Follow Up on the Zacarias Moussaoui Bombshell Connecting Saudi Arabia to 9/11

It is encouraging to see The New York Times follow up Scott Shane's "Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda" with two additional stories today.

Yesterday I monitored Google News to see how much play the Moussaoui bombshell was getting. The answer was not that much. The big news at the top of the page was on the fatal Metro-North Railroad accident in New York and Islamic State's immolation of a caged Jordanian fighter pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. I was prepared for the Moussaoui story to be a one-off.

Unfortunately one of the two stories today -- "Pre-9/11 Ties Haunt Saudis as New Accusations Surface," by Ben Hubbard and Scott Shane -- is a pitiful effort by the Gray Lady to walk back, or at least muddy, Shane's original report. I say pitiful because it is constructed out of quotes from establishment academics (Princeton's Bernard Haykel and Texas A & M Bush School of Government's Gregory Gause III, whose universities are likely endowed by Saudi money), Saudi royalty and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman all casting doubt on the veracity of Moussaoui's claim that key members of the Saudi royal family with critical positions in the Kingdom backed the 9/11 attacks.

Where is an outline of the case against Saudi Arabia that the families of the 9/11 victims are pursuing? That is what should be addressed in this follow up because it is civil suit that has not be reported on extensively. We get plenty of stories about Jewish families going after Hamas and Iran in civil court for backing terrorism but very little about the great white whale of international jihad, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The gist of the Hubbard and Shane walk back is that, yes, the Saudis supported the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, along with the U.S. government, and these mujahedeen morphed into Al Qaeda, But the Saudis cut their ties with Al Qaeda.

For a sample of the quality of the walk back there is this quote from Princeton's Haykel:

By 1994, when Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and banned from the kingdom, the Qaeda founder was “writing nonstop against the Saudi regime with the idea of toppling it,” said Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “That the Saudis would knowingly support a movement that sought to destroy them makes no sense to me.”

I guess a prestigious perch at an Ivy League university blinds an intellectual like Haykel to the possibility that Saudis might support Al Qaeda with the understanding that its targets will be first and foremost the "Far Enemy."

In any case, Hubbard and Shane have a tough pull on their hands. Piles of evidence point to the Saudis. Everyone knows it, accepts it as an existential reality. The story even acknowledges a continuation of the pattern today with Saudis funding fighters in Libya and Syria:

. . . American officials have praised the Saudi government for cracking down on militants inside the kingdom and for acting to stop terrorist financing by Saudi citizens. But the kingdom has continued to support militant groups other than Al Qaeda and armed tribes that it sees as advancing its policies in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. And at home, the kingdom’s traditional religious establishment promotes and enforces a strict interpretation of Islam.

The point of the Hubbard and Shane walk back is to muddy the waters, float the narrative that Saudi support for Al Qaeda was a historical artifact that preceded 9/11 (even though there is a paragraph in the piece built around a quote from Ambassador Freeman that states the Saudis didn't seriously change their thinking on Al Qaeda until 2003 when there were Qaeda-linked bombings in the Kingdom) as well as cast doubt on Zacarias Moussaoui.

The second story today on the Saudi connection to 9/11 is by the reliable Carl Hulse ("Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report") and focuses on the long, strange history of the national security classification of the 28 pages classified 13 years ago obviously finger the Saudis as the funding source for the 9/11 attacks -- former Florida Senator Bob Graham has said as much. And Obama has promised family members of 9/11 victims that he will release section 4, but he never has. The reason? Pressure for some sort of action against the House of Saud would be hard to resist. Why not some fianancial sanctions? We have plenty levied against Iran and Iran didn't attack us on 9/11.

Another reason is that the U.S. doesn't want to stop funding for jihad as this has replaced the Cold War as the primary rationale for its globe-straddling militarism. As one of plaintiffs in the civil suit against the Saudis explains:

WASHINGTON — A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism. 

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify. 

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public.

Mr. Lynch and his allies have been joined by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a leader of the inquiry. He has called for the release of the report’s Part 4, which dealt with Saudi Arabia, since President George W. Bush ordered it classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

Mr. Graham has repeatedly said it shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.

Relatives of those killed on Sept. 11 as well as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia have also demanded that the pages be made public, seeing them as the vital link that they believe connects an important ally of the United States to the deadly attacks. They say the pages, Part 4 of the report, could also help in determining the source of current funding for terrorist activities.

“If we stop funding of terrorism and hold those people accountable, wouldn’t it make a dent in the financing of terrorism today?” asked William Doyle, whose son, Joseph, was killed in the World Trade Center. Mr. Doyle said that President Obama personally assured him after the death of Osama bin Laden that he would declassify that section of the report.

Proponents of releasing Part 4, titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain National Security Matters,” have suggested that the Bush and Obama administrations have held it back for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner rather than for any national security consideration.

I don't see how section 4 can remain classified now. To keep it classified with a presidential campaign fast approaching would require a great deal of political capital, something the Democrats don't have. I would imagine what will happen is that there will be more attacks on Moussaoui, more muddying and prevarication in the prestige press, high profile senators will eventually stand on their hind legs and voice support for their paymasters in the Kingdom, and Obama will grudgingly release the 28-pages, possibly at date designated after the 2016 election, in a highly redacted form.

***CORRECTION***

Originally I said that the 28 classified pages are part of the 9/11 Commission Report. That is incorrect. The 28 classified pages are part of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which Senator Bob Graham co-chaired.

Kirkpatrick Shines a Light on House of Saud

Regularly on this page I have praised the reporting of David Kirkpatrick, the Gray Lady's Cairo bureau chief who covered the Tahrir Square revolution in 2011 as well as the military-led counterrevolution in 2013 and everything that went on in between. He is a rare journalist in the mainstream press in that he does not not first adhere to whatever the company line is at the time and then sculpt his writing to suit that purpose; rather, he propounds a thesis and then sets to proving it. The thesis Kirkpatrick chooses to articulate seems to be of his own making and not yoked to the State Department talking points in circulation.

Of course there is always the possibility that Kirkpatrick is an intelligence agency asset -- just a very good one -- an example of how the CIA, though much maligned, is one step ahead of the competition. I prefer to think of him as a very shrewd operator, a reporter who knows the ropes and who can press right up to the censor's red line. He is -- and this for a salaried worker of the Gray Lady is incredible -- reliable.

Kirkpatrick's offering in today's paper, "ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed," is a must read. The House of Saud is finally getting some of the mainstream attention that it deserves:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van. 

Kirkpatrick goes on to outline the divergence between Al Qaeda and Islamic State, which is grounded in Saudi Wahhabism; ISIS is the more faithful scion of al-Saud:

This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking that forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda, and it has led to a fundamentally different view of violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful. 

“Violence is part of their ideology,” Professor Haykel said. “For Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.” 

The distinction is playing out in a battle of fatwas. All of the most influential jihadist theorists are criticizing the Islamic State as deviant, calling its self-proclaimed caliphate null and void and, increasingly, slamming its leaders as bloodthirsty heretics for beheading journalists and aid workers. 

The upstart polemicists of the Islamic State, however, counter that its critics and even the leaders of Al Qaeda are all bad Muslims who have gone soft on the West. Even the officials and fighters of the Palestinian militant group Hamas are deemed to be “unbelievers” who might deserve punishment with beheading for agreeing to a cease-fire with Israel, one Islamic State ideologue recently declared.

“The duty of a Muslim is to carry out all of God’s orders and rulings immediately on the spot, not softly and gradually,” the scholar, Al Turki Ben-Ali, 30, said in an online forum.

***

The Islamic State’s founder, Mr. Baghdadi, grafted two elements onto his Wahhabi foundations borrowed from the broader, 20th-century Islamist movements that began with the Muslim Brotherhood and ultimately produced Al Qaeda. Where Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers, Mr. Baghdadi adopted the call to political action against foreign domination of the Arab world that has animated the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other 20th-century Islamist movements. 

Mr. Baghdadi also borrowed the idea of a restored caliphate. Where Wahhabism first flourished alongside the Ottoman Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded shortly after that caliphate’s dissolution, in 1924 — an event seen across the world as a marker of Western ascent and Eastern decline. The movement’s founders took up the call for a revived caliphate as a goal of its broader anti-Western project. 

These days, though, even Brotherhood members appear almost embarrassed by the term’s anachronism, emphasizing that they use caliphate as a kind of spiritual idea irrelevant to the modern world of nation-states. 

“Even for Al Qaeda, the caliphate was something that was going to happen in the far distant future, before the end times,” said William McCants, a researcher on militant Islam at the Brookings Institution. The Islamic State “really moved up the timetable,” he said — to June 2014, in fact. 

Adhering to Wahhabi literalism, the Islamic State disdains other Islamists who reason by analogy to adapt to changing context — including the Muslim Brotherhood; its controversial midcentury thinker Sayed Qutb; and the contemporary militants his writing later inspired, like Ayman al-Zawahri of Al Qaeda. Islamic State ideologues often deem anyone, even an Islamist, who supports an elected or secular government to be an unbeliever and subject to beheading. 

“This is ‘you join us, or you are against us and we finish you,’ ” said Prof. Emad Shahin, who teaches Islam and politics at Georgetown University. “It is not Al Qaeda, but far to its right.”

The story concludes by Kirkpatrick bringing it back to Saudi Arabia and the dilatory response of the clerics there in criticizing ISIS:

Some experts note that Saudi clerics lagged long after other Muslim scholars in formally denouncing the Islamic State, and at one point even the king publicly urged them to speak out more clearly. “There is a certain mutedness in the Saudi religious establishment, which indicates it is not a slam dunk to condemn ISIS,” Professor Haykel said. 

Finally, on Aug. 19, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the Saudi grand mufti, declared that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way, but are the first enemy of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims, as seen in the crimes of the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda.”

To paraphrase a writer Thomas Friedman quoted in his column yesterday, "How can we expect the Saudi royal family to condemn ISIS when they believe the exact same thing?"

The shortcoming of Kirkpatrick's piece is that it fails to mention the longstanding relationship between Wahhabism, the Muslim Brothers, Al Qaeda and the United States. But the fact that more stories are appearing in the press tracking Islamic State back to its sponsors within the House of Saud I take to be a positive development.