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Saturday, August 02, 2003

Is Bush really protecting the Saudis?
I said a few days ago that I thought I had figured out what the Saudi "demand" that the 28 pages be released was all about: a carefully orchestrated charade to make the Saudis look innocent and Bush look competent. One thing that has nagged at me, though, is that it seems as though a necessary part of the charade would have been that Bush shared what was in the 28 pages with the Saudis. After the meeting with Bush, the Saudi prince said he understood the reasons for keeping the pages secret, which he didn't before (all of this while we are pretending to believe the charade was real--that is the Saudis were truly outraged before and mollified after meeting with Bush). It seems almost required that anyone believing the charade would have to believe that the Saudis were shown the 28 pages. If this is so, doesn't that severely undercut the national security argument? I mean, here we have information that Bush isn't willing to share with the American public but is willing to share with the government of a country that provided 15 of the 19 hijackers, the mastermind, and a lot of the money to the 9/11 attacks.

This leads to the point of an article that Tatiana e-mailed to our peace group:

Bush seems to be less concerned with national security--the only legitimate reason for censorship--and more concerned with not providing lawmakers and journalists information that might lead them to a sobering question: What if the "Saudi ties" are in reality homegrown?

If Saudi ties find their knot in the U.S. then all current questions must be changed. No longer do we ask why the Saudi information is still classified, but which Saudi ties can be traced back to the United States? And who forced the classification? Who are these suspects President Bush is so scared to have mentioned?


The article then goes on to discuss numerous US-based corporations which have numerous ties with both the Saudis and the Bush administrations (41 and 43). It concludes thusly:

Finally, the involvement of private U.S. military contractors (passively or actively) with terrorists can no longer be ignored. The most popular private military contractors are MPRI, Halliburton Brown + Root, L3, and DynCorp, all of which had contracts with Saudi Arabia.

All of the preceding information can be found in the news archives of various internet sites. It is public knowledge and none of it risks national security. In a move that would make Monty Python blush, President Bush decided not to declassify information that is already available to the average sleuth. The result is, the mainstream media will not pick up on any of this “classified” information and the majority of Americans not inclined to research anything on their own will eat the spoon-fed spin of their favorite networks. You can look for that spin to go something like this:

Saudi Arabia is a base for Al-Quaeda. We thought they were our friends but they said one thing in our language and another thing in their own. The major financiers of terrorism reside in Saudi Arabia.

Once this becomes doctrine, the PNAC cabal headed by Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz will start promoting their biggest dream: a winner-takes-all invasion of Saudi Arabia. This is a dream wet in oil and blood.


Of course, the Saudis may already be thinking of the lesson that Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein could teach--that being a US "ally" can be hazardous to your health.