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    Interesting little titbit re: Saudis and 9/11 I just read Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on June 6, 2020, 11:34 am

    I'm reading "The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side" by Clive Stafford Smith, about his experiences as lawyer for many of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay; it's an excellent book and even if you think you know how horrendous that whole system was, it will give you fresh insight.

    Anyway, near the end in a chapter mainly concerning KSM these few paragraphs pop up. I can't remember having seen this widely reported, even on sites where the Saudi involvement is taken as read.

    Abu Zubaydah had been in US custody even longer than KSM,
    and there may be even more embarrassing consequences to his appearance
    in a military commission. In his book Why America Slept, Gerald
    Posner describes how the US set up a fake Saudi detention centre in
    Afghanistan, with two agents posing as Saudi intelligence, to pretend
    that Abu Zubaydah had been flown to face the supposedly barbaric
    justice of Saudi Arabia. They expected Abu Zubaydah to tremble with
    fear when he discovered his ‘rendition’.

    However, when Abu Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis,
    ‘his reaction was not fear’, Posner writes, ‘but utter relief ’. He reeled
    off telephone numbers he had memorised for Prince Ahmed bin
    Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a nephew of King Fahd (and a racehorse
    owner whose horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002).
    To the amazement of the Americans, the numbers proved valid.
    ‘He’ll tell you what to do,’ said Abu Zubaydah, who described the
    extensive assistance that Saudis had given to al-Qaeda. The final
    chapter of Posner’s book suggests that the Saudis (inevitably tipped
    off by the Americans, and possibly working with them) found a
    solution to prevent the unwanted publicity that these revelations
    would have entailed.

    Prince Ahmed and two other Saudi royals named
    by Abu Zubaydah coincidentally died within days of each other,
    shortly after Abu Zubaydah’s intelligence was passed along to the
    Saudi government. On 22 July 2002 Prince Ahmed died of a heart
    attack aged forty-three. The next day Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin
    Turki al-Saud was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident
    at the age of forty-one. The last of the three, Prince Fahd bin Turki
    bin Saud al-Kabir, expired one week later, officially dying ‘of thirst’
    while travelling east of Riyadh.

    That's those Saudi princes for you; always dying of thirst. Seriously though, even though I distrust Posner generally, that is a pretty damning story if true.

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