I just came across this while browsing Wikipedia the other day. It may be old news (well, it is), but it’s the first interesting thing I’ve read about 9/11 in a long time.
Bandar bin Sultan, member of the Saudi royal family and former ambassador to the United States, is so close to the Bush family that he earned the nickname “Bandar Bush.” His wife, apparently, has credible ties to the 9/11 plot.
That sounds too close for comfort to me. My wife and I share absolutely everything.
I wonder if there’s something very obvious that I’m missing here, since after years of reading and discussing conspiracy theories and their debunking, I have never once heard this mentioned by either side.
Do you know for a fact that Obama ISN’T buddies with this guy? They’re the same religion, and Obama is always looking to blame his problems on W., so I think this is part of a secret Muslim brothers plan to make W. look bad.
Not long after 911 the media kept reporting about how Saudi Arabia isn’t as good a friend as we thought; it mentioned letters and memos implicating royal members giving money to terrorist organizations. Most of the hijackers were Saudi’s. Wahhabism came from there.
Yet each time a report would come out putting Saudi Arabia in a bad light, Bush would always just shrug it off and say everything is fine; Saudi Arabia is a good friend and ally, and just ignore reports that say anything to the contrary.
But I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. As long as we depend on foreign oil and need to maintain bases in the Middle East, we’ll pretty much look the other way regardless of what they do.
You mean the 911 commission that included the likes of Bush and Blackwater lawyer Fred Fielding, and John Lehman who was involved with PNAC? Or how about Lee H. Hamilton, who refused to investigate Reagan or Bush Sr. during Iran-Contra.
I’m sure these guys really wanted to get the truth.
I’m sure there is a definition of conspiracy that suits your preference but, what I know of real court cases, if a person in position of authority looks the other way, said person becomes accused in a conspiracy to commit criminal act.
To me, a conspiracy means being in on something. It’s kind of like a mobster’s wife who is purposely ignorant of her husband’s business. She pretty much knows what he does, but she doesn’t ask any questions and doesn’t participate in any gangster activities.
I must admit, Nobody: I thought the exact same thing as newcomer when I read post #10.
Though I don’t know why it would say that, because Omar al-Bayoumi is quite clearly, demonstrably, a link between Bandar’s wife and the hijackers. And Bandar’s wife is quite clearly linked to Bandar, and Bandar is so closely linked to our then-President George W. Bush that he is widely known to go by the same surname. These aren’t tenuous links.
Don’t read his post so literally. The report actually states that there was “no evidence that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the conspiracy, either directly or indirectly,” and does not make any reference to “links”. Which is good, because links can be found between damn near anything if you’re willing to pursue something far enough (as often shown by Glenn Beck).
In any case, is there any evidence that Princess Haifa even knew of the existence of al-Bayoumi? All we have are some checks drawn from her account for a Saudi woman living in the US as part of what seems to be a common act of Islamic charity by the Saudi royal family. There’s nothing suggesting that she had ever even met that woman. At the worst, she gave money to someone (Dweikat) who gave some of the money to someone else (Bajadr) who gave money to someone else (Basnan) who gave money to someone else (al-Bayoumi) who likely gave money to the hijackers. This might be worth following if we were talking about real money, but at the most we’re talking about $73,000 (most likely less, since Dweikat apparently did have the medical procedure that sparked all this in the first place.) This, from someone who has a fortune and would, without a doubt, have more efficient ways of funneling real money to terrorists if she wanted to do so.
That’s going by the Wikipedia article, which isn’t particularly good (the introduction’s “a sequence of payments allegedly made to a Saudi national by the name of Omar al-Bayoumi” makes it seem as if she was paying al-Bayoumi directly) and appears to be based a dead link and a Fox News article. The Fox News article in turn is based on Newsweek reporting by Michael Isikoff, who broke the story. The most recent article by Isikoff (from 12/02) on the issue noted that “No evidence has surfaced tying the royal couple to the September 11 hijackers. Some investigators suspect that the two may actually have been scammed.”
(BTW, from what I can tell through on-line searches, the only people who use the nickname “Bandar Bush” outside of the Bush family are liberal pundits, bloggers, and conspiracy theorists.)
The British are having a 911 inquiry right now and they say Bush and Blair wanted the war and exaggerated the intelligence to get it. They also ignored intelligence that suggested Al Qeada would be helped by the war. Most of us knew that anyway.