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Members of bin Laden's family and other important Saudis were "driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks." The flights to Texas and Washington occurred before the national air ban was lifted. 1 On September 13th a Lear Jet flew a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan and a Saudi army commander from Tampa, FL to Lexington, KY. Then the two flew on a private 747 out of the country. 2
The 9/11 Commission attempted to deflect the charge that Saudi nationals were afforded special treatment by deceptively implying that all flights were allowed to resume on September 13th, when in fact private aircraft remained grounded until the 14th.
Originally posted by bsbray11
Members of bin Laden's family and other important Saudis were "driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks." The flights to Texas and Washington occurred before the national air ban was lifted. 1 On September 13th a Lear Jet flew a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan and a Saudi army commander from Tampa, FL to Lexington, KY. Then the two flew on a private 747 out of the country. 2
The 9/11 Commission attempted to deflect the charge that Saudi nationals were afforded special treatment by deceptively implying that all flights were allowed to resume on September 13th, when in fact private aircraft remained grounded until the 14th.
Source, which has links to the footnotes and stuff (the numbers in the above are supposed to be superscripts).
According to the same link, which references a 2005 NY Times article, two Saudi families were actually flown out by the FBI.
Originally posted by Lumos
Don't forget political capital to be made. 9/11 has critically altered the american psyche, providing essentially carte-blanche for all kinds of outrageous policy changes.
Preemptive war?
Torture?
Eavesdropping?
Constitution shredding?
etc. pp.
War on Terror!
Originally posted by count zero
Also don't forget the SEC documents destroyed in WTC 7
In 1994, Saudi Arabia stripped bin Laden of citizenship for alleged terrorist links and his family disavowed him, at least publicly.
The bin Laden family (Arabic: بن لادن), also spelt bin Ladin, is an immensely wealthy family intimately connected with the innermost circles of the Saudi royal family. The family was thrown into media spotlight through the activities of one of its members, Osama bin Laden. The bin Laden family owns and operates a global corporation annually grossing 5 billion U.S. dollars, based upon the largest construction firm in the Islamic world, with offices in London and Geneva.
Osama bin Laden's niece, in an interview with GQ magazine in which she appears scantily clad, says she has nothing in common with the al-Qaida leader and simply wants acceptance by Americans.
"Everyone relates me to that man, and I have nothing to do with him," Wafah Dufour, the daughter of bin Laden's half brother, Yeslam Binladin, says in the January edition of magazine, referring to the Al-Qaida leader.
"I want to be accepted here, but I feel that everybody's judging me and rejecting me," said the California-born Dufour, a law graduate who lives in New York. "Come on, where's the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are like yours. And I'm here. I'm not hiding."
[edit] Business connections of the Bush and bin Laden families
Michael Moore's highly critical theatrical documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 alleges strong business connections between the Bush family and the bin Laden family. Moore based most of his claims on Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud which relates how Salem bin Laden invested through James R. Bath, the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, some money in Arbusto Energy, a company run by George W. Bush [1].
On the morning of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, was meeting with Osama bin Laden's brother, Shafig bin Laden, in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Washington, on Carlyle Group business. The New York Times reported that they were quickly called together by officials from the Saudi Embassy, which feared that they might become the victims of American reprisals. With approval from the F.B.I., according to a Saudi official, the bin Ladens flew by private jet from Los Angeles to Orlando, then on to Washington, D.C. and finally to Boston. Once the FAA permitted overseas flights, the jet flew to Europe.
The bin Laden family (Arabic: بن لادن), also spelt bin Ladin, is an immensely wealthy family intimately connected with the innermost circles of the Saudi royal family.
However, Peter Bergen, a CNN journalist and adjunct professor who is known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, refuted Cook's notion, stating on August 15, 2006, the following:
The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.
The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?
Originally posted by Griff
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Edit: Sorry for the double info. I just read Mauddib's post. BTW, Mauddib, why are you getting so worked up about his niece? I haven't seen any mention of the "evil" Bin Ladens on this threrad.