[Oman-L] Astonished??: is this planted disinformation or prep for assault?
XXL
djnuby@yahoo.com
Mon, 22 Oct 2001 06:47:29 -0700 (PDT)
Sorry,
There is no reason to be astonished.
As long as the Saudis and many Arabs kiss the hands of
American, why should the Americans or other respect
the Arabs.
Th Othmany Impire was once called the "Sick Man on
Posporus". The Arab nation is multiple sick. We are no
more Al-Bunian Al-Marssous (The steady wall) we are a
wall of rotten brigs and ramshakle building. We don't
care about our religion, nor about our identity.
If all Arabs would boykott McDonalds, USA would start
a war againgst us and punnish us as terrorists. What
do you expect my friend?
I hope every intelligent would care about educating
his kids about these subject to develop this nation
from the base to the summit.
Don't you know the proverb: when butter is available
in huge amounts at Arabs, they will use as body lorion
for the ass.
Sorry for using it but the conditions are harmfull
Many greetings from an Arab who immigrated before 40
years to Europe.
Bakuany
--- "Moh ." <mnur_01@hotmail.com> wrote:
<HR>
<html><div style='background-color:'><DIV>
<P><BR>
<DIV></DIV>>----- Original Message ----- </P></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>>From: Afrikom News
<DIV></DIV>>To: news
<DIV></DIV>>Sent: Friday, 9 November 2001 14:52
<DIV></DIV>>Subject: How vulnerable are the Saudi
royals?
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Note: the article below is very
interesting. I do find it odd that the US National
Security Agency would release this info at this time.
Questioning the motives of government agencies are
paramount. Abdullah is on the right track.
<DIV></DIV>>How vulnerable are the Saudi royals?
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Issue of 2001-10-22 Posted 2001-10-16
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?011022fa_FACT1
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Since 1994 or earlier, the National
Security Agency has been collecting electronic
intercepts of conversations between members of the
Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King
Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime increasingly
corrupt, alienated from the country's religious rank
and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has
brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions
of dollars in what amounts to protection money to
fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The intercepts have demonstrated to
analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama
bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in
Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and
throughout the Persian Gulf region. "Ninety-six is the
key year," one American intelligence official told me.
"Bin Laden hooked up to all the bad guys-it's like the
Grand Alliance- and had a capability for conducting
large-scale operations." The Saudi regime, he said,
had "gone to the dark side."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In interviews last week, current and
former intelligence and military officials portrayed
the growing instability of the Saudi regime-and the
vulnerability of its oil reserves to terrorist
attack-as the most immediate threat to American
economic and political interests in the Middle East.
The officials also said that the Bush Administration,
like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to
confront this reality, even in the aftermath of the
September 11th terrorist attacks.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Saudis and the Americans arranged a
meeting between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
King Fahd during a visit by Rumsfeld to Saudi Arabia
shortly before the beginning of the air war in
Afghanistan, and pictures of the meeting were
transmitted around the world. The United States,
however, has known that King Fahd has been
incapacitated since suffering a severe stroke, in late
1995. A Saudi adviser told me last week that the King,
with round-the-clock medical treatment, is able to sit
in a chair and open his eyes, but is usually unable to
recognize even his oldest friends. Fahd is being kept
on the throne, the N.S.A. intercepts indicate, because
of a bitter family power struggle. Fahd's nominal
successor is Crown Prince Abdullah, his half brother,
who is to some extent the de-facto ruler-he and Prince
Sultan, the defense minister, were the people Rumsfeld
really came to see. But there is infighting about
money: Abdullah has been urging his fellow-princes !
to address the problem of corruption in the
kingdom-unsuccessfully, according to the intercepts.
"The only reason Fahd's being kept alive is so
Abdullah can't become king," a former White House
adviser told me.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The American intelligence officials
have been particularly angered by the refusal of the
Saudis to help the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run
"traces"-that is, name checks and other background
information-on the nineteen men, more than half of
them believed to be from Saudi Arabia, who took part
in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. "They knew that once we started asking for a
few traces the list would grow," one former official
said. "It's better to shut it down right away." He
pointed out that thousands of disaffected Saudis have
joined fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle
East. Other officials said that there is a growing
worry inside the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. that the actual
identities of many of those involved in the attacks
may not be known definitively for months, if ever.
Last week, a senior intelligence official confirmed
the lack of Saudi coöperation and told me, angrily,
that the Saudis "have only one constant-and it's
keeping them!
selves in power."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The N.S.A. intercepts reveal the
hypocrisy of many in the Saudi royal family, and why
the family has become increasingly estranged from the
vast majority of its subjects. Over the years,
unnerved by the growing strength of the fundamentalist
movement, it has failed to deal with the underlying
issues of severe unemployment and inadequate
education, in a country in which half the population
is under the age of eighteen. Saudi Arabia's strict
interpretation of Islam, known as Wahhabism, and its
use of mutawwa'in-religious police-to enforce prayer,
is rivalled only by the Taliban's. And yet for years
the Saudi princes-there are thousands of them-have
kept tabloid newspapers filled with accounts of their
drinking binges and partying with prostitutes, while
taking billions of dollars from the state budget. The
N.S.A. intercepts are more specific. In one call,
Prince Nayef, who has served for more than two decades
as interior minister, urges a subordinate to withhold
f!
rom the police evidence of the hiring of prostitutes,
presumably by members of the royal family. According
to the summary, Nayef said that he didn't want the
"client list" released under any circumstances.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The intercepts produced a stream of
sometimes humdrum but often riveting intelligence from
the telephone calls of several senior members of the
royal family, including Abdullah; Nayef; Sultan, whose
son Prince Bandar has been the Saudi ambassador to the
United States since 1983; and Prince Salman, the
governor of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital. There was
constant telephoning about King Fahd's health after
his stroke, and scrambling to take advantage of the
situation. On January 8, 1997, Prince Sultan told
Bandar about a flight that he and Salman had shared
with the King. Sultan complained that the King "barely
spoke to anyone," according to the summary of the
intercept, because he was "too medicated." The King,
Sultan added, was "a prisoner on the plane."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Sultan's comments became much more
significant a few days later, when the N.S.A.
intercepted a conversation in which Sultan told Bandar
that the King had agreed to a complicated exchange of
fighter aircraft with the United States that would
bring five F-16s into the Royal Saudi Air Force. Fahd
was evidently incapable of making such an agreement,
or of preventing anyone from dropping his name in a
money-making deal.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In the intercepts, princes talk openly
about bilking the state, and even argue about what is
an acceptable percentage to take. Other calls indicate
that Prince Bandar, while serving as ambassador, was
involved in arms deals in London, Yemen, and the
Soviet Union that generated millions of dollars in
"commissions." In a PBS "Frontline" interview
broadcast on October 9th, Bandar, asked about the
reports of corruption in the royal family, was almost
upbeat in his response. The family had spent nearly
four hundred billion dollars to develop Saudi Arabia,
he said. "If you tell me that building this whole
country . . . we misused or got corrupted with fifty
billion, I'll tell you, 'Yes.'. . . So what? We did
not invent corruption, nor did those dissidents, who
are so genius, discover it."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The intercepts make clear, however,
that Crown Prince Abdullah was insistent on stemming
the corruption. In November of 1996, for example, he
complained about the billions of dollars that were
being diverted by royal family members from a huge
state-financed project to renovate the mosque in
Mecca. He urged the princes to get their off-budget
expenses under control; such expenses are known as the
hiding place for payoff money. (Despite its oil
revenues, Saudi Arabia has been running a budget
deficit for more than a decade, and now has a large
national debt.) A few months later, according to the
intercepts, Abdullah blocked a series of real-estate
deals by one of the princes, enraging members of the
royal family. Abdullah further alarmed the princes by
issuing a decree declaring that his sons would not be
permitted to go into partnerships with foreign
companies working in the kingdom.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Abdullah is viewed by Sultan and other
opponents as a leader who could jeopardize the
kingdom's most special foreign relationship-someone
who is willing to penalize the United States, and its
oil and gas companies, because of Washington's support
for Israel. In an intercept dated July 13, 1997,
Prince Sultan called Bandar in Washington, and
informed him that he had told Abdullah "not to be so
confrontational with the United States."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Fahd regime was a major financial
backer of the Reagan Administration's anti-Communist
campaign in Latin America and of its successful proxy
war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Oil money
bought the Saudis enormous political access and
leverage in Washington. Working through Prince Bandar,
they have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars
to charities and educational programs here. American
construction and oil companies do billions of dollars'
worth of business every year with Saudi Arabia, which
is the world's largest oil producer. At the end of
last year, Halliburton, the Texas-based oil-supply
business formerly headed by Vice-President Dick
Cheney, was operating a number of subsidiaries in
Saudi Arabia.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In the Clinton era, the White House did
business as usual with the Saudis, urging them to buy
American goods, like Boeing aircraft. The kingdom was
seen as an American advocate among the oil-producing
nations of the Middle East. The C.I.A. was discouraged
from conducting any risky intelligence operations
inside the country and, according to one former
official, did little recruiting among the Saudi
population, which limited the United States
government's knowledge of the growth of the opposition
to the royal family.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In 1994, Mohammed al-Khilewi, the first
secretary at the Saudi Mission to the United Nations,
defected and sought political asylum in the United
States. He brought with him, according to his New York
lawyer, Michael J. Wildes, some fourteen thousand
internal government documents depicting the Saudi
royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and
financial support for terrorists. He claimed to have
evidence that the Saudis had given financial and
technical support to Hamas, the extremist Islamic
group whose target is Israel. There was a meeting at
the lawyer's office with two F.B.I. agents and an
Assistant United States Attorney. "We gave them a
sampling of the documents and put them on the table,"
Wildes told me last week. "But the agents refused to
accept them." He and his client heard nothing further
from federal authorities. Al-Khilewi, who was granted
asylum, is now living under cover.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Saudis were also shielded from
Washington's foreign-policy bureaucracy. A government
expert on Saudi affairs told me that Prince Bandar
dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never
met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny
handful of people inside the government are familiar
with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained. "And that is
purposeful."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks in New York and Washington, the royal family
has repeatedly insisted that Saudi Arabia has made no
contributions to radical Islamic groups. When the
Saudis were confronted by press reports that some of
the substantial funds that the monarchy routinely
gives to Islamic charities may actually have gone to
Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, they denied any
knowledge of such transfers. The intercepts, however,
have led many in the intelligence community to
conclude otherwise.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Bush Administration has chosen not
to confront the Saudi leadership over its financial
support of terror organizations and its refusal to
help in the investigation. "As far as the Saudi
Arabians go, they've been nothing but coöperative,"
President Bush said at a news conference on September
24th. The following day, the Saudis agreed to formally
cut off diplomatic relations with the Taliban
leadership in Afghanistan. Eight days later, at a news
conference in Saudi Arabia with Prince Sultan, the
defense minister, Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had
given the Saudis a list of the September 11th
terrorist suspects for processing by their
intelligence agencies. Rumsfeld, who is admired by
many in the press for his bluntness, answered
evasively: "I am, as I said, not involved with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation that is conducting the
investigation. . . . I have every reason to believe
that that relationship between our two countries is as
close, that any info!
rmation I am sure has been made available to the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Saudis gave Rumsfeld something in
return-permission for U.S. forces to use a
command-and-control center, built before the Gulf War,
in the pending air war against the Taliban. Over the
past few years, the Saudis have also allowed the
United States to use forward bases on Saudi soil for
special operations, as long as there was no public
mention of the arrangements.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>While the intelligence-community
members I spoke with praised the Air Force and the
Navy for their performance in Afghanistan last week,
which did much to boost morale in the military and
among the American citizenry, they were crestfallen
about an incident that occurred on the first night of
the war-an incident that was emblematic, they believe,
of the constraints placed by the government on the
military's ability to wage war during the last decade.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>That night, an unmanned Predator
reconnaissance aircraft, under the control of the
C.I.A., was surveilling the roads leading out of
Kabul. The Predator, which costs forty million dollars
and cruises at speeds as slow as eighty miles an hour,
is equipped with imaging radar and an array of
infrared and television cameras that are capable of
beaming high-resolution images to ground stations
around the world. The plane was equipped with two
powerful Hellfire missiles, designed as antitank
weapons. The Predator identified a group of cars and
trucks fleeing the capital as a convoy carrying Mullah
Omar, the Taliban leader. Under a previously
worked-out agreement, one knowledgeable official said,
the C.I.A. did not have the authority to "push the
button." Nor did the nearby command-and-control suite
of the Fifth Fleet, in Bahrain, where many of the war
plans had been drawn up. Rather, the decision had to
be made by the officers on duty at the headquarters of
the United !
States Central Command, or CENTCOM, at MacDill Air
Force Base, in Florida.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Predator tracked the convoy to a
building where Omar, accompanied by a hundred or so
guards and soldiers, took cover. The precise sequence
of events could not be fully learned, but intelligence
officials told me that there was an immediate request
for a full-scale assault by fighter bombers. At that
point, however, word came from General Tommy R.
Franks, the CENTCOM commander, saying, as the
officials put it, "My JAG"-Judge Advocate General, a
legal officer-"doesn't like this, so we're not going
to fire." Instead, the Predator was authorized to fire
a missile in front of the building-"bounce it off the
front door," one officer said, "and see who comes out,
and take a picture." CENTCOM suggested that the
Predator then continue to follow Omar. The Hellfire,
however, could not target the area in front of the
building-in military parlance, it could not "get a
signature" on the dirt there-and it was then agreed
that the missile would attack a group of cars parked!
in front, presumably those which had carried Omar and
his retinue. The missile was fired, and it
"obliterated the cars," an official said. "But no one
came out."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>It was learned later from an operative
on the ground that Omar and his guards had indeed been
in the convoy and had assumed at the time that the
firing came from rocket-propelled grenades launched by
nearby troops from the Northern Alliance. A group of
soldiers left the building and looked for the enemy.
They found nothing, and Omar and his convoy departed.
A short time later, the building was targeted and
destroyed by F-18s. Mullah Omar survived.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Days afterward, top Administration
officials were still seething about the incident. "If
it was a fuckup, I could live with it," one senior
official said. "But it's not a fuckup-it's an
outrage.This isn't like you're six years old and your
mother calls you to come in for lunch and you say,
'Time out.' If anyone thinks otherwise, go look at the
World Trade Center or the Pentagon." A senior military
officer viewed the failure to strike immediately as a
symptom of "a cultural issue"-"a slow degradation of
the system due to political correctness: 'We want you
to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.' No
collateral damage." Others saw the cultural problem as
one of bureaucratic, rather than political,
correctness. Either way, the failure to attack has
left Defense Secretary Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of
glass and breaking doors," the officer said. "But in
the end I don't know if it'll mean any changes."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>A Pentagon planner also noted that some
of the camps the bombers were hitting were empty. In
fact, he added, it became evident even before the
bombing that troops of the Northern Alliance had moved
into many of the unused Taliban camps. The Alliance
soldiers came up with a novel way of alerting American
planners to their new location, the officer said:
"They walked around holding up white sheets so when
the satellites came by they're saying, 'Hey, we're the
good guys.' "
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The American military response has
triggered alarm in the international oil community and
among intelligence officials who have been briefed on
a still secret C.I.A. study, put together in the
mid-eighties, of the vulnerability of the Saudi fields
to terrorist attack. The report was "so sensitive," a
former C.I.A. officer told me, "that it was put on
typed paper," and not into the agency's computer
system, meaning that distribution was limited to a
select few. According to someone who saw the report,
it concluded that with only a small amount of
explosives terrorists could take the oil fields off
line for two years.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The concerns, both in America and in
Saudi Arabia, about the security of the fields have
become more urgent than ever since September 11th. A
former high-level intelligence official depicted the
Saudi rulers as nervously "sitting on a keg of
dynamite"-that is, the oil reserves. "They're
petrified that somebody's going to light the fuse."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>"The United States is hostage to the
stability of the Saudi system," a prominent Middle
Eastern oil man, who did not wish to be cited by name,
told me in a recent interview. "It's time to start
facing the truth. The war was declared by bin Laden,
but there are thousands of bin Ladens. They are
setting the game-the agenda. It's a new form of war.
This fabulous military machine you have is completely
useless." The oil man, who has worked closely with the
Saudi leadership for three decades, added, "People
like me have been deceiving you. We talk about how you
don't understand Islam, but it's a vanilla analysis.
We try to please you, but we've been aggrieved for
years."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>The Saudi regime "will explode in
time," he said. "It has been playing a delicate game."
As for the terrorists responsible for the September
11th attacks, he said, "Now they decide the timing. If
they do a similar operation in Saudi Arabia, the price
of oil will go up to one hundred dollars a
barrel"-more than four times what it is today.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>In the nineteen-eighties, in an effort
to relieve political pressure on the regime, the Saudi
leadership relinquished some of its authority to the
mutawwa'in and permitted them to have a greater role
in day-to-day life. One U.S. government Saudi expert
complained last week that religious leaders had been
allowed to take control of the press and the
educational system. "Today, two-thirds of the Saudi
Ph.D.s are in Islamic studies," a former Presidential
aide told me. There was little attempt over the years
by American diplomats or the White House to moderate
the increasingly harsh rhetoric about the U.S. "The
United States was caught up in private
agreements"-with the Saudi princes-"while this shit
was spewing in the Saudi press," the former aide said.
"That was a huge mistake."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>A senior American diplomat who served
many years in Saudi Arabia recalled his foreboding
upon attending a training exercise at the kingdom's
most prestigious military academy, in Riyadh: "It was
hot, and I watched the cadets doing drills. The
officers were lounging inside a suradiq"-a large
pavilion-"with cold drinks, calling out orders on
loudspeakers. I thought to myself, How many of these
young men would follow and die for these officers?"
The diplomat said he came away from his most recent
tour in Saudi Arabia convinced that "it wouldn't take
too much for a group of twenty or thirty
fundamentalist enlisted men to take charge. How would
the kingdom deal with the shock of something ruthless,
small, highly motivated, and of great velocity?"
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>There is little that the United States
can do now, the diplomat said. "The Saudis have been
indulged for so many decades.They are so spoiled.
They've always had it their way. There's hardly
anything we could say that would impede the 'majestic
instancy' of their progress. We're their janissaries."
He was referring to the captives who became élite
troops of the Ottoman Empire.
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>"The policy dilemma is this," a senior
general told me. "How do we help the Saudis make a
transition without throwing them over the side?"
Referring to young fundamentalists who have been
demonstrating in the Saudi streets, he said, "The kids
are bigger than the Daddy."
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>> Airstrikes Hit Afghan Homes, 5 Dead
<DIV></DIV>>killed at least five civilians -
including a 16-year-old girl and four in one family
<DIV></DIV>>http://news.excite.com/news/ap/011018/19/news-attacks-afghanistan
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Civilian Toll Mounts As Bush Signals
Switch To Ground Assault
<DIV></DIV>>http://www.rense.com/general15/swtich.htm
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>UK, France, Germany to hold summit
tomorrow
<DIV></DIV>>http://www.dawn.com/2001/10/18/int1.htm
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Sources told NBC on condition of
anonymity that military planners were drawing up a
list of potential targets elsewhere, beginning with
suspected terrorist camps in Somalia run by followers
of bin Laden
http://www.msnbc.com/news/627086.asp?cp1=1
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>90 Abortion Clinics Get 'Anthrax'
Threat Letters With Powder
<DIV></DIV>>Christian Fundamentalist next target
... Who Benefits
<DIV></DIV>>http://www.rense.com/general15/poww.htm
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
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