Saudi Arabia and the redacted pages from the 9/11 report

Criminals become embolden when they escape their just punishment and that's what has happened in the case of Saudi Arabia.  The Bush family and the other political elite of the USA, including the Clintons, knowingly sheilded Saudi Arabia's involvement in the 9/11 attacks.  The involvement was not just a matter of "some individual Saudi billionaires" backing and funding the terrorists  as the politicians in the USA, but only when they were cornered,  have led Americans think it was.

Good analysis below.  I have taken only a few salient paragraphs from the three-part article.  Worth accessing the link and reading it in its entirety.

Melkulangara Bhadrakumar, former career diplomat from India,  writing at StrategicCulture Dec 24:
....There is a hint of an American  warning appearing on the horizon to the House of Saud that discretion is the better part of valor and the latter is in no position to threaten the White House. The Saudi regime couldn’t have missed this subtle message but how it assimilates it will bear watch. ....
.....Not only was such a thing impossible during the George W. Bush presidency (because the president’s family for three generations had kept close ties with the House of Saud), but such rhetoric has never been the Saudi style. Riyadh always preferred to operate in the subsoil away from prying eyes when it came to the all-important relations with Washington. ....

....Most certainly, gone are the days when Washington spoke of «all options» being on the table on Iran or of the bottom line in Syria being Bashar’s exit from power. This has sunk in well in Riyadh as well as the realization that the Saudi lobby’s robust campaigning in Washington and even the implicit threat that Saudi Arabia would cozy up to other big powers as counterweight to the US have failed to impress the Obama administration. Put differently, Saudis are coming up against an altogether new experience, namely, that they no longer wield a veto power over the conduct of the US’ Middle Eastern policies that are henceforth to be riveted on the pursuit of American geostrategic interests as part of Washington’s global strategies. For a regime that placed full faith on the power of money to command and dictate and to navigate the way through the corridors of power in Washington, this is a paradigm shift. And it is not going down well in Riyadh.....

.....For long, there has been speculation that the 28 pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry [JICI] report of 2002 portray that the Saudi government had at the very least an indirect role in supporting the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attack.
In fact, former Senator Bob Graham, who chaired the JICI is himself on record that he is convinced that «the Saudi government without question was supporting the hijackers who lived in San Diego». Now, all this is no longer a matter of intellectual curiosity or the stuff of idle gossip on the part of the US Congressmen and the American public and the media – and, perhaps, even the judiciary…



....By a strange coincidence, last week the US Appeals Court upheld the right of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to pursue their suit filed in 2003 to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on grounds that it provided significant support to the al-Qaeda in advance of the terrorist attack. Essentially, the ruling is to the effect that placing Saudi Arabia as a defendant in the suit is necessary.
Indeed, lawyers in the 9/11 lawsuit have often cited the JICI report to claim Saudi Arabia was the primary source of the al-Qaeda funding, but the counter-argument by the lawyers representing the House of Saud has been that the available JICI report showed no evidence of either the Saudi government or Saudi officials individually having funded al-Qaeda. ....



.......To be sure, the lawsuit, if it succeeds, could mean the Saudi government and members of the royal family serving on charities that financed al-Qaeda operations paying compensation to the tune of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Once the legal juggernaut starts moving, which is shortly, it is anybody’s guess where it could end up.

What makes the whole matter highly explosive is that the Saudi ambassador to the US at the time of the 9/11 attack was none other than Bandar bin Sultan, presently Riyadh’s spy chief. Furthermore, Bandar is also alleged to have personally prevailed upon Bush Jr. to grant special permission by the White House (at a time when all air traffic was grounded all over the US) to whisk out of the US post-haste in a chartered plane from Kentucky a group of 144 persons, including several members of the bin Laden family, so that they wouldn’t be prescreened, interviewed or in any manner debriefed on the 9/11 attack. After the flight, FBI officials have been cited as ruing that these people who were whisked out of the US by Bandar (thanks to Bush’s personal intervention) were «people of interest». ....

....Besides, it is not only the Syria front where Bandar has been involved. Bandar was also the Saudi point person who piloted the military coup in Egypt. In fact, none of the theatres where Bandar’s footprint is discernible – Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria – things are going well for Saudi Arabia and all are interconnected.
Egypt is likely to turn out to be an Albatross on the Saudi neck. The Saudi expectation was that the country would be pacified in no time but the ferment continues and there is no end in sight. The latest development is that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is by far the best organized and the most popular political platform in Egypt, has been declared a «terrorist» organization. «Inclusive» democracy and stability and economic recovery in Egypt seems a chimera for a generation.
Yet, Saudi Arabia is bankrolling that bankrupt and paralyzed state. How long can this continue? .........

.....The fact of the matter is that Israel and Saudi Arabia operate at vastly different levels in Washington. Israel’s connections in the US are profound and they encompass the political, cultural and religious templates of American society, whereas Saudi Lobby operates on a superficial level. At the core of the difference lies the ground reality that Israel has the capacity to act autonomously to safeguard its security interests and even if it may at times put strains on the atmospherics of the ties with the White House, that would remain a transient feature and the overall relationship recovers without any serious damage. The House of Saud, on the other hand, relies completely on US...........