Thread: Why Does Assad Believe He Can Get Away With His Crimes?

Originally Posted by Abu Sina

well one thing is clear

Saudi Qatar and USA have set up Al Qaeda in Syria now and are arming and funding them through Iraq and Lebanon

I suggest that you prove your claim.........

As subsequent events and revelations have made clear, the Saudis had reason to fear the inquiries of the
Clinton administration. There was a lot to hide.

In the eighties, the House of Saud had encouraged donations to charities that funneled tens of millions of dollars to bin Laden's Afghan Arabs during the Afghanistan War. But over the years, as Al Qaeda evolved from Afghan Arab freedom fighters into sophisticated anti-American terrorists, Osama bin Laden had effectively hijacked countless
millions to fund terrorism.

As a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations later put it,

"These widely unregulated, seldom audited, and generally undocumented practices have allowed
unscrupulous actors such as al-Qaeda to access huge sums of money over the years."

The funds regularly flowed through Saudi Arabia's biggest bank, Khalid bin Mahfouz's National
Commercial Bank.

According to court documents filed in a $1-trillion lawsuit by more than four
thousand relatives of the victims of 9/11 against hundreds of wealthy Saudis and others who had
allegedly aided bin Laden, "A bank audit of NCB in 1998 showed that over a ten year period, $74
million was funneled by its Zakat Committee to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a
Muslim charity headed by Osama bin Laden's brother in law."




Congressional testimony by Vincent
Cannistraro, former chief of operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which was also cited in
the court case, adds that much of "the money is paid as 'protection' to avoid having the enterprises run
by these men attacked" by Al Qaeda terrorists.

Money transfers through NCB were allegedly used
to finance a number of bin Laden's terrorist acts, including the attempted assassination of Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak in 1995. Mubarak was constantly at war with Islamic militants in his
own country and in Sudan.


The National Commercial Bank was not the only institution tied to the bin Mahfouz family alleged to
have aided terrorist funding.

In 1991, Khalid bin Mahfouz had created the Muwafaq (Blessed Relief)
Foundation, hoping, according to a spokesman, "to establish an endowment like the Rockefeller
Foundation to give grants for disaster relief, education, and health."

His son, Abdulrahman bin
Mahfouz, had become a director of it. However, the U.S. Treasury Department later concluded that
Muwafaq transferred "millions of dollars from wealthy Saudi businessmen to bin Laden."

Even though the bin Laden family claimed to have cut off ties with their errant terrorist sibling, that
was not clearly the case for the entire extended family.


According to Carmen bin Laden, an
estranged sister-in-law of Osama's, several members of the family may have continued to give money
to Osama. At least one member of the family, Osama's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa,
was a central figure in Al Qaeda and was widely reported to be linked to the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing and was alleged to have funded a Philippine terrorist group.



Two other relatives were key figures in a charitable foundation linked to Osama. The American branch
of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was directed by Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in
Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.

His brother Omar bin Laden was also on WAMY's
board.

WAMY members have denied that the organization has been involved in terrorist activities.

But
the charity, which published writings by Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, one of bin Laden's intellectual
influences, was cited by Indian officials and the Philippine military for funding terrorism in
Kashmir and the Philippines.

"WAMY was involved in terrorist support activity," says a security
official who served under George W. Bush.
"There's no doubt about it." FBI documents marked
"Secret" and coded "199," indicating a national security case, show that Abdullah bin Laden and Omar
bin Laden were under investigation by the FBI for nine months in 1996 and that the file was reopened
on September 19, 2001, eight days after the 9/11 attacks.



Then there was the Saudi royal family itself.


According to court documents in the 9/11 families'
lawsuit, after the Gulf War in 1991, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, the father of Prince Bandar,
supported and funded several Islamic charities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization,
that allegedly provided funds to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda totaling at least $6 million.



Sultan's attorneys acknowledge that for sixteen consecutive years he approved annual payments
of about $266,000 to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Saudi charity whose U.S. offices
were raided by federal agents.

Finally, there was Prince Bandar.

Saudi royalty, including Bandar and his wife, frequently came to the
aid of Saudis who had financial trouble when they were abroad. As first reported by Michael Isikoff
of Newsweek, in 1998 when Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in California, pleaded for financial
assistance from the Saudi embassy in Washington because his wife was suffering from a thyroid
condition,

Prince Bandar wrote a check for $15,000. In addition, his wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal,
began sending the couple a stipend of roughly $2,000 a month. According to the Baltimore Sun,
over a four-year period the sum given by Bandar and his wife came to roughly $130,000.


As it
turned out, Basnan was said to be an Al Qaeda sympathizer and signed the money over to another
Saudi who had moved to the United States, Omar al-Bayoumi. Al- Bayoumi also had Al Qaeda
connections -- and he had other things in mind for Bandar's funds. In turn, al-Bayoumi subsidized two
other newly arrived Saudis, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, two of the men who helped hijack
American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon in the September 11 plot. What had
happened was undeniable: Funds from Prince Bandar's wife had indirectly ended up in the hands of the
hijackers.

To date the Al Saud have kept the Khobar and Riyadh file securely locked up and away from any investigation. Many Americans died in the bombing but Al Saud will not allow any investigation into it by USA.

Originally Posted by Margot

I suggest that you prove your claim.........

Turn on your TV Margot

Only the blind and deaf and dumb are ignoring the facts now

What goes around comes around, after this conflict is over ALQ will use those weapons against the west and Americans will make their corporate people happy by hiring Blackwaters and the likes for protection .
Talk about moving the market here !

In fact, whenever the United States tried to investigate these charitable donations or looked at financial
institutions such as the National Commercial Bank, the House of Saud performed a well-rehearsed
rendition of Captain Renault in Casablanca proclaiming himself "Shocked! Shocked!" that funds were
flowing to terrorists.

According to counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, when U.S. counterterrorism
officials tried to trace terrorist funding through Islamic charities, the Saudis inevitably came back with
one of two answers. "They said we need more information from you, or that they had looked and
hadn't found anything. "


Clarke suggests that the lack of cooperation from the Saudis occurs because they have responded to Al
Qaeda in different ways.


Some actively support the terrorists while some cooperate with Al Qaeda in
the hope that the group will leave them alone. Others merely resent American interference in what they
see as their own domestic issues. "Some of them were clearly sympathetic to Al Qaeda," Clarke says.





But the larger point is that the complex, impenetrable, and unregulated system of Islamic charities
actually enabled the House of Saud to have it both ways.

Through their generous charitable donations,
they could both establish their bona fides as good Muslims and even buy "protection" from militants.


And thanks to the unregulated nature of the charities, they could do so in a way that gave them
plausible deniability to the West.

In addition, many things suggest that the House of Saud was not nearly so naive as it professed to be.


Despite its pronouncement that the 1995 Riyadh attack was not the work of dissidents, the
Saudis clearly knew better.

Privately, Minister of Intelligence Prince Turki had even told Egyptian
authorities that bin Laden's Afghan Arabs were behind the attack, probably with the help of
accomplices who had infiltrated the Saudi National Guard.


In fact, a few days after the bombing, threatening letters had been faxed to the private fax numbers of
several high-level Saudi officials, including Prince Turki and Interior Minister Prince Nayef.




The implications were staggering.






The fax numbers were for the exclusive use of the highest-ranking
members of the royal family.





The National Guard's sole mission was to protect the House of Saud.
Terrorists had penetrated the House of Saud's last line of defense -- and the royal family clearly knew
it.





Moreover, there were thousands of princes in the family, and many of them were said to be privately
delighted by the bombings:


"A lot of the royal princes remained sympathetic to bin Laden, even after
his citizenship was stripped," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and the
author of Sleeping with The Devil. "Quite a few of the junior princes hate the U.S."



Some of the senior royalty may have felt the same way. According to Yossef Bodansky's Bin Laden;
The Man Who Declared War on America, it was widely speculated that no less a figure than
Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the powerful governor of Riyadh, had advance knowledge of the 1995
bombing and allowed it to take place to solidify his political position.





A brother of King Fahd and
Prince Sultan's, and a member of the Sudairi Seven, Prince Salman may have hoped to use the growing
Islamist violence and his putative ability to control it to advance his fortunes -- perhaps even all the
way to the throne.




When it came to dealing with the West, of course, the House of Saud revealed none of this internecine
complexity, preferring to project the image of a stable monarchy that ruled a patriotic populace that
honored its legitimacy and authority.

Despite pressure from Clinton, in the end the Saudis simply
declined to press any charges whatsoever against bin Laden for the 1995 Riyadh bombing and the
Khobar Towers bombing on 1996.

On November 5, 1998, Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef bin
Abdul Aziz said, "It has been reported that the two explosions in Riyadh and Khobar were planned by
Osama bin Laden. This is not true."


Nayef went further, asserting, with astonishing logic, that because the kingdom had revoked his
citizenship, bin Laden was no longer a Saudi and therefore the Saudis no longer had any interest in the
activities masterminded by the world's most wanted terrorist. "He does not constitute any security
problem to us and has no activity in the kingdom," said Nayef. "Regarding his external activity, we are
not concerned because he is not a Saudi citizen." The House of Saud failed to have bin Laden
extradited from Afghanistan, where he was a guest of the Taliban, and declined to prosecute him
legally.




And so, the double game continued -- though by now, through his repeated bombings, bin Laden had
upped the ante. Through the late nineties, cash flowed virtually unrestricted into bin Laden's and
Al Qaeda's coffers as they escalated their jihad against the West.

Originally Posted by mutmekep

What goes around comes around, after this conflict is over ALQ will use those weapons against the west and Americans will make their corporate people happy by hiring Blackwaters and the likes for protection .
Talk about moving the market here !

That jinni that the US created cannot be put back into the lamp and now they are using it in the nest way they can.

To control the entire ME

At the end of the day we all know who makes the $$$$$$$$$$$

Carlisle Group

and who own that and has stakes in that..........?

CIA steering aid to Syrian rebels

A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.


The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/wo...?smid=tw-share

Now didn't the UN and Annan Peace Plan say ALL SIDES were to STOP arming rebels?

USA as usual is the conductor in this latest orchestra of war

Do you have a link?

Originally Posted by Abu Sina

As subsequent events and revelations have made clear, the Saudis had reason to fear the inquiries of the
Clinton administration. There was a lot to hide.

In the eighties, the House of Saud had encouraged donations to charities that funneled tens of millions of dollars to bin Laden's Afghan Arabs during the Afghanistan War. But over the years, as Al Qaeda evolved from Afghan Arab freedom fighters into sophisticated anti-American terrorists, Osama bin Laden had effectively hijacked countless
millions to fund terrorism.

As a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations later put it,

"These widely unregulated, seldom audited, and generally undocumented practices have allowed
unscrupulous actors such as al-Qaeda to access huge sums of money over the years."

The funds regularly flowed through Saudi Arabia's biggest bank, Khalid bin Mahfouz's National
Commercial Bank.

According to court documents filed in a $1-trillion lawsuit by more than four
thousand relatives of the victims of 9/11 against hundreds of wealthy Saudis and others who had
allegedly aided bin Laden, "A bank audit of NCB in 1998 showed that over a ten year period, $74
million was funneled by its Zakat Committee to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a
Muslim charity headed by Osama bin Laden's brother in law."




Congressional testimony by Vincent
Cannistraro, former chief of operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which was also cited in
the court case, adds that much of "the money is paid as 'protection' to avoid having the enterprises run
by these men attacked" by Al Qaeda terrorists.

Money transfers through NCB were allegedly used
to finance a number of bin Laden's terrorist acts, including the attempted assassination of Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak in 1995. Mubarak was constantly at war with Islamic militants in his
own country and in Sudan.


The National Commercial Bank was not the only institution tied to the bin Mahfouz family alleged to
have aided terrorist funding.

In 1991, Khalid bin Mahfouz had created the Muwafaq (Blessed Relief)
Foundation, hoping, according to a spokesman, "to establish an endowment like the Rockefeller
Foundation to give grants for disaster relief, education, and health."

His son, Abdulrahman bin
Mahfouz, had become a director of it. However, the U.S. Treasury Department later concluded that
Muwafaq transferred "millions of dollars from wealthy Saudi businessmen to bin Laden."

Even though the bin Laden family claimed to have cut off ties with their errant terrorist sibling, that
was not clearly the case for the entire extended family.


According to Carmen bin Laden, an
estranged sister-in-law of Osama's, several members of the family may have continued to give money
to Osama. At least one member of the family, Osama's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa,
was a central figure in Al Qaeda and was widely reported to be linked to the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing and was alleged to have funded a Philippine terrorist group.



Two other relatives were key figures in a charitable foundation linked to Osama. The American branch
of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was directed by Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in
Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.

His brother Omar bin Laden was also on WAMY's
board.

WAMY members have denied that the organization has been involved in terrorist activities.

But
the charity, which published writings by Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, one of bin Laden's intellectual
influences, was cited by Indian officials and the Philippine military for funding terrorism in
Kashmir and the Philippines.

"WAMY was involved in terrorist support activity," says a security
official who served under George W. Bush.
"There's no doubt about it." FBI documents marked
"Secret" and coded "199," indicating a national security case, show that Abdullah bin Laden and Omar
bin Laden were under investigation by the FBI for nine months in 1996 and that the file was reopened
on September 19, 2001, eight days after the 9/11 attacks.



Then there was the Saudi royal family itself.


According to court documents in the 9/11 families'
lawsuit, after the Gulf War in 1991, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, the father of Prince Bandar,
supported and funded several Islamic charities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization,
that allegedly provided funds to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda totaling at least $6 million.



Sultan's attorneys acknowledge that for sixteen consecutive years he approved annual payments
of about $266,000 to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Saudi charity whose U.S. offices
were raided by federal agents.

Finally, there was Prince Bandar.

Saudi royalty, including Bandar and his wife, frequently came to the
aid of Saudis who had financial trouble when they were abroad. As first reported by Michael Isikoff
of Newsweek, in 1998 when Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in California, pleaded for financial
assistance from the Saudi embassy in Washington because his wife was suffering from a thyroid
condition,

Prince Bandar wrote a check for $15,000. In addition, his wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal,
began sending the couple a stipend of roughly $2,000 a month. According to the Baltimore Sun,
over a four-year period the sum given by Bandar and his wife came to roughly $130,000.


As it
turned out, Basnan was said to be an Al Qaeda sympathizer and signed the money over to another
Saudi who had moved to the United States, Omar al-Bayoumi. Al- Bayoumi also had Al Qaeda
connections -- and he had other things in mind for Bandar's funds. In turn, al-Bayoumi subsidized two
other newly arrived Saudis, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, two of the men who helped hijack
American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon in the September 11 plot. What had
happened was undeniable: Funds from Prince Bandar's wife had indirectly ended up in the hands of the
hijackers.

To date the Al Saud have kept the Khobar and Riyadh file securely locked up and away from any investigation. Many Americans died in the bombing but Al Saud will not allow any investigation into it by USA.