Were Saudi Royals and Iranian Mullahs Behind 9/11?

In a previous Blaze story, I reported that Iran is harboring and actively supporting al Qaeda and has been doing so for over 10 years. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that individuals close to the Sunni Royal family in Riyadh as well the most senior members of the Shiite leadership in Tehran were co-conspirators in the Sept. 11 plot.

The Iranian Mullahs provided intelligence, secure communications, and logistical support while there is new evidence that emissaries of the House of Saud met with and aided the Sept. 11 hijackers once inside the country. In response, two U.S. congressmen have authored a house resolution aimed at pressuring the president to declassifying a 28-page 9/11 document which the International Business Times reported, led directly to Riyadh.

In this photo of a sketch by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin and reviewed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, right, speaks with lawyer and U.S. Marine Corps Major Derek Poteet, a member of his legal team, while wearing a camouflage vest during the third day of the Military Commissions pretrial hearing against the five Guantanamo prisoners accused of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has told authorities he was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijacking plot, wore the woodland-style camouflage vest for the first time Wednesday, a clothing choice previously denied because of fears it might disrupt the court. Co-accused Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali is seen in the background, second from left. Photo Credit: Janet Hamlin/AP 

A High-level Iranian Defector Warned the CIA that 9/11 Was Coming

In my book “Lessons from Fallen Civilizations,” I reference Ken Timmerman in his ground breaking best seller “Countdown to Crisis”:

…On July 26, 2001, at a backwater US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, a high-level Iranian security official, Hamid Reza Zakeri, walked in. He told the receptionist that he wanted to speak to the CIA because he had information related to the security of the United States. He explained to the station chief, “Joan,” that in his capacity as a high-level security officer at Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) headquarters, he observed “Arabs” training pilots and briefing them on their appointed targets. He even described models that were on the table in the meeting room—the World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, and Camp David. He told her that the attack was coming from the air, the Arab pilots had already left for America, and the date for the attack was 9/11/01.

Joan called for backup. Several days later a senior CIA officer, “George,” arrived from headquarters to debrief the “Baku walk in.” He immediately decided that Zakeri was peddling lies, paid him $200, and told him to get out. The information that could have saved 3,000 lives was never passed up the chain-of-command.”…

Recovered Bin Laden Files Also Show that Iran Partners with Al Qaeda

Rahman indicated as new emissary for Al-Qaeda in Bin Laden files.

In August 2011, based on files recovered from bin Laden’s safe house in Pakistan, the administration released a report indicating that Treasury officials had frozen assets and movements of Atiya Abd al-Rahman.

In this undated image made from video and provided by by Al-Jazeera, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, is shown. Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and spokesman still maintains that there was justification for the September 11, 2001 attacks orchestrated by al-Qaida upon the United States. (AP Photo/Al-Jazeera) 

The documents showed that Osama bin Laden had appointed Rahman to serve as al-Qaeda’s emissary in Iran and was allowed to move freely to and from Iran. Moreover, he was planning attacks to coincide with the 10 year anniversary of Sept. 11. The type and scale of the planned attacks remain classified.

But the report was remarkable because it was the first time that the Obama administration admitted that bin Laden, his son Saad, and al-Qaeda’s most senior members had been sometimes harbored and financially aided for 10 years by the Iranian theocracy.

As I wrote in part one of this series, with the Lebanese-born terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, as their point man, for 25 years Iran has participated in spectacular attacks against Israel and the U.S, including Sept. 11. Just days after the Geneva agreement, Iran’s Foreign Minister laid a wreath at Mugniyeh’s grave because he is arguably the most important modern terrorist. He was the ambassador which unified both Sunni and Shiite on the Sept. 11 attacks.

An Interview with the Author Who Broke the Iranian Sept. 11 Story –Ken Timmerman

I spoke with Ken Timmerman who debriefed Zakeri in "Countdown to Crisis,” and was the first in the U.S. to directly link the Iranian regime to Sept. 11. I asked him if anything had changed since his book appeared in 2005 that would make him reevaluate Zakeri’s account.

“Yes, there has been significant corroboration since then. In fact, I’ve learned from my own sources that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has set up a task force to investigate Iran’s ties to Sept. 11 and to reevaluate the information they already have but that was not included in the (whitewashed) Sept. 11 Commission Report,” said Timmerman.

At left a March 1, 2003 photo obtained by the Associated Press shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan. At right, a photo downloaded from the Arabic language Internet site www.muslm.net and purporting to show a man identified by the Internet site as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sep. 11 attacks, is seen in detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Photo: AP/www.muslm.net) 

Timmerman went on to explain to me that the reason the CIA and the intel community for the longest time after Sept. 11, could not believe that Iran had participated was because it invalidated their decades long analysis which held that Sunni and Shiite jihadists simply would not cooperate.

If the Iranian government was a participant, it would further discredit those whose job it was to prevent an attack such as Sept. 11. As Ken put it, “It’s now become an accepted analysis that indeed Iran did play a role in Sept. 11. Now when you assert this (the intel community) doesn’t look at you like you’re a kook.” (More on Timmerman’s view of the coming war in the Middle East in Part III of this series)

In my opinion, the fact our most senior intelligence officers know that the Iranian government played a role in Sept. 11 is of staggering importance because it was an act of war perpetrated by the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

And if the American electorate was broadly aware of this, it would makes this administration’s recent relaxation of sanctions against Iran look like the fool’s errand that it is. Americans would know that the recent Iran accord negotiated in Geneva puts the country at risk, because as Donald Rumsfeld put it, “weakness is a provocation.”

The Saudi Connection

Republican Rep. Walter Jones (Photo Credit: AP) 

I spoke with Rep. Walter Jones, (R-N.C.), who with Rep. Stephen Lynch, (D-Maine), has sponsored a resolution, HR 428, which demands that the Obama administration declassify and release a 28-page report which exposes “foreign sources of support for the Sept. 11 hijackers.”

“Do you feel that members close to or within the inner circle of the Saudi royal family played a role in Sept. 11?” I asked him.

"I would answer you this way. That is certainly one of the concerns that need to be addressed. How does a republic like America remain strong when the government decides what its citizens can and cannot know? If you don’t declassify this information, the public will never know the truth. That’s why we feel so passionately that the families (who lost loved ones on Sept. 11) have every right to read this report,” Congressman Jones replied.

He went on to concede that there are questions about the relationship between the hijackers (15 of which were Saudi nationals) and the Saudi royals.

He told me that he and Congressman Lynch would be holding a press conference on the steps of the Capital along with family members in an attempt to pressure the administration to release the report. And finally he directed me to seek out former governor and senator from Florida, Bob Graham who, as the former Co-Chair of the Sept. 11Commission, has filed law suits in a Federal Court to declassify this report.

After terrorist hijackers crashed airliners into New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (Photo: Robert Giroux/Getty Images) 

Even before leaving the Senate, Graham began working tirelessly on this issue, writing two books on the subject, one non-fiction which was highly censored, the other a novel. I found a number of live interviews that he has given on the Saudi involvement in Sept. 11. What follows is a sampling of the assertions that Graham has made in various media interviews:

• In Sarasota, Florida, near where the leaders of the plot took their flight training a few days before the attacks, a very wealthy Saudi couple fled the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, leaving their house and all their possession including three cars. Phone records showed that they had been in touch with Mohammad Atta, the Sept. 11 leader.

• In Southern California, a Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi when they arrived late in 2000. Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles to meet the hijackers at a local restaurant. Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up an operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving Los Angeles. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric the notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was later killed by an American drone strike in Yemen.

On Dec. 15, 2013, in the New York Post, Paul Sperry, author of “Infiltration,” wrote a story about the Saudis denial of any role in the Sept. 11 attacks; Paul wrote in part:

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

Whereas Iran provided planning, training, and logistics support prior to the attacks, what seems to be emerging is the fact that agents closely associated with the Saudi Royals met the attackers once they arrived in the U.S. and gave support prior to the commencement of the attacks.

Moreover, if the men running Iran and key people close to the Saudi Royals cooperated in Sept. 11, it means that the threat from radical Islam is far greater than our government will state publicly.

(In Article III, read why the Saudi’s would have aided a major attack on the U.S., its largest customer, and what the involvement of both the Iranian Mullahs and agents close to Saudi Royals means to America’s national security.)

My book and on-going writing contain this central theme - why great civilizations fail and what that means to us.

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