A Saudi Palace Coup | David Hearst
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By AYA BATRAWY and LEE KEATH, Associated Press
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — With the death of King Abdullah, the throne of Saudi Arabia passed to another son of the country's founder as it has relatively smoothly for the past six decades. But it brings the oil-rich kingdom one step closer to a question that will test the unity of its royal family: Who in the next generation will reign?
Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who united tribes and founded the kingdom that bears his name, had dozens of sons — possibly more than 50 — from multiple wives. Power has passed among them, from brother to brother, since his death in 1953.
Crown Prince Salman, Abdullah's half-brother, is now king.
But ranks of that generation, largely in their 70s and 80s, are thinning. Soon, the throne must go to the son of one those sons, potentially putting succession and power in the hands of one branch of the family at the expense of the others.
The health of Salman, 79, is uncertain. He suffered at least one stroke that has left him with limited movement on his left arm.
Some of the grandsons are clearly jockeying to be in the running, installed in prominent positions by their fathers in preparation.
Traditionally, the Al Saud unite to conceal any divisions over succession and protect the stability of their rule. But previous transitions have not had the all-or-nothing potential of the generational change.
Abdullah sought to ensure the transition goes without intra-family rivalries by formalizing the Allegiance Council, a body made up of the living sons of Abdul-Aziz and some of the prominent grandsons who vote to pick the king and crown prince.
That legacy could be tested sooner than expected.
Abdullah took the unusual step of setting a second-in-line to the throne: Prince Muqrin. Notably, Muqrin's nomination as deputy crown prince was approved by the Allegiance Council — the first time it voted on a succession issue, setting a precedent for its authority. He won with a three-quarters majority.
Muqrin was named crown prince in the same royal court statement that announced Salman as king. Muqrin, who once oversaw the kingdom's intelligence agency, is the youngest of Abdul-Aziz's sons. Still, he is 69.
In theory, Salman — now that he's king — could try down the line to push the Allegiance Council to name a new crown prince instead of Muqrin, but any such attempt could stir up too ugly a family dispute. Another possibility is that he will turn to the council to select a new deputy crown prince after Muqrin.
In any case, the question of the generational shift in succession will jump to the fore.
Two in the next generation are seen as front-runners. One is Miteb, the son of Abdullah, who holds the powerful post of commander of the National Guard, effectively the king's personal force. Abdullah, who had more than 30 children, seeded other sons into significant positions. One is governor of Riyadh, the kingdom's capital, while another is governor of Mecca, home to Islam's holiest shrine.
The other likely contender is Interior Minister Prince Mohammed, the son of Abdullah's half-brother Nayef. Nayef was a powerhouse in Saudi Arabia for years, holding the Interior Ministry post and leading security forces in the fight against Islamic militants. Nayef was elevated to crown prince under Abdullah but died in 2012. Mohammed later became interior minister himself.
Others may be possibilities. Prince Faisal, the son of Salman, is governor of Medina, one of Islam's holiest sites. Another son of Salman, Prince Mohammed, is believed to be the closest to his father and head of his royal court, though being only in his 30s could keep him out of the immediate running.
Another grandson, Prince Khaled bin Bandar, served as deputy defense minister briefly and was the first of his generation to be governor of Riyadh. He is now head of intelligence.
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Zainal Abd Halim/Reuters
President George W. Bush held his hand and walked with him through a field of flowers at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. President Barack Obama, when he first met him, performed a courtly bow.
For Saudi Arabia’s aged King Abdullah, whose death was announced in Riyadh early Friday morning, physical gestures of friendship and respect were important, so even American presidents indulged him. He was one of the most powerful men in the world, after all, and he was also one of the easiest to understand.
A former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh described Abdullah as “in many ways a throwback to that desert warrior ethos where men stand by their word, they look each other straight in the eye, they are direct, and they apply a code of honor.”
Abdullah’s daughter, Princess Adelah, once told me, “My father doesn’t have two parallel identities. What you see as a monarch and a ruler is what you see as a father. He is very straightforward, very honest, he hates injustice, and he likes truth.”
But Abdullah was doomed to disappointment. The ambassador remembers that when they were together the king would ask rhetorically, “Where are the men of honor left in the Middle East?” And the answer, clearly, was “none are to be found.”
In recent years Abdullah’s traditional values and attitudes became a source of huge frustration for him. People close to the ninety-something king say events seemed to overwhelm him, baffle him, infuriate him. He believed he had made a peace offer to Israel that it could not refuse, and yet it had. He could not accept the news that those who carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the “miscreants” as he called them, were sons of Saudi Arabia. But they were. He had wanted to bring stability to the Middle East, and all he saw was growing chaos.
With his own powers waning (he was said to sleep most of the day) he entrusted some very sensitive issues to that most Machiavellian of Saudi princes, Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to Washington who, before he finally was dismissed as intelligence chief last year, achieved results exactly opposite of those intended: Syria fractured amid unconscionable slaughter; the so-called Islamic State grew; Iraq became a Shiite-dominated country on Saudi Arabia’s northern border; and now Yemen, the kingdom’s poor but strategically vital neighbor, is falling apart on the southern frontier.
That Abdullah was as successful a leader as he proved to be is, in retrospect, surprising.
Abdullah gave Bandar two important briefs. One was to stop the advance of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region after the Arab Spring. The organization, originally modeled on the communist and fascist parties of the 1920s, promises a sort of theocratic democracy undermining traditional monarchies, and the House of Saud has come to see it as a direct threat. So the Saudis were instrumental in supporting Egypt’s Gen. Abdel Fattouh al-Sisi when he overthrew the Brotherhood’s elected government in Cairo in 2013 and then moved to crush the whole organization. But Egypt, now, is in terrible economic condition, and even the Saudi government is said to be tired of writing checks to keep it afloat.
The other major goal for Bandar was to stop the advancing influence and presence of Iran in the region. Riyadh sent troops into little Bahrain to suppress Shiite-led protest there. But every other point of confrontation was a disaster. Most recently the Houthis in Yemen, allegedly with Iranian support, have overthrown the Saudi-backed government there.
In Syria, because Abdullah would not support the traditional Muslim Brotherhood-led opposition, and vehemently opposed the Iran-allied Assad government, his agents found themselves groping for other groups to carry out a revolution. In the process the Saudis provided support directly or indirectly to fighters that eventually aligned with al Qaeda or, worse still, the newly established “Islamic State” widely known as ISIS or ISIL.
In Iraq, the more pressure Saudi-backed Sunnis put on the Shiite government in Baghdad, the more it leaned on Tehran for support. The polarization that developed also helped open the way for the growth of ISIS on that side of the frontier. And the head of ISIS, having declared himself “caliph,” the leader of all the world’s Muslims, must soon turn his attention toward the Saudi city of Mecca, which is the most holy site in Islam.
When the Obama administration started negotiating seriously with Iran over its nuclear program, with the possibility that at the end of that process there would be a normalization of relations, King Abdullah was said to be furious. Not only was he worried that Washington would let Tehran retain a capacity to make nuclear weapons on short notice (a concern Abdullah shared with Israel), he was concerned that Iran would become, somehow, America’s new best friend in the region, much as it was when the shah was in power in the 1970s.
It will be difficult if not impossible for Abdullah’s chosen successor, 79-year-old King Salman, to pick up all these friable pieces of policy. If the contagion of chaos spreads into Saudi Arabia itself, which might easily happen, the effects will be felt dramatically around the world. The kingdom, as former CIA operative Robert Baer likes to explain, “is the fulcrum that the global economy teeters on.”
To make sense of the critical American relationship with the Saudis, the heritage of Abdullah and the future under Salman, the first thing to understand is that the ties are built entirely on the basic principle of realpolitik, which puts shared interests above all else. Those are the supply of oil, the money it generates, and the stability in the region that allows the oil and money to keep flowing.
For a long time the arithmetic of the realpolitik was simple: Saudi Arabia had about 25 percent of the world’s proven oil supply and the United States accounted for about 25 percent of global demand. The Saudis had so much oil that was so accessible, in fact, that by turning some of their taps on or off they could effectively determine price on the world market, and that is what gave them such enormous power. Politicians in the United States would rail against “importation of foreign oil.” But it didn’t matter where it came from, the Saudis more or less determined what it cost.
Although many in the West still remember the Saudis as leaders of the devastating OPEC oil embargos in the 1970s, for most of the last 30 years they have used their ability to keep the market relatively stable. And several times as crown prince and king, Abdullah used that Saudi power to help out the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, huge jumps in the oil price might have been expected. That didn’t happen. The Saudis increased shipments and production to keep the market on an even keel.
In the middle of the last decade, the enormous oil demand from booming Asian economies exceeded the ability of the global market, even the Saudis, to keep up. The resulting vertiginous surge in prices from the $20 a barrel range in 2001 to $100-plus in 2008, contributed to the global economic crisis that erupted that year. But by then Abdullah was investing more than $50 billion to increase Saudi Arabia’s ability to up the flow whenever it wants.
Today, Saudi Arabia controls 85 percent of global spare production capacity. And its decision to keep the pumps open at a time when the United States has also vastly increased production through fracking is what has caused a 50 percent drop in the price of oil over the last few months. Oil producing countries that have big populations and weak economies—Russia, Venezuela, and Iran—are in dire straits as a result, which suits U.S. policy goals as well. (The Saudis have $900 billion in foreign reserves, so they are positioned to weather low oil prices for quite some time to come.)
The American side of the bargain with Saudi Arabia was always to offer it a military defense against its enemies, as the United States did in 1990 when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait. And, at least until recently, Riyadh was comfortable in the belief that Washington would protect it from Iran. In the meantime American weapons manufacturers racked up countless billion-dollar contracts.
But apart from the oil-defense nexus, there really is no tie that binds. Forget democracy. Forget human rights. Forget freedom of expression. Forget women’s rights. Those all are laudable objectives, but if, as the Saudi elite seems to believe, they can be used directly or indirectly to challenge the regime, then they are luxuries too costly even for the richest monarchs on earth.
Abdullah’s predecessor, King Fahd, once warned a protégé he was sending to work with the Americans, “We have no cultural connection with them… no ethnic connection to them… no religious connection… no language connection… no political connection.” And anyone arguing today that Western-style freedoms will bring long-term stability and prosperity to the Arabian Peninsula will have to explain why the grim fate of those countries that experienced the “Arab Spring” wouldn’t befall the Saudis if they went in that direction.
Inside his country, Abdullah did try to carry out some significant reforms, but he also believed progress had to be slow, and even as an absolute monarch he found he was up against immovable Saudi bureaucracy and tradition. “We have a lot of decrees that are not executed,” his daughter told me during a push for reforms in women’s education. “But the executives of these institutions and the ministers don’t believe in these decrees, so they put them in drawers.”
Under Salman, none of that is likely to change.
That Abdullah was as successful a leader as he proved to be is, in retrospect, surprising. He was born into the crumbling palaces of desert tribes in 1923 (the precise date was not recorded). When he was a boy, his father, Abdelaziz ibn Saud, had not yet finished his desert conquests or founded the nation-state that bears the family name.
As Abdullah grew up, the Saudis’ rule was threatened by the same intolerant fanaticism of their allies’ atavistic Wahhabi “Brotherhood” that had helped bring them to power. The kingdom was threatened constantly by war and rebellion. As an adult, Abdullah saw the burgeoning of phenomenal oil wealth and the corrosive effects of spectacular greed—and more fanaticism, more insurrection—including the bloody siege of the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
It was after that bloody battle that Abdullah’s predecessors started trying to export not only their radical faith, but their radicals, to fight in a holy war against the godless Soviet communists in Afghanistan. From that effort grew the nucleus of the organization that came to be called al Qaeda, while Wahhabi-funded imams and schools indoctrinated young men the world over.
After then-Crown Prince Abdullah heard of the attacks on the United States in 2001, a visitor to the palace found him at prayer. “I am sure our good people did not do these things,” Abdullah said when he had finished, and it took him some time to accept what had happened. It was not until al Qaeda carried out a series of bombings in Saudi Arabia in 2003 that Abdullah turned the full force of his security apparatus against the organization and its sympathizers.
In 2002, Abdullah had tried to set a new course for Saudi and Arab diplomacy, with a plan that offered Israel peace with every nation in the Arab world if it would return to its 1967 borders, accept East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and work out an arrangement to allow the descendants of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homeland or receive compensation. The Israelis found the plan unacceptable.
At the same time, Abdullah had to watch intrigues in his own family. His father, Abdelaziz ibn Saud, had left more than 40 recognized sons by several women. When Abdelaziz died in 1953, the succession passed to his son Saud, who was deposed in 1964 by his half brother Faisal, who was murdered years later by a nephew. The crown has never yet passed to the next generation, and will not do so now.
In the 1980s, King Fahd and his brothers Sultan, Nayef, and Salman—all sons of the same mother, Hassa bin Ahmed al Sudairi—looked as if they would establish a dynasty within the dynasty. But by then Abdullah, his mother’s only child, was well established as the head of the powerful, and heavily tribal, Saudi National Guard. His power base could not be ignored.
When Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995, Abdullah became the de facto ruler and when Fahd died in 2005, Abdullah succeeded to the throne. But the Sudairi brothers were positioned to follow him: Sultan as defense minister, Nayef as interior minister, Salman as mayor of Riyadh. Then Sultan died in 2011 and Nayef died in 2012.
For the moment, Salman’s designated successor is his half brother Prince Muqrin who, at 69, is the youngest of the surviving sons of Abdelaziz. We can all speculate about when and how the crown might be passed to the next generation of royals. But, for now, it looks as if the monarchy will endure, at least for a few more years. And, for better or worse, given so many uncertainties in such a strategic part of the world, the United States had better hope that it does.
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Saudi Arabia's new Crown Prince Muqrin represents the biggest break from the kingdom's tradition of any of his predecessors in the role - both because of his lowly maternal birth and his foreign education.
Seen as a relative progressive in the ruling family, with a grasp on the need for long-term reform, Muqrin has also voiced traditional hawkish views on Iran, but it is far from clear how much influence he will have during Salman's reign.
The affable former fighter pilot, long a member of the ruling family's top circle of strategic decision makers and intelligence chief from 2005-12, appears on paper to have the stolid qualifications required by his family to rule.
But the 69-year-old heir to King Salman will be the first Saudi monarch born after the birthplace of Islam struck oil in 1939, and the first to attend a Western university instead of the home classes run by clerics in Riyadh's old mud palace.
And, as the son of King Abdulaziz by a Yemeni woman instead of a wife of high tribal birth, he has no full siblings in the ruling dynasty and has often been seen as something of an outsider, condescended to by haughtier relatives.
"Muqrin is not as conservative (as Salman), but we will see how much of a role he will play in the new reign. According to Saudi law, the crown prince cannot do more than what he is assigned by the king," said Khalid al-Dakheel, a political science professor in Riyadh.
When he was appointed deputy crown prince by Abdullah a year ago, Muqrin promised in a statement carried by state media to continue the late king's economic and social reforms.
"He gives you an impression of a progressive guy who knows the world very well. When he was governor ofMedina he made reforms and he is into culture and music," said Jamal Khashoggi, head of a television news channel owned by another prince.
"He's bilingual and an avid reader of The Economist. It's his favourite magazine," he added.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a member of the Saudi ruling family, which sees itself as locked in a region-wide struggle with Tehran for control of the Middle East, he is seen as hawkish on Shi'ite Iran.
A 2008 US diplomatic cable from the Riyadh embassy, released by WikiLeaks, cited him as being in favour of much stronger sanctions against Iran. In another cable from the following year, he was quoted by diplomats as warning that the Shi'ite crescent was "becoming a full moon".
The youngest son of Saudi Arabia's founder, the prince is a genial former airforce captain, diplomats say, and is a close friend of his nephew Prince Bandar, another former spy chief, with whom he served in the military.
A 2009 US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks described Muqrin as having the confidence of the king, who had "given him the lead on Saudi efforts to resolve conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan" and sent him to build ties with Syria.
Prince Muqrin trained as a military pilot at Cranwell, a British Royal Air Force base, and is described by diplomats as outgoing and gregarious. He served for nearly 20 years as governor of Hail province before being promoted to the post of governor of Medina province in 1999.
He served as intelligence chief from 2005 to 2012, a challenging period when the kingdom put down a determined insurgency by al Qaeda militants and sought to stave off instability from neighbouring Iraq, where Islamist armed groups were fighting US occupation.
He is an accomplished musician who plays the lute and takes an interest in astronomy, Saudis say. A Saudi journalist, Fahed Amer al-Ahmadi, told Al Arabiya television last year the prince spoke several languages and was very "open minded".
Some Saudis close to the family say it was Muqrin who brought Bandar back into the top echelons of the administration after years when Bandar disappeared from public life.
The 2009 US cable noted Muqrin appeared to have been heavily involved in Saudi dealings with Yemen, and "likely has personal as well as professional reasons for being so" a reference to his Yemeni heritage.
If that remains the case, his ties to the country could play a role in developing the Saudi response to Yemen's growing chaos after the Iranian-backed Houthi movement all but seized power there this week.
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King Abdullah's writ lasted all of 12 hours. Within that period the Sudairis, a rich and politically powerful clan within the House of Saud, which had been weakened by the late king, burst back into prominence. They produced a palace coup in all but name.
Salman moved swiftly to undo the work of his half-brother. He decided not to change his crown prince Megren, who was picked by King Abdullah for him, but he may choose to deal with him later. However, he swiftly appointed another leading figure from the Sudairi clan. Mohammed Bin Nayef, the interior minister is to be his deputy crown prince. It is no secret that Abdullah wanted his son Meteb for that position, but now he is out.
More significantly, Salman, himself a Sudairi, attempted to secure the second generation by giving his 35- year old son Mohammed the powerful fiefdom of the defense ministry. The second post Mohammed got was arguably more important. He is now general secretary of the Royal Court. All these changes were announced before Abdullah was even buried.
The general secretaryship was the position held by the Cardinal Richelieu of Abdullah's royal court, Khalid al-Tuwaijri. It was a lucrative business handed down from father to son and started by Abdul Aziz al Tuwaijri. The Tuwaijris became the king's gatekeepers and no royal audience could be held without their permission, involvement, or knowledge. Tuwaijri was the key player in foreign intrigues -- to subvert the Egyptian revolution, to send in the troops to crush the uprising in Bahrain, to finance ISIL in Syria in the early stages of the civil war along his previous ally Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
The link between Tuwaijri and the Gulf region's fellow neo-con Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, was close. Tuwaijri is now out, and his long list of foreign clients, starting with the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi may well feel a cooler wind blowing from Riyadh. Sisi failed to attend the funeral on Friday. Just a question of bad weather?
Salman's state of health is cause for concern, which is why the power he has given his son is more significant than other appointments announced. Aged 79, Salman is known to have Alzheimers, but the exact state of his dementia is a source of speculation. He is known to have held cogent conversations as recently as last October. But he can also forget what he said minutes ago, or faces he has known all his life, according to other witnesses. This is typical of the disease. I understand the number of hospital visits in the last few months has increased, and that he did not walk around, as he did before.
So his ability to steer the ship of state, in a centralized country where no institutions, political parties or even national politics exist, is open to question. But one indication of a change of direction may lie in two attempts recently to establish links with Egyptian opposition figures.
I am told that senior advisers to Salman approached an Egyptian liberal opposition politician and had a separate meeting with a lawyer. Neither of them are members of the Muslim Brotherhood but have working contacts with it. Talks were held in Saudi Arabia in the last two months about how reconciliation could be managed. No initiative was agreed, but the talks themselves were an indication of a more pragmatic, or less belligerent, approach by Salman and his advisers. It was understood that these meetings were preparatory to a possible initiative Salman may announce once he was in power.
The policy of the late King was to declare the Brotherhood terrorist organization on a par with the Islamic State and al Qaeda.
Even before the Sudairis made their move, a power struggle within the House of Saud was apparent. Early on Thursday evening, rumors on Twitter that the king was dead flooded the Internet, which is the primary source of political information in the kingdom. There were official denials, when a Saudi journalist on al Watan newspaper tweeted the information.
The palace's hand was forced when two emirs tweeted that the king was dead. MBC TV network cut broadcasting and put the Koran on screen, a sign of mourning, while national television kept on with normal programming. This was a sign that one clan in the royal family wanted the news out quickly and the other clan was stalling for more negotiations.
The need for a change of course is all too apparent. On the very night in which the royal drama was taking place, a political earthquake was underway in Saudi Arabia's backyard, Yemen. President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, his prime minister and government resigned after days of virtual house arrest by Houthi militia. Hadi's resignation leaves two forces in control of the country both of them armed to the teeth: an Iranian backed militia which gets its training from Hezbollah, and al Qaeda, posing as the defender of Sunni muslims.
It is a disaster for Saudi Arabia and what is left of the ability of the Gulf Cooperation Council to make any deal stick. Their foreign ministers met only the day before. Yemen's former strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was levered out of power three years ago and who according to leaked telephone calls, advised the Houthis on how to grab power, is now calling for fresh elections, and there were already calls on Thursday night for the south to split away from the North. Yemen, in other words, has officially become the Middle East's fourth failed state.
The meteoric rise of the Houthis in Yemen was not the result of spontaneous combustion. It was planned and plotted months ago by Saleh and the United Arab Emirates. Saleh's son, the Yemeni ambassador to the UAE, was a key figure in this foreign intrigue, and as I reported before, he met an Iranian delegation in Rome. This was picked by US intelligence and communicated to Hadi. The year before, the then Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar flew a leading member of the Houthi delegation via London for a meeting. Incredible as it seemed, the Saudis were re-opening contact with an Iranian backed Zaydi or Shia sect with whom they had once fought bitter wars.
The Saudi/Emirati plan was to use the Houthis to engage and destroy their real target, which was Islah, the Islamist party and chief representative of the Sunni tribes in Yemen. As elsewhere in the Arab world, the entire focus of Abdullah foreign policy after 2011, was to stop the Arab spring in its tracks in Tunisia and Egypt and crush all forces capable of mounting an effective opposition in the Gulf States. Everything else, including the rise of Saudi's foremost regional rival Iran, became subservient to that paramount aim to crush democratic political Islam.
The Yemen plan backfired when Islah refused to take up arms to resist the Houthi advance. As a result, the Houthis took more control than they were expected to, and the result is that Yemen stands on the brink of civil war. Al Qaeda's claim to be the only fighters prepared to defend Sunni tribesmen, has just been given a major boost.
It is too early to tell whether King Salman is capable of, or even is aware of the need for changing course. All one can say with any confidence is that some of the key figures who stage-managed the Kingdom's disastrous foreign intrigues are now out. Meteb's influence is limited, while Tuwaijiri is out.
It is in no-one's interests for chaos to spread into the Kingdom itself. Maybe it is just coincidence that Abdullah died almost on the eve of the anniversary of the January 25 revolution in Egypt. But the timing of his death is a symbol. The royal family should learn that the mood of change, that started on January 25 is unstoppable. The best defense against revolution is to lead genuine tangible political reform within the Kingdom. Allow it to modernize, to build national politics, political parties, real competitive elections, to let Saudis take a greater share of power, to free political prisoners.
There are two theories about the slow train crash which the Middle East has become. One is that dictatorship, autocracy, and occupation are the bulwarks against the swirling chaos of civil war and population displacement. The other is that dictators are the cause of instability and extremism.
Abdullah was evidence in chief for the second theory. His reign left Saudi Arabia weaker internally and surrounded by enemies as never before. Can Salman make a difference ? It's a big task, but there may be people around him who see the need for a fundamental change in course. It will be the only way a Saudi King will get the backing of his people. He may in the process turn himself into a figurehead, a constitutional monarch, but he will generate stability in the kingdom and the region.
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This 2007 file photo shows construction at the World Trade Center site in New York. (AP)
Congressional lawmakers on Wednesday ramped up efforts to get President Obama to release 28 top-secret pages from a 9/11 report that allegedly detail Saudi Arabia's involvement in the terror attacks.
Lawmakers and advocacy groups have pushed for the declassification for years. The effort already had bipartisan House support but now has the backing of retired Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman whom supporters hope will help garner enough congressional backing to pressure Obama into releasing the confidential information.
“The American people have been denied enough,” North Carolina GOP Rep. Walter Jones said on Capitol Hill. “It’s time for the truth to come out.”
Jones has led the effort with Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch, among the few members of Congress who have read the 28 redacted pages of the joint House and Senate “Inquiry into Intelligence Activities Before and After the Terror Attacks,” initially classified by President George W. Bush. They introduced a new resolution on Wednesday urging Obama to declassify the pages.
Jones and other lawmakers have described the documents' contents as shocking.
That 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens is already known. But Graham and the congressmen suggested the documents point to Saudi government ties and repeatedly said Wednesday that the U.S. continues to deny the truth about who principally financed the attacks -- covering up for Saudi Arabia, a wealthy Middle East ally.
'The Saudis know what they did'- Former Sen. Bob Graham
“The Saudis know what they did. We know what they did,” said Graham, who for more than a decade has pushed to get to the bottom of the attacks. He made clear he was referring to "the Kingdom," and not just Saudi operatives inside the country.
He argued that failing to disclose the truth will spur Saudi Arabia’s continued or “accelerated … financial support for institutions carrying out extreme forces of Islam.” Graham argued Saudi Arabia has been a hotbed for such extremist groups as Al Qaeda, al-Shabaab and now the Islamic State.
Lynch called Jones “relentless” in his efforts to publicize the pages and reveal the truth about Saudi Arabia’s connection to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including who financed the terrorists who hijacked and brought down four passenger jets, killing nearly 3,000 people on U.S. soil.
“We're going to keep pushing,” Lynch said. “The release of this report will influence national security and foreign policy.”
When pressed by reporters, the lawmakers said they couldn’t and wouldn’t reveal the exact contents of the pages, as it remains classified. But they said the release of the information has the potential to change foreign policy and national security while posing no risk to U.S. intelligence agents or methods -- and Obama should make the details public.
Saudi officials have said they have nothing to hide and also have called for the declassification of the pages.
The press conference took place just hours after masked gunmen killed at least 12 people in Paris, at a publication that had mocked the Prophet Mohammed. Prince Khaled bin Bandar, the Saudi intelligence chief, also was in Washington this week to talk about joint efforts to fight ISIS.
Jones and Lynch last year submitted a House resolution on the document issue and filed another on Tuesday. They acknowledge the difficulty in getting sponsors for the release of a document few have seen but vowed to keep trying, in large part because of the families who lost relatives in the attacks.
“They are the reason we are here,” Lynch said.
The effort has garnered support from an array of advocacy groups including <a href="http://28pages.org" rel="nofollow">28pages.org</a> and 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism.
“We all know Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11,” said Terry Strada, a group co-chairwoman whose husband, Tom, died in the attacks. “But that is only half of the truth. The other half lies in the 28 pages.”
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Since the early days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when news emerged that most of the airline hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, dark allegations have lingered about official Saudi ties to the terrorists. Fueling the suspicions: 28 still-classified pages in a congressional inquiry on 9/11 that raise questions about Saudi financial support to the hijackers in the United States prior to the attacks.
Both the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have refused to declassify the pages on grounds of national security. But critics, including members of Congress who have read the pages in the tightly guarded, underground room in the Capitol where they are held, say national security has nothing to do with it. U.S. officials, they charge, are trying to hide the double game that Saudi Arabia has long played with Washington, as both a close ally and petri dish for the world’s most toxic brand of Islamic extremism.
One of the most prominent critics is former Florida Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat who co-chaired the joint investigation of the House and Senate intelligence committees into the Sept. 11 attacks. On Wednesday, in a press conference with two current members of Congress and representatives of families who lost loved ones in the attacks, he will once again urge the Obama administration to declassify the pages—a move the White House has previously rebuffed.
“There are a lot of rocks out there that have been purposefully tamped down, that if were they turned over, would give us a more expansive view of the Saudi role” in assisting the 9/11 hijackers, Graham said in an interview. He maintains that nothing in them qualifies as a legitimate national security secret.
Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican who has also read the pages, agrees. “There is no reason the 28 pages have not been made public,” Jones told Newsweek. “It’s not a national security issue.” Parts of it, however, Jones said, will be “somewhat embarrassing for the Bush administration,” because of “certain relationships with the Saudis.”
In July, the two co-chairman of a separate inquiry, commonly known as the 9/11 Commission, likewise urged the White House to declassify the 28 pages.
“I’m embarrassed that they’re not declassified,“ former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind) said at a press conference with his co-chair Tom Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. “I assumed all along that our records would be public—all of them, everything. And when I learned that a number of documents were classified or were even redacted, I was surprised and disappointed. I am embarrassed to be associated with a work product that is secret.”
Referring to widely reported connections between Saudis and two future hijackers in Southern California, Kean added, “We did research on that particular episode in San Diego with Saudi Arabia and believe if you read the 9/11 report you'll find you want to find about that particular section. There is no reason to classify it anymore.”
Their live-streamed press conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. received considerable attention. But Hamilton told Newsweek that he did not favor declassification of the 28 pages from the congressional investigation, just his own 9/11 Commission report. “I do not favor the declassification” of the the congressional probe’s pages, he said in a telephone interview. He added that he had "never read" that section of the other probe and “I don’t know what’s in it….No one ever came to me and said you ought to read these pages.” (He later amended that to say, “I can’t say I’ve never read them; I have no recollection of having read them.”) He evinced no interest in reading them now. “I haven't asked. I don’t think I would,” he said. “It depends on the terms of classification."
Kean could not be reached for clarification of his own remarks. A confidante of both men, who asked for anonymity, said that confusion over their comments arose from "the somewhat confusing” manner the question was raised about the 28 pages in the press conference.
According to Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Saudi officials “knew that people who had a mission for Osama bin Laden were in, or would soon be placed in, the United States. Whether they knew what their assignments were takes the inference too far.”
The 2002 joint congressional committee probe he co-chaired reported only that, “contacts in the United States helped hijackers find housing, open bank accounts, obtain drivers licenses, locate flight schools, and facilitate transactions.”
But in an interview with Newsweek, Graham said “the contacts” were Saudis with close connections to their government. “I think that in a very tightly controlled institution like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, activities that would be potentially negative to its relationship with its closest ally, the United States, would not have been made at any but the highest levels,” he said.
The Florida Democrat charged that there has been “an organized effort to suppress information” about Saudi support for terrorism, which "started long before 9/11 and continued to the period immediately after 9/11" and continues today.
“I don't think that anyone in any agency, whether it was the CIA or FBI or others, made the decision to do this,” Graham added, referring to the decision to classify the pages. “I think it was a decision made at the White House and the executive agencies that were responsible to the White House were told to keep this under rocks.”
The Obama administration has also kept the 28 pages under lock and key. President Obama ignored an April 14 letter from Jones and Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Ma), requesting that the documents be declassified. Two months later, they received a response from the director of national intelligence’s legislative liaison promising “a coordinated response on behalf of the President,” which never came. A White House spokesperson told Newsweek on Monday it would have no further comment.
Likewise, Philip D. Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and has read the pages, thinks they should remains secret. Now a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Zelikow compared the 28 pages to grand jury testimony and raw police interviews—full of unproven facts, rumors and innuendo. If the government did decide to make them public, he said, “hundreds, if not thousands” of additional pages of interviews would also likely need to be declassified.
In any event, he maintains, the Saudi connections were “a red herring.” The roles of three Yemenis in the U.S. who supported the future hijackers, he said, is the real untold story of the attacks.
“The more interesting story is where they”—the hijackers—“decided to settle here, and why,” said Zelikow, whom Obama appointed to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board in 2011.
On their part, the Saudis have also publicly called for the pages to be declassified. “Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide,” Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., has said. “We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”
With only 21 co-sponsors, the congressional resolution Jones and Lynch plan to introduce is not going anywhere.
Meanwhile, Washington and the Saudi royals still maintain their decades-long, cozy relationship. This week Prince Khaled bin Bandar, chief of Saudi intelligence, arrived in Washington for “discussions on joint efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS),” according to the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations.
Which is all the more reason why Graham persists in his efforts, however unlikely they may be to come to fruition.
“Saudi Arabia,” he said, “has not stopped its interest in spreading extreme Wahhabism.”
And there’s a direct line, he maintained, running from the fostering of that ideology to the creation of the Islamic State.
“ISIS...is a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money and Saudi organizational support, although now they are making a pretense of being very anti-ISIS,” Graham added. “That’s like the parent turning on the wayward or out-of-control child.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the aforementioned congressional resolution had no co-sponsors. The article has been amended to reflect that the resolution has 21 co-sponsors.
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SMITHFIELD, N.C. (WTVD) --
Smithfield police are trying to figure out why two teenage boys were on railroad tracks when they were hit and killed by an Amtrak train.
The accident happened just before 2 p.m. Thursday near the intersection of Shelter Way and North Brightleaf Boulevard near downtown Smithfield.
The victims were identified by police as 17-year-old Robert Naughton and 18-year-old Alan Peedin, both of Selma. Both attended Smithfield-Selma High School.
An Amtrak spokesperson said the train was on its daily route from Savannah to New York when the accident happened. Ninety-four people were on board and they stayed on board for more than two hours until police cleared the scene.
A relative of one of the 94 passengers on the train told ABC11 that passengers were told the train hit two people who were walking down the tracks wearing headphones.
Smithfield police haven't said that but they are investigating the circumstances around the accident.
"It's devastating. I have children of my own and it's something I don't like to do. It's very difficult," said Lt. R.K. Powell with the Smithfield Police Department.
The case remains under investigation. Anyone with information can contact the Smithfield Police Department at (919) 989-1063.
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2 teens killed in Johnston County train accident identified
2 teens killed in Johnston County train accident identified ... the train hit two people who were walking down the tracks wearing headphones.
2 teens killed in Johnston County train accident
Authorities said two teen boys were killed by an Amtrak train near ... train two people who were walking down the tracks wearing headphones.
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