NY Times: "White House Approved Departure of Saudis After Sept. 11, Ex-Aide Says"
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/04/politics/04SAUD.html& a story from the October 5th Tampa Bay Times 2001, "Phanton Flight from Florida":
http://web.archive.org/web/20011108145853/http://www.tampatrib.com/MGA3F78EFSC.htmlVanity Fair Press Release (from v. early September)
* to the moderators: I hope this is okay to post in full as I don't know if it is online & as a press release I would assume that it doesn't have copyright restrictions, but huge apologies if I've broken any rules & please edit it down *
Press release from Vanity Fair:
FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM CZAR TELLS VANITY FAIR HOW BIN LADENS AND OTHER SAUDIS WERE CLEARED TO FLY OUT OF U.S. AFTER SEPTEMBER 11; GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS DENY FLIGHTS EVER TOOK PLACE
NEW YORK, N.Y.- Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke tells Vanity Fair that the Bush administration decided to allow a group of Saudis to fly out of the U.S. just after September 11-at a time when access to U.S. airspace was still restricted and required special government approval. According to other sources, at least four flights with about 140 Saudis, including roughly two dozen members of the bin Laden family, flew to Saudi Arabia that week-without even being interviewed or interrogated by the F.B.I.
Officially, the White House has declined to comment. But a source inside the White House says that the administration is confident that no secret flights took place and that there is no evidence to suggest that the White House ever authorized such flights. An F.A.A. spokesman, Chris White, told the Tampa Tribune that a flight on September 13 did not even take place. “It’s not in our logs. It didn’t occur.” In addition, the F.B.I. denies that it played any role in the repatriation.
But Vanity Fair writer Craig Unger interviewed Dan Grossi, a private eye and former Tampa Police Department officer who received a call two days after 9/11 asking him to escort Saudi students on a flight from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, even though private planes were still grounded nationwide. “I was told it would take White House approval,” Grossi tells Unger. But when the plane’s pilot showed up, they took off.
At the time, Richard Clarke chaired an ongoing crisis group in the 18-by-18-foot Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were hunkered down managing the crisis, and Colin Powell, C.I.A. director George Tenet, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came and went. “Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,” Clarke tells Unger. “My role was to say that it can’t happen until the F.B.I. approves it. And so the F.B.I. was asked-we had a live connection to the F.B.I-and we asked the F.B.I. to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone . . . O.K. to leave. And they came back and said yes, it was fine with them. So we said, ‘Fine, let it happen. . . . I asked them if they had any objection to the entire event-to Saudis leaving the country at a time when aircraft were banned from flying.”
Clarke, who headed the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council, now runs a consulting firm in Virginia and does not recall who initiated the request for approval. He says it was probably either the F.B.I. or the State Department, both of which have denied playing any such role.
“It did not come out of this place,” says a State Department source. “The likes of Prince Bandar does not need the State Department to get this done.”
“I can say unequivocally that the F.B.I. had no role in facilitating these flights one way or another,” Special Agent John Iannarelli, the F.B.I.’s spokesman on counterterrorism activities, tells Unger.
However, Saudi Arabia’s director of information, Nail al-Jubeir, said that the flights had been requested by the Saudis and were authorized “at the highest level of the U.S. government.”
After the September 11 attacks, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, was in Washington orchestrating the exodus of about 140 Saudis scattered throughout the country who were members of, or close to, the House of Saud, which rules Saudi Arabia, and the bin Laden family. By coincidence, even before the attacks, Bandar had been scheduled to meet President Bush in the White House on September 13, 2001, to discuss the Middle East peace process. The meeting took place as planned. Nail al-Jubeir tells Unger that he does not know if Bandar and the president discussed getting the bin Ladens and other Saudis back to Saudi Arabia.
Some Saudis tried to get their planes to leave before the F.B.I. had even identified who was on them, Unger reports. “I recall getting into a big flap with Bandar’s office about whether they would leave without us knowing who was on the plane,” an F.B.I. agent says. “Bandar wanted the plane to take off, and we were stressing that the plane was not leaving until we knew exactly who was on it.” Dale Watson, the F.B.I.’s former head of counterterrorism, tells Unger that while the Saudis were identified, “they were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations.” The bureau has declined to release the Saudis’ identities.
The wealthy bin Laden family long ago broke with their terrorist brother, Osama, but Unger reports that some members of the family have had links to militant Islam. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden had been under F.B.I. investigation for their involvement with the American branch of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which has published writings by one of Osama bin Laden’s principal intellectual influences. According to documents obtained by the Public Education Center in Washington, the file on Abdullah and Omar was reopened on September 19, 2001, while the Saudi repatriation was under way. A security official who served under George W. Bush tells Unger, “WAMY was involved in terrorist-support activity. There’s no doubt about it.”
The Saudis’ planes took off from or landed in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Houston, Cleveland, Orlando, Tampa, Lexington, Kentucky-and Newark and Boston, both of which had been points of origin for the September 11 attacks. “We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history,” Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Boston’s Logan airport, tells Unger, “and here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens! . . . I wanted to go to the highest authorities in Washington. This was a call for them. But this was not just some mystery flight dropping into Logan. It had been to three major airports already, and we were the last stop. It was known. The federal authorities knew what it was doing. And we were told to let it come.”
“I asked
to make sure that no one inappropriate was leaving,” Clarke tells Unger. Clarke assumed the F.B.I. had vetted the bin Ladens prior to September 11. “I have no idea if they did a good job. I’m not in any position to second-guess the F.B.I.”
Prince Bandar has had a 20-year friendship with former president George H. W. Bush. Unger questions whether the long-standing Bush-Saudi relationship could have influenced the administration. The latest in a line of business links between the Bush family and the Saudis involves the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm for which George H. W. Bush is a senior advisor and former secretary of state James Baker III is a senior counselor. The Carlyle Group has received $80 million in Saudi investment, Unger reports, including $2 million from the bin Ladens which was returned to them after September 11. In 1995, Abdulrahman and Sultan bin Mahfouz invested “in the neighborhood of $30 million” in the Carlyle Group, according to family attorney Cherif Sedky. Abdulrahman bin Mafouz was a director of the Muwafaq Foundation, which has been designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as “an al-Qaeda front.” (Carlyle categorically denies that the bin Mahfouzes are now or have ever been investors.)
Clarke believes the decision to let the Saudis go was made because “there’s a realization that we have to work with the government we’ve got in Saudi Arabia. The alternatives could be far worse. The most likely replacement to the House of Saud is likely to be more hostile-in fact, extremely hostile-to the U.S.”
The October issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands in New York on September 3 and nationally on September 9.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(161 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
