07/24/16 – Larisa Alexandrovna Horton – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, July 24th, 2016, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show it is, Anti-War Radio, here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Every Sunday morning at 8.30, I'm your host, Scott Horton.
And today, we have a very special guest.
My wife, investigative reporter Larissa Alexandrovna.
First time we've done this in a while.
She's got a new piece out that ran on Anti-War.com the other day.
The 28 Pages Explained.
Welcome to the show, dear.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
Alright, so late last week, the government finally declassified the 28 pages, the famous 28 pages of the original House and Senate Congressional Joint Committee investigation of the 9-11 attacks and how they took place.
And the 28 pages, as we've all known for quite some time, have quite a bit to do with the role of certain Saudis in their relations with the actual hijackers who did the attack of September 11th.
And quite a bit of this information has been known in the past, but now the 28 pages have finally been revealed.
And of course, all of the major media agrees.
Move along.
Nothing to see here.
No new information.
Jeez, we can't even figure out why it was classified in the first place.
Because there's just nothing at all.
And jeez, 28 is a really big number.
You don't want to try to read all the way through that, do you?
Just forget it.
Well, Larissa didn't just forget it.
She dove right in.
She was also a consultant and screenwriter on the documentary 9-11 Press for Truth.
So she has a long history with this information and has the best write-up by far so far of what we've learned from the 28 pages.
So very happy to have you on the show here today, dear.
And I really encourage people to find this article.
It's called The 28 Pages Explained at Antiwar.com.
And I guess, would it be okay if, first of all, you give us a little bit of background of what we already knew about the 28 pages?
Because one of the major talking points on TV and major websites is that, well, you know, it's kind of all just raw, unvetted material.
So it may or may not mean anything, and you can't really put any stock in it.
So just don't worry about it.
Well, actually, you're right.
The talking points have been that it's raw and unvetted and then also that there's nothing new in it.
And both talking points are incorrect.
First of all, yes, we did know a lot of information from the 28 pages because it's been 14 years since they were classified, and there were numerous FBI and CIA and whatnot investigations, and those were leaked to the press.
So, yes, we do know quite a bit.
However, just because we know that and it's now again reaffirmed doesn't make those allegations any less important.
And finally, there is also new information.
And there's also context.
And together it paints a pretty damning picture.
So anyone who says there's nothing new hasn't read it, and anyone who says that what's in there isn't damning either doesn't understand or is lying because it's pretty damning.
So you had 19 guys in the country for almost a year and a half, but they weren't just their own handlers taking care of all of their own needs.
Were others in the country helping them?
That's right.
And the 28 pages primarily focuses on the hijackers living in San Diego, which I call the San Diego cell.
They are the ones that crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11.
And this document primarily deals with them and their handlers.
And you're right.
They didn't just arrive into the country and just go about their business.greeted by a welcome wagon.
The person that greeted them, a man by the name of Omar al-Bayoumi, was an employee of the Saudi Ministry of Defense as well as the Saudi Civil Aviation Administration.
He had extensive ties to the Saudi embassy, and that includes phone calls as well as financial ties, which we'll get into later, I assume.
But he picked these guys up, took them to his apartment, and then also got them their own apartment and co-signed for it.
He gave them money.
He drove them to grocery stores, to the Social Security office to get their driver's licenses.
He helped them find flight schools.
He had several of his associates also help them and everything from flight schools to learning English.
I mean, these guys literally had a babysitter from the time they arrived to the time that they boarded those planes.
All right.
So talk about that part because when I read the 28 pages, it seems like most of the contact and money being transferred to these guys all took place quite a long time before September 11th.
So what are you referring to there?
Okay.
So what I'm talking about is the year prior to September 11th.
So all of 2000, the hijackers were—this is the San Diego soul because that's what the 28 pages is about.
They had handlers that were helping them in every facet of their life.
I mean, literally, grocery stores, this, that, and the other thing.
At the end of 2000, in December 2000, they and who would become the pilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon, Hani Hanjur, those three moved to Arizona, and their connection to this gentleman, al-Bayoumi, ended.
However, the night before the attacks on September 10th, they stayed at a hotel with a man from the Saudi Ministry of the Interior by the name of Hussein.
And when the FBI questioned him, he faked the seizure.
And when he was taken to the hospital, it was found that there was nothing wrong with him.
And he went off back to Saudi Arabia, where he was promoted to the president of the holy sites, probably the highest religious government position there is.
So when I say that they had a minder from the time they got here to the time that they boarded those planes, I'm quite serious.
There was somebody in contact with them or helping them or positioned near them for all that time.
And now it's interesting, isn't it, that in the 28 pages they say, well, this Saudi official stayed at the same hotel the same month as the hijackers before the attack.
But then, as you point out in your article, it's been previously reported that he was there the night of September 10th, 11th.
That's right.
But you have to remember that these pages were classified for 14 years.
So in the interim, there were additional investigations, and that was leaked to the press.
So there are things that are known to the public that the 28 pages, in fact, doesn't necessarily mention, and this is one of them.
But most of the things that are known to the public that are mentioned in the 28 pages are pretty explosive, and there's additional information making it that much more explosive, in particular with regard to the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar.
All right.
Well, tell us all about him.
Who's Prince Bandar?
In the Saudi government, the Saudi family and the Saudi government are one and the same.
And Bandar is fairly high up there in terms of rank.
After the attacks of 9-11 in 2005, he goes on to become head of intelligence.
His father, at the time of the attacks, Prince Sultan is the head of the Ministry of Defense.
And in 2005, Prince Sultan becomes the second in line to the throne as the crown prince.
So Bandar is fairly high up there, and he's also very close to the political establishment of the United States.
In fact, he's so close to the Bush family that he's been nicknamed Bandar Bush.
So he's the face of Saudi Arabia in the United States.
All right.
And now, so what exactly do these 28 pages show or prove about Prince Bandar and his role in running these hijackers?
Well, I'm not saying he ran these hijackers, and neither do the 28 pages.
What they say, however, is that he had a relationship, a financial one, with the handlers.
Remember, I mentioned that when the hijackers had gotten here, and in particular we're talking about the San Diego cell because that's what this document is about.
When they had arrived here, they had babysitters, minders, people who basically did everything for them.
Well, those people are who Bandar has an association with, not the actual hijackers.
And, for example, one of the things the 28 pages tells us is that Prince Bandar's wife wrote 31 checks to one of these handlers who was handling the San Diego cell, 31 checks totaling almost $75,000.
Prince Bandar wrote at least one check to these people.
Now, Bandar and his wife run several charity organizations.
So if this was a charity donation, which some have alleged, then why didn't they use their charity organizations from which to write these checks?
Instead, they used their own accounts from Riggs Bank.
So there's that connection.
Then there's the phone records that show that the embassy had high traffic communications with the handlers of the hijackers.
There were at least 100 calls, or almost, I'm sorry, almost 100 calls from Al Bayoumi, the babysitter, to the embassy from the time the hijackers arrived until April of that year.
And that doesn't include the other government agencies the handlers had in contact.
It doesn't include the Los Angeles consulate, the Saudi consulate, which the handlers had excessive communications with.
And one of the officials at the consulate was also an imam in a local mosque where the hijackers went.
So there's so many connections to the embassy and to Bandar and the handlers of the 9-11 hijackers.
But my favorite, I think, two connections aren't directly to the 9-11 hijackers, but to terrorist suspects elsewhere.
For example, Abu Zubaydah, and you know who that is, but I'll just briefly mention this is a suspected Al-Qaeda member, a high-ranking one.
When he was captured in Pakistan, on his person was found a phone book, which contained an Aspen phone number, an unlisted Aspen phone number.
When the FBI investigated this phone number, it turned out to belong to a ghost company, and by that I mean a company that has no official documents with the state of Colorado.
And this ghost company was created, and its sole purpose is to manage the private estate of Prince Bandar's Aspen home.
Now, what are the odds of that kind of connection?
But there was another number found in Zubaydah's phone book, and that was of a security company that provided security for a management company.
And that company also is unlisted, and it also is a ghost company, but it also has ties to this Bayoumi, this babysitter of the hijackers.
So there's that bizarre connection to Zubaydah.
The other one that I found really fascinating was a man whose number was found in Osama bin Laden's safe house in Pakistan.
This man is in Virginia.
He's not named.
You're talking about his safe house that he had back in 2001, not his safe house that he was busted in, in 2011.
Right, correct, correct.
This is around the 9-11 attacks, correct.
So this guy from Virginia, and we don't know anything about him, but his number is found in the safe house.
So the FBI goes to talk to him, and he doesn't know how his number got there.
Well, upon interviewing him and speaking with him, they learned that he works for two assistants for Prince Bandar, and that Prince Bandar's driver, his limo driver, knows this guy and also travels to Pakistan regularly.
So even if you put aside the domestic contacts to the hijackers via handlers, you still have these strange findings where this ranking member of the House of Saud, who's also a ranking member of their government, has connections to terrorists all over the place.
All right, now, so to get back to the money in San Diego, you talk about in the article, there seems to be a pretty obvious difference between overall Saudi protection money paid to al-Qaeda, that, hey, just don't blow up anything inside the kingdom and we'll leave you alone, versus what seemed to be real tight correlations in San Diego between the actions of the eventual hijackers and the amounts of money that they were getting.
So it doesn't just seem like Bandar and or through his wife, he wasn't just paying this guy Bayoumi, the Saudi intelligence official, but he was increasing payments as the hijackers came in, increasing payments as connections were made with people looking for flight schools to put them in, etc., like that.
Do I have that right?
Well, sort of.
OK, so Bandar and his wife were paying money via a man named Omar Basnan, who was working for Bayoumi, whose cover also was with the Saudi government.
So he's another Saudi intelligence officer.
He's one of the babysitters.
So there's two babysitters for the San Diego cell, Basnan and Bayoumi.
And the Bandar family, his wife and he, were paying money through the second guy to his wife, and then his wife was signing over checks to Bayoumi's wife.
And that was the process.
So you have Bandar's wife to Basnan's wife, who then signed it over to Bayoumi's wife.
And those checks, the amounts changed when the hijackers arrived.
But more importantly, Bayoumi was also receiving money from the Saudi Department of Defense, which at the time, as I noted, the head of that was Prince Sultan, Bandar's father.
He was getting money from a company run by the Department of Defense.
And that money also increased in amount right around the time of the arrival of the hijackers.
So he's being paid both by the Saudi government officially and by Prince Bandar separately.
And then as a third guy I mentioned, this Basnan guy is also being paid by the Saudi government officially and is also being paid separately by Bandar, Bandar's wife.
And then this second guy, Basnan, is also getting money from an unnamed Saudi royal, that we find out about this later.
So there's all these channels of money.
Now, you had mentioned an agreement made by Saudi Arabia with bin Laden.
This alleged agreement was made by Prince Turki, who was the head of intelligence at the time.
And just FYI, he resigned 10 days before 9-11.
But he was the head of intelligence.
And it has come out since 9-11 that he had brokered an agreement with bin Laden and al-Qaeda that they stay out of Saudi Arabia, that they don't target Saudi Arabia or try to promote rise-ups there, that they basically leave the Saudis alone.
And in exchange, they will be provided with money for the Taliban and money for bin Laden and things like that.
When you look at the operations in the U.S., the money that was being paid wasn't ideological in terms of we're providing it for this larger movement of the Taliban and their beliefs.
It wasn't to bin Laden.
It was quite literally to these Saudi intelligence officers.
In other words, the Saudi government is paying itself.
That wouldn't fall in terms of the people I've talked to who have reviewed this stuff.
That wouldn't fall into the channels of this agreement, this protection agreement that Prince Turki made with Osama bin Laden.
So this appears to be a separate avenue of financing.
All right, now this calls for speculation here, but you're a longtime Intelligence Beat reporter and you have a pretty good handle on this stuff.
What about the idea that Bandar and even these Saudi intelligence handlers didn't know what these al-Qaeda guys were doing?
Maybe they even knew they were al-Qaeda guys and they were in the country for some reason.
But do you have any real indication that the purpose of all this money and all this coordination was to accomplish the actual September 11th attacks?
Well, I mean, I can't say for sure, and I certainly don't have the evidence.
I mean, there's people I've talked to who speculate everything from the CIA was trying to recruit these guys to the FBI was trying to recruit these guys to infiltrate mosques and spy domestically.
I've heard various theories as to, you know, why these guys were acting this way and collecting this money and doing these things.
The problem is that you actually see the rise in money when the hijackers arrive.
You see a rise in phone calls when the hijackers arrive.
There's this collection of activity that appears to be going towards a purpose.
And so, you know, is it possible that Bandar and Prince Sultan and Prince Turkey and all of these high-level officials in the Saudi government didn't know about the hijackers or what they were doing?
Sure, it's possible.
Is it possible they didn't know the handlers?
I don't think so, because they were paying the handlers from different channels.
It's not – that wouldn't be possible.
So if they know the handlers, the question is, what were the handlers assigned to do and were the handlers double-crossing the Saudi government?
Or were the handlers acting on behalf of the Saudi government?
And the fact that everyone's running around saying there's nothing here makes it kind of hard to believe the Saudis weren't involved, because if they weren't, wouldn't they have arrested these very people who betrayed them?
Well, and of course, all week long the Saudi embassy on Twitter and all over the place has been doing a major PR push here.
And what they do not do is grapple with any of the revelations in the 28 pages.
They simply spin it that there's nothing to see here.
Don't even bother clicking on it.
You won't learn anything if you read it.
There was even an article in Al Arabiya blaming the whole thing on Iran and saying the 28 pages prove that.
But so now we get to the question of the cover-up here.
Many of us have seen pictures of George W. Bush.
Am I imagining the pictures?
We've at least read about, I think we've even seen the pictures, of George W. Bush and Prince Bandar smoking cigars on the Truman Balcony on September 13th, two days after the September 11th attack.
So we're not even talking about a stab in the back here.
We're talking about a guy that, again, as you said, is so close to the Bush family that he's called Bandar Bush, stabbing George W. Bush right in the chest like this and then having the gumption to go and smoke cigars with him on the Truman Balcony.
You could see why people jumped to the conclusion that Bush must have put them up to it in the first place.
Well, you know, I suspect he was there on the balcony that day to organize the evacuation en masse of Saudi nationals because we know that happened right after.
So the thing is I don't know if that proves anything other than a Saudi— look, by then we knew that 15 of the hijackers were Saudi.
The Saudi ambassador shows up.
He shows up to say, hey, oh my God, this is horrible.
What can we do to help?
And also we need to get these innocent Saudis out of the country and blah, blah, blah.
And that makes perfect sense to me.
I think it would be—there isn't evidence other than them sitting there smoking cigars, which they did all the time and, you know, other presidents did before Bush and whatnot.
Unless somebody can give me more evidence than the balcony and cigars, I really can't see that as proof of anything.
Okay, but so why did George W. Bush classify all this stuff instead of bombing Riyadh off the face of the earth?
Okay, well, that is a separate question, and it's not just George W. Bush.
It's the U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia.
And my theory—okay, and again, this is pure speculation.
My theory is twofold.
There's two things going on to explain this cover-up.
One is that our currency is tied to the Saudi oil, and our oil interests have a big stake in that country's security.
And so to protect them, what else were we going to do?
If we bombed them, I mean, what would that do to our currency?
I think it was probably what they were thinking.
Protecting them is our national security, even if they did do it.
The other thing I think is that we've known that certain members of our government who have the revolving door into corporations and back again have had questionable business dealings with Saudi government officials and Saudi royals.
You know, there's the whole BCCI scandal.
So I think there's another part of the cover-up where it's about not uncovering any questionable business dealings.
To me, that's what the cover-up's about, this two-pronged thing, U.S. currency protection and possible criminal activity by U.S. corporations and or government officials in terms of business dealings.
Well, and, of course, that was the problem that got us attacked in the first place was that our government is too close to the government of Saudi Arabia.
Not that the Saudis are our enemies, but that they're too tight of allies, and they let us have military bases in their country, which is what drove Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement to target the United States in the first place.
Yes, you're right.
They had a very close relationship, so much so that we had bases there, and this is part of the problem that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had with the United States.
Ironically, right after 9-11, the Bush administration closed those bases, but we still went ahead and had this war on terror.
And what really galls me is that our ally in the war on terror, Saudi Arabia, is suspiciously connected to those who carried out the attacks on 9-11.
Instead of having issue with the government of Saudi Arabia, we went on to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11, which wasn't funding terrorism, and we aligned ourselves with a country in the greater context of the war on terror, which does fund terrorism, and which was seemingly tied to the attacks of 9-11.
It's mind-boggling.
And who started funding the Sunni-based insurgency against the American occupation within the first year of the occupation beginning.
Yep.
I mean, I have no explanation for this whatsoever, but what I can tell you is that these pages are important.
They're very important because they do show a connection.
And anyone who says otherwise either didn't read them or doesn't understand or, frankly, is lying.
Because if this were Saddam Hussein's U.S. ambassador and he and his wife wrote 31 checks to the handlers of the hijackers, we would have nuked Iraq over this.
If this was Saddam Hussein's ambassador whose phone number was found in the possession of Abu Zubaydah, or whose driver and assistance numbers were found in the safe house of Osama bin Laden, that would have led the campaign to war against Iraq, wouldn't it?
Not some pretend, oh, we've got intelligence on maybe uranium somewhere.
That would have led as the reason why we attack Iraq.
But for some reason this isn't important because it's Saudi Arabia, and that really is concerning.
All right.
Now, you mentioned how these 28 pages focus really only on the Flight 77 cell, the San Diego pilot hijackers there.
But there's so much more to this story, actually came from Saudi Arabia at the last minute, more or less, just in the last couple of months before the attack, and we didn't find out anything about that.
And then it was later revealed, Senator Bob Graham complained, that there was a whole other story of apparently Saudi royals or Saudi mucky mucks of some kind living in Florida and providing aid and comfort to some of the other hijackers, including the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta.
And that's not even in here at all, and that seems like it's its own scandal.
As Bob Graham was saying, he was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and how come the FBI hadn't told them about this?
They certainly knew by the time they were putting this report together in 2002 and 2003.
Right.
There was, in fact, well, let me point out that the 28 pages, as you noted and as I mentioned throughout this conversation, is strictly focused almost exclusively on the San Diego, what I call the San Diego cell, which hit the Pentagon.
Then there's the question of, and the 28 pages doesn't cover this, but there is a whole other support network that existed for the guys who hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
And it was a couple in Florida by the name of Al-Hajiji, who appeared to have had the hijackers at their home on several occasions and who prior to 9-11, like a week or two prior to 9-11, literally vacated their entire home, food still in the fridge, cars still in the driveway, you know, just literally like they had vanished into thin air.
Everything was still operational in their home, lights on in various rooms.
They literally vacated this home.
And also they had found that another operative that the FBI questioned also had seemingly left documents inside embassy envelopes.
Now, we're not sure how he got the embassy envelopes, but in other words, there's a whole other line of investigation that needs to be done on the support for the other hijacker cells.
And clearly there's a whole other group of people that were also somehow involved with the embassy, but we don't have enough information on that.
And Graham is right that he should be outraged.
We should all be outraged.
All right, y'all, that is Larissa Alexandrovna Horton, my wife, investigative reporter, award-winning investigative reporter, formerly with Raw Story.
And she's got this one at Antiwar.com.
It's on the Viewpoints page.
It's a couple days old now.
The 28 pages explained, again, by Larissa Alexandrovna.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 4,000 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
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