royal system — by which I don’t mean the Saudi royal family. He’s had on-and-off relations with the Saudis. But Bandar’s a British agent: He was trained at Sandhurst, and if you think about the long wave of British control over Saudi Arabia and the other countries of the Persian Gulf, you realize that there are many, many people who may nominally be Saudi by birth, or Qatari by birth, or Bahraini by birth, but they’re British to the core, and Bandar is absolutely one of them. That’s why he went to Thatcher to establish the Al Yamamah deal in the first place.

So Bandar was leaving the United States; he was a burnout case. And so, he was preparing to go back to Saudi Arabia, and so he commissioned a biography, an official biography written by someone who he went to British Air Force academy with, a kind of a finishing school for training of young Gulf princes who were going to be going back and having some kind of power role in the establishment there. And in this book [The Prince, by William Simpson], he could not resist, but boasting about the real nature of the Al Yamamah deal. And so, he said, and this is a quote from one of the British officials who actually managed the bank accounts through a British office in the Ministry of Defense, called the DESO, the Defense Exports Support Office. They basically wrote the checks for the Al Yamamah and a guy named Edwards was the head of the DESO for a number of years and was interviewed by Prince Bandar’s friend who was the biographer.

And he says: “Edwards admitted that for the Saudis the use of oil meant that the contract was effectively an off-balance- sheet transaction: it did not go through the Saudi Treasury. Edwards also confirmed that one of the main attractions for the Saudis in this unique arrangement was British flexibility.” I don’t think that was a sexual allusion, by the way. [laughter] “‘The British were much more flexible than the Americans,’ he said. ‘The Americans went through the Foreign Military Sales system which has congressional law behind it. If the customers get out of line and they fail to pay the money, then they are cut off. In this country, it was quite flexible;…’ The phenomenal amount of money generated from the sale of oil comes through DESO before being paid to British Aerospace. Edwards admitted that the government does charge a little commission for administering the contract, money that attracted the attention of the treasury, as it built up a considerable surplus…. The ingenious diversity of Al Yamamah, together with the British government’s discretion and liberal approach to a unique finance deal, largely founded on the undisputed collateral of the huge Saudi oil reserves, could explain the financial black holes assumed by a suspicious media, to be evidence of commissions.”

But [author] Simpson explained, “Although Al Yamamah constitutes a highly unconventional way of doing business, its lucrative spinoffs are the by-products of a wholly political objective: a Saudi political objective and a British political objective. Al Yamamah is, first and foremost, a political contract. Negotiated as the height of the Cold War, its unique structure has enabled the Saudis to purchase weapons from around the globe to fund the fight against Communism. Al Yamamah money can be found in the clandestine purchase of Russian ordnance used in the expulsion of Qaddafi’s troops from Chad.” And here’s the key admission: “It can also be traced to arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviet occupying forces.” In other words, the antecedents and then the existence of al-Qaeda was being financed through this fund. “Arguably,” Simpson admitted, “its consummate flexibility is needed because of inevitable opposition to Saudi arms purchases in Congress…. The oil barter arrangement, circumvented such bureaucracy.”

So this is the kind of thing that exists when you are an empire, and you can make your own laws as you go along and you happen to control every offshore financial in the world. You can use them to run these operations, and, if you shut down that apparatus, then you dry up international terrorism in short order. The idea of approaching this from the bottom up, by hunting through caves in Afghanistan or desert outposts in Yemen or Somalia is not the way to go, when this is a policy of empire. And if we can break the myth that there is in fact a Saudi Arabia or a Qatar, or a U.A.E., or a Kuwait, as real sovereign entities, as opposed to subsidiary fictions of the British Empire, then we’ll already be a very long way towards defeating terrorism.

And by the way, this is what Bush and Obama are terrified of more than anything. What they’re afraid of, is that their existence as creatures of the British Empire, poisoning the United States, is going to be exposed.

Now, I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not when it comes to major historic turning points, and so, I have a sinking suspicion, that there’s some correlation between the press conference by Senator Graham and Congressmen Lynch and Jones and the 9/11 families on January 7th, and the fact that earlier this week, the Republican Party in their retreat, their “chocolate kiss” retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, had as their keynote speaker, Tony Blair. And the same day, President Obama at the White House was entertaining British Prime Minister David Cameron. So I think this is the Bush/Obama concept of “bipartisanship.” [laughter] The British New Labour go to brief the Republicans, and the British Tories go to dictate to President Obama what to do.

Now, I am sure, that Blair, who shut down the Al Yamamah investigation as Prime Minister, because it threatened vital British national security interests, — and indeed it did — was there with the Republicans, telling them, “You better shut these guys up. You better make sure that this Senator Graham, Walter Jones, et al. thing gets quashed now, and it doesn’t see the light of day, because all of our necks are on the line.”

So I think that sort of brings me to an obvious conclusion: Everybody here in this room, as Representative Jones urged all of you, has a special responsibility to make sure that these 28 pages see the light of day, and they see the light of very soon, before we wind up staring down the barrel of Russian nuclear weapons, or American nuclear armed submarines launching on Russia. This is the legacy of Ground Zero. If you want closure on Ground Zero, which is hallowed ground in this country, then let’s get these 28 pages released, and let’s be the voice that explains to the American people, and the world, what these pages actually reveal. It’s not just the fact that Prince Bandar received money through the Bank of England into his account, and dutifully wrote checks to the 9/11 hijackers, which is exactly what happened. But that’s merely a small episode in something that’s much bigger and that we’ve got to make sure that the world clearly understands.

If we can accomplish that, in the days and weeks and months ahead, then what Helga called for, about the United States becoming an active participant in the BRICS process, in the new paradigm of relations in the world, can be realized. So there’s no gap whatsoever, between the fight for the 28 pages, and the fight to restore the United States to its Hamiltonian tradition, which means wiping out the power of Wall Street and London over the U.S. And this is the decisive flank, to make that happen.

Thank you.