For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's my pleasure.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and researcher.
He writes regularly for IPS News, and you can find all of his archives for IPS at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
And he's got a five-part series just out that's come out in the last week or so about the 1996 Cobar Towers bombing.
And what seems to be a scandal surrounding the official investigation into that bombing.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
I'm glad to be back.
Well, I'm really glad to have you back.
This is a great piece of journalism that you've got here.
I think there's a note at the bottom of one of these articles that the work was financed in part by some foundation or something.
Do you want to give them a shout?
Yeah, sure.
It's the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which is a Washington, D.C.
-based independent organization, which gives small grants to journalists to carry out research on investigative subjects.
And they were kind enough to give me a small grant to spend a few months on this topic.
All right.
Well, now, before we get into the details of the subject matter, I've got to pretend to be devil's advocate here for a second.
I notice that, well, really all of my favorite work of yours is stuff that you do that, you know, basically could be characterized as simply defending the Iranian regime, defending Hezbollah, defending Iran.
No matter what the American empire says about them, all your journalism is about how, no, it ain't so.
So why is that?
Well, I guess it seems that everywhere you look when you read about American foreign policy over the past 15 to 20 years, you know, you have one incident after another in which the United States blamed Iran for various actions, terrorist actions.as well as other policies.
And I'm not suggesting that in no case has Iran ever done anything that was a violation of ethics or international law by any means.
But what I find in, you know, actually looking into the details of the cases where I do investigate, and this is, you know, at this point I would cite, you know, seven or eight different cases.
I always find the same thing at the end of the investigation, which is that it just wasn't true and that, in fact, whether it was a conscious lie or it was a combination of assumptions that were never, that no one had any incentive to examine and simply were the basis for continuing to assume that Iran was behind it.
And so when the effort was really made to look into an alternative, you know, they always came out with basically an accusation which simply is not borne out by the facts when you really delve more deeply into the history of it.
So, you know, at the risk of spoon-feeding you answers here, I don't care.
You're my friend.
I think you're a great reporter.
And I believe that your motives are pure about this.
For the record, it's not that you somehow love the Ayatollahs and want to defend them.
It's that you take your responsibility as checking the truth, the veracity of the statements and official positions of this government, the U.S. government.
Yes, I mean, I don't have any brief for the Iranian regime in terms of defending its internal policies, specifically its political system or anything of the sort.
And I just don't write about that.
One could argue that, you know, that's a topic that an investigative journalist should look at.
But, in fact, what I cover is U.S. national security policy.
And, you know, the issues that I cover are those that are directly relevant to U.S. national security issues.
So, you know, in those issues, what I have found is that, time and again, the truth is very different from what has been presented by the U.S. government and the news media, for the most part.
All right.
Well, let's talk about how the Iranians didn't do the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
That was the official line, I guess.
But who did it?
Well, there's very little question at all.
I would say close to zero question at this point, that it was, in fact, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, which was behind the Khobar Towers bombing.
And in the five-part series, I point to a whole raft of different types of evidence to support that.
You can start with the fact that...
Let's start in chronological order with the bombing in Riyadh that took place in November of 1995.
Right.
I mean, this was the bombing of a headquarters of...
It was something called the program office of the Saudi National Guard.
In other words, the U.S. military mission to the Saudi National Guard was the target of that November 1995 bombing in the capital, Riyadh.
And that killed, if I remember correctly, five U.S. servicemen, as well as some Saudis.
And after several months, it was, I believe, in April that the Saudis announced that they had arrested four former veterans of the Afghan war who had confessed to the Riyadh bombing.
The same day that this was announced, the U.S. embassy requested that it be allowed, that U.S. FBI agents be allowed to interview these four people who had confessed to the bombing.
And the U.S. embassy waited week after week.
Nothing ever happened.
At the end of May, the embassy was informed one hour ahead of the event that these four men were going to be beheaded.
And that's exactly what happened.
So what happened, in effect, was the Saudi government had no intention of allowing any U.S. officials, much less the FBI, to get close to any of these people to actually interview them about who was behind the bombing.
In addition to that, you need to know that in their confession, they talked about having been in a particular camp in Afghanistan, which is known to be a camp that was run by Osama bin Laden.
And they also talked about having been inspired by bin Laden personally.
So they clearly had ties with bin Laden.
The remarkable thing is that the Saudi government allowed those confessions to be broadcast, because it did suggest that al-Qaeda was indeed behind the bombing.
Or at least people who were involved with bin Laden were part of a bin Laden organization.
But that was the first clue that the Saudis had no intention of allowing a U.S. investigation of a terrorist bombing which involved bin Laden's organization.
As well as being a pretty major clue that somebody wasn't very happy with the presence of American soldiers on the Arabian Peninsula.
I thought I remembered this, and I wasn't sure, so I googled it.
And sure enough, right here at the PBS NewsHour website is Osama bin Laden's fatwa of August 1996, where he says, and I might as well quote it directly here, The explosion at Riyadh and Al-Kobar is a warning of this volcanic eruption emerging as a result of the severe oppression, suffering, excessive iniquity, humiliation and poverty.
Right, and that of course has been widely cited, but one of the dodges that you hear from official Americans who are still defending the outcome of the so-called investigation that the FBI carried out, is that, well, bin Laden doesn't actually take responsibility, he merely welcomes the bombing.
But in fact, as I point out in the series, bin Laden twice explicitly took responsibility for the bombing.
Twice?
Now, pardon me, I remember there's one quote in there that you have from the, I forgot the name of it, the newspaper in London, where he says, quote, we bombed Kobar.
But what's the other one?
Well, the other one was also published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
It was a statement in which he talked about the bombings, tying the bombings to his own strategy, and using the term we to refer to, it said we, I'm sorry, there's two items here.
One was the one that you mentioned.
The other one is where he actually said we shook or crushed, we crushed the crusader forces when we bombed them at Kobar.
So that was a very explicit statement of responsibility.
And then some weeks later, he gave another statement or interview, which was published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in which he said that, you know, he again used we in referring to the bombing and said, we thought that the earlier bombings were a, were a warning, sufficient warning to the Americans that they should get out.
But apparently that's not the case.
And referring to both, both Riyadh and Kobar.
Well, you know, it's too bad they couldn't just explain what Osama bin Laden's fatwa said on TV, because he might be giving secret coded messages to terrorists and stuff like that.
Well, I mean, the problem is, of course, that FBI agents and others who prefer to view this as something that was the responsibility of Iran, simply failed to register these two very explicit claims of responsibility for the Kobar bombing, as well as the Riyadh bombing by bin Laden himself.
I mean, it's a remarkable case of simply refusing to look at basic pieces of evidence that point directly to bin Laden.
I mean, I heard more than one FBI agent who I interviewed for this series say, Oh, well, bin Laden never, never claimed responsibility for the bombing.
He only welcomed it.
And that continues to be the belief of virtually everybody who has not really done the necessary research and looked into the actual documentation.
Okay, well, we definitely need to spend a lot of time on the cover up here, the role of Saudi intelligence and of the FBI and so forth.
But I'd like to develop further your thesis that it really was al-Qaeda that did this attack.
I mean, it clearly makes sense when you look at the title of the fatwa, Declaration of Holy War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, and then a truck bomb goes off in front of the barracks of American soldiers, killing 19 of them, wounding 372.
You know, it kind of makes sense on its face, but where did the explosives come from?
Who were the people who drove the truck?
How do you know?
Yes, well, we don't have those specific details, all the details, but we do have a very intriguing intelligence report that was compiled by the bin Laden unit of the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center.
This was a few weeks after the Khobar bombing.
Michael Scheuer, who was then the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, asked his staff to put together, to compile a complete list of all of, not just a list, but to compile the actual intelligence reports, indicating that there was going to be another bombing operation in Saudi Arabia carried out by al-Qaeda.
That is to say, a bombing operation that took place after, that was to take place after the Riyadh bombing.
In other words, only evidence that clearly indicated something after the Riyadh bombing was to be included.
And he came up with a four-page memorandum which had detailed reports on how bin Laden had discussed moving explosives into Yemen, some of which would be going into Saudi Arabia for an operation there, as much as two tons of explosives, according to this report.
Now, bear in mind, these are reports which were compiled after the Riyadh bombing and before the Khobar bomb.
So, clearly, these are not sort of post-facto things that were dredged up.
They were time-relevant to showing that there was evidence that there was a plan in existence after Riyadh and before the Khobar bombing.
So, he did, in fact, compile detailed intelligence showing that there was going to be an operation.
It included Khobar specifically in a list of possibilities.
They did not pinpoint it as the only place, but it was on the list of possibilities.
Now, there was an article in the Village Voice called, Rudy's Ties to a Terror Sheik, and it was about Rudy Giuliani getting a plush contract to do so-called security consulting for some sultan or emir or something over there.
And, in that article, I think he talks about the theory, at least, that the explosives went through this guy al-Thani's farm, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden had both stayed there very recently, and that the government dismissed this tie, I guess in favor of, again, the Iranians did it line, and said, Well, no, because that's an entirely different country.
That's way far away.
But then the Village Voice says, No, it's just on the other side of the fence from Khobar, really.
It's not very far at all.
And it made perfect sense that the explosives had gone through there.
And I forget all the different evidence that he cited, but have you read that article, and do you concur with that at all?
Do you know?
Well, I have looked at that, and of course it was after I had finished the piece, and I did not include it because I had not had a chance to ask further about that information, to look into it further.
But it certainly sounds consistent with everything that I found in my own investigation.
All right.
Well, so is there any other evidence, direct or indirect, that you know of that indicates Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group's involvement in this that I haven't asked you about yet?
Oh, I can think of one that you report in one of these articles here, that they actually, besides arresting these guys, the so-called Saudi Hezbollah, they actually did arrest some al-Qaeda guys and torture them too, even though those guys weren't provided to the FBI and so forth.
Well, there are various strange anomalies in the Saudi account of this bombing, which they blamed, of course, on Saudi Hezbollah, meaning Shia citizens who had been clearly close to Iran.
There's no question about that, that there was a close relationship between Iranian officials and Saudi Hezbollah.
They were both Shia organizations.
They were both...
So there really was such a thing as Saudi Hezbollah.
They didn't just make that up for this story.
They did not make it up.
There was a Saudi Hezbollah.
They were close to Iran.
And let me just say that one of the key reasons that so many American officials believed at that point that, well, it must be Iran, is that it was well known that Iranian agents had been surveilling U.S. military and civilian targets within Saudi Arabia.
In 1994 and 1995, this was something that was widely reported, not in the media, but through intelligence channels, and there have been various accounts of that published since then.
And this was confirmed by one of the Saudis who was accused of being part of the Khobar bombing, who was arrested in Canada, brought to the United States as a terrorist, and interrogated by the FBI.
And he was offering to tell them everything he knew.
He was not trying to deny his Saudi Hezbollah membership or his having worked with the Iranians, and he told them, yes, I did help surveil one military site.
It wasn't Khobar.
He said it was another one.
I helped carry out surveillance of a U.S. military site, but it wasn't to carry out a terrorist bombing.
It wasn't to simply bomb this site.
It was part of a defensive posture of Iran, that in case Iran was attacked by the United States, then Iran would have something to retaliate against.
And he made that point explicitly in the FBI interview that he gave, and I can absolutely attest to that fact.
I have absolutely, on very good authority, that he twice told the FBI that it was not for the purpose of a terrorist bombing.
The surveillance that he participated in was a defensive mechanism by the Iranians to deter U.S. attacks.
Well, now, you also refer to an ambassador or somebody who made the same conclusion, right?
That's right.
This is Ambassador Ron Newman.
He was later U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan in 2005 to 2007.
During this period, 1993-1994, he was the Director of the Office of Iran Affairs in the State Department.
He was the highest-ranking official in the Office of Iran Affairs.
And so he had responsibility for, basically, not for intelligence per se, but for making judgments about Iran's motives and Iran's intentions.
And that was his interpretation of what was happening during that period, and he told me that he, in fact, did circulate his opinion at the time, which was different from what most people believed.
They were suspicious that Iran was preparing for some sort of an attack on the United States.
And can you elaborate at all about the al-Qaeda guys that were arrested by the Saudis and tortured, even though they weren't part of the story of the bombing there?
Let me continue that point.
The Saudi Shia who were arrested, the Saudi Hezbollah people who were arrested, were said to have confessed to the bombing at Kobar.
The Saudis began to tell Americans that they were getting this evidence that the Saudi Shia and Iran were behind it within a matter of very few weeks after the bombing.
But then, in late 1996, they actually handed over to U.S. officials the evidence that they claimed had come from these interrogations of the confessions, I should say, from the Saudi Shia.
The problem is that they would not give the Americans the confessions.
They would not even give them the details.
They would simply give them broad statements saying that this is what happened, we are told that, blah, blah, blah.
And they never would give the Americans any details of the confession.
So the CIA was very skeptical about the Saudi information that they were supposedly extracting from the Saudi Shia.
And not only the CIA, but the Justice Department was quite convinced that these people had been tortured and forced to admit to something that they may or may not have done.
They didn't know.
They just had no idea whether this was the real truth or not.
And they said this could not be used in court, it's worthless as far as evidence is concerned.
And so the Saudi Shia who had been brought to the United States ultimately had to be released because they never had any evidence to hold him there.
Despite the fact that the Saudis were still accusing him of having driven the getaway car from the Khobar Towers.
So basically the Saudi Shia were the scapegoats for the Khobar bombing, essentially to hide the responsibility of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden.
And to keep the Americans from following the bin Laden trail to what would ultimately have been found to be links between bin Laden and a high-ranking Saudi official.
Particularly the Interior Ministry and Saudi Intelligence.
Well now, what exactly do you think that relationship entailed at that time?
I know that there's an article by Greg Pallas that came out not too long after September 11th.
Where he talks about a meeting that took place at a hotel in Paris, France.
Where basically I think Prince Bandar and Prince Turki al-Faisal both came with sacks of money with dollar signs on them to pay off Osama bin Laden's bag men.
Basically protection money I think is how Pallas characterized it.
Look, just don't blow up things in Saudi Arabia and we'll keep you paid.
Just leave us alone, go blow up somebody else.
I don't know the details of when and where payoffs may have been made.
But what I did cover in this series is the evidence that came from multiple sources.
And which was referred to in the 9-11 commission report actually.
As well as more recent reporting.
That the Saudi regime did in fact approach the Taliban leadership.
And ask them to go to bin Laden and say look, if you come back to Saudi Arabia and accept the legitimacy of the Saudi royal family and the regime.
We won't give you any problems.
Just as long as you don't target us.
And as long as you just target the US military.
So that part of it seems to be very well documented.
Based on reports that apparently intermediaries and people relating to the Taliban who had talked to the Taliban had picked up.
This was the message that came from the Saudi regime.
So why is it that the FBI rather than say American military intelligence or military police forces or the CIA or whatever would be in charge of this investigation.
I thought the FBI's power stopped where the water meets the dirt there on the east coast.
Well this is a very interesting point that you're raising.
In fact one wonders whether that made any sense at all.
The rationale however was that they expected to be able to actually get evidence that could be used to prosecute the terrorists behind the bombing at Khobar Towers.
And that was the rationale for having the FBI carry out what was supposed to have been a major investigation.
They had 125 people who were sent to Saudi Arabia to begin the process to actually to police up the crime scene.
That is the Khobar Towers bombing scene.
When they got there there were some things that they could do but they were basically prevented from doing most of the kind of work that it would be necessary to do to do a full investigation.
Of that bombing.
Now don't get me wrong I'm curious about the legal technicality although I guess it just comes down to whether Janet Reno writes a piece of paper that says it's okay or not.
But I think it's important that actually that that is the model that America follows when it comes to things like this.
I think that's what we should be doing is trying people in our courts and affording them the Bill of Rights and convicting them anyway if they're guilty.
Well I mean I think that's a good theory.
In the case of Saudi Arabia as I point out in my series it became clear within a matter of a few days.
I mean I'm talking about within two to three days at most that the Saudi government had no intention of allowing the United States to carry out an investigation of that bombing.
Well and that's the important point is that the FBI can't be expected to be able to do anything if they don't have Bill Clinton's 100 percent of his belligerence on their side telling the Saudis you better knock it off and cooperate with my cops over there man.
Which he obviously was not doing.
Well it's not clear that he was not doing that.
I mean I think that to the extent that the White House could could lean on the Saudis and say you know we want your cooperation to carry this out.
And to the extent that Louis Freeh was saying to the White House you have to lean on the Saudis to let us carry out a house to house interviews in the neighborhood of the Karbar Towers.
And you must allow us to carry out a full investigation of the Riyadh bombings and you must allow us to get a full record of cell phone and other phone conversations that were carried out in the Karbar Towers neighborhood.
I think the White House would be perfectly happy to do that.
But in fact there's no reason to believe that Louis Freeh ever did that.
I mean what what he did was to from the very beginning to make it clear that Iran was considered to be the culprit.
And they were not really interested in a kind of investigation that was going to be focused on internal Saudi matters.
Well now I remember seeing a front line about John O'Neill who was the Al-Qaeda obsessed guy at the FBI headquarters in New York who then became the head of security at the World Trade Center and died on September 11th.
And they talked about in that front line his conflict with Louis Freeh after they had gone and had a conversation with some Saudis about I think maybe this was about the embassy bombings in 98.
Maybe it was about Karbar.
Maybe you can correct me.
Yes I believe he did.
He did object to the way in which.
Well there was a fight because he used some profane language in front of Louis Freeh to say these people are lying to you.
And so that was the end of his relationship of being able to get along with the FBI director.
This one guy at the FBI who actually really was trying to hunt down Osama for us.
Absolutely.
I mean there's no doubt that that was about Karbar Tower's investigation.
When he went to Saudi Arabia with Louis Freeh he saw the way Louis Freeh was wined and dined by the Saudis.
They treated him like he was American royalty and it would tell him all these things.
And yet when Freeh had gone back home the Saudis would simply stiff all of the FBI agents who were trying to carry out an investigation.
They didn't cooperate at all.
And Freeh refused to hear anything of the sort.
He was simply not disposed to think badly of what the Saudis were doing.
And of course as I point out in the series, particularly the last installment, it turned out that Freeh was getting so chummy with Prince Bandar that we now have reason to believe that he was assured that once he was out of office he would be, quote, taken care of, unquote.
Meaning that he would be substantially supported.
Wait, whose quote is that?
That's Louis Freeh talking?
No, this was a quote from Prince Bandar.
A quote that represented the reconstruction of what Bandar said to an associate, an unnamed associate, reported in the Washington Post in 2002.
It was a quote in which Bandar said, you'd be surprised if it gets to be known that we take care of U.S. officials once they're out of office how cooperative they are when they're in office.
And bear in mind that Louis Freeh was a man who had a wife and six children to support.
He could not even support them in the manner to which he wanted them to be supported on an FBI salary.
He had to have some high rollers behind him.
And lo and behold, once he left the FBI, he began to become an open, what I call a defense lawyer for Saudi Arabia, and particularly for Prince Bandar.
Giving interviews and making statements indicating that the Saudis' cooperation could not have been better.
Despite the fact that the real record that the Saudis had compiled was very clear that they intended to obstruct the U.S. investigation at every turn.
And despite the fact that they had deceived the Americans about a key matter which even Freeh himself in his memoirs refers to.
That he had not been happy about, that he had not been told by Prince Bandar the full story after the bombing.
So, in other words, he was whitewashing the Saudi role in basically relating to the investigation.
Well, and it sounds like he was basically acting as their de facto agent in Washington, D.C.
You say in the article that he would not allow the Washington field office of the FBI, would not allow, I guess, the New York field office, the counterterrorism guys, or the CIA's bin Laden unit to have anything to do.
They classified their intelligence stream and everything.
And they said, nah, it was just the Iranians that did it.
I mean, Louis Freeh making this political decision that you described, basically to blame Iran, that had a really powerful effect.
Right, exactly.
I mean, it's very important to understand the degree to which very deliberate decisions were made early on in the investigation, very early in the investigation to close off not just some formal decision to investigate bin Laden, but not to allow the specialists on bin Laden and al-Qaeda to be part of the investigation.
As you said, the office of the FBI in New York, and the bin Laden specialists of the FBI were excluded quite deliberately from the investigation.
And the same thing happened in the CIA.
That is to say, the leadership of the CIA very quickly let it be known that only a very small number of people there would be allowed to have access to information about the investigation and to be part of it.
And the bin Laden unit, strange as it seems, was not among those who would be allowed to be part of, to be knowledgeable about the investigation and to have input into it.
Now, did you try to contact Louis Freeh for this five-part series that you did for IPS News here?
I certainly did.
I contacted his company, his consulting firm, and asked to talk to him about this issue.
And I was told that he was not going to speak with me.
So I mentioned that he refused to be interviewed as part of the series.
Well, that's just too bad.
Yes, it is.
It is unfortunate, I think, from the point of view of getting at the truth.
And I think it's unfortunate from Louis Freeh's point of view that he clearly is not interested in having somebody investigate and actually do an interview in which he'd be asked some hard questions.
Well, now, what about all these, you say in the article you have more than a dozen different sources here.
You name some of them, former FBI agents, former CIA agents, you have Jack Cloonan from the FBI, Michael Shoyer, of course, from the CIA in there.
Now, are these guys basically unanimous that Al-Qaeda did this and that Louis Freeh did it?
No, I mean, in fact, the FBI, the former FBI agents who I interviewed, none of them were willing to say that they doubted that the FBI's investigation had been on target.
All of them, with the exception of Dan Coleman, who expressed some degree of doubt, believed that the FBI had done the right thing.
Perhaps Jack Cloonan as well.
I would say Jack Cloonan had some degree of doubt.
Is there a record of what John O'Neill thought about Kobar Towers?
I don't know of anything on the record that is available.
In other words, no documentation has come to light about that.
I need to go back and watch that front line again.
It's been a few years.
I think the point here is that the higher-ranking FBI officers who were involved in working on this case basically continued to defend the investigation.
When I interviewed them, it was in that context.
What I found, however, is that they made some very damaging admissions.
Among them, when the FBI mission was sent to Saudi Arabia, supposedly to watch the interrogation of these Saudi Shia detainees behind a one-way mirror, the question mark hanging over that mission, of course, was, were they still being threatened with more torture in order to force them to say whatever the Saudi government wanted them to say?
We know that the Justice Department never admitted that there was any legitimate evidence coming out of that because of the torture question hanging over them.
What I was told by one former high-ranking FBI official who was involved in the case is that Louis Freeh did not care about the torture issue.
He would have gone over and watched this interrogation even if the detainees were being propped up.
That was the term that was used by this former official.
In other words, Freeh simply didn't care about the nature of the evidence.
He was going to use it for his political purposes, even though there were very substantial doubts about its legitimacy.
As I point out, after Freeh left the FBI, it was clear that the Saudis had tortured six Europeans, Canadians, and Australians to force them to admit to carrying out car bombings, which had actually been carried out by Al-Qaeda in Riyadh.
We have the record of personal testimony by these people, specifically one Canadian who talked about the fact that he had been tortured.
His testicles had become the size of an orange because of the beating, the torture that they had inflicted on him in order to force him to basically say that he had carried out these car bombings.
Not only that, he did it in front of foreign observers because of the threat of further torture.
Here's one thing that impresses me about the Clinton administration's handling.
It's not all just him, obviously.
Louis Freeh's role and the whole police-slash-intelligence effort in regards to Al-Qaeda all through the 1990s.
It seems like basically just one cover-up after another for various reasons leading to the September 11th attack.
I mean, I guess I know all the truthers are going to get mad in the comment section or whatever.
Beginning in 1993, you had Ramzi Youssef and those guys' attempt, which the FBI could have stopped if they had just paid their informant his $500 a week.
Anyway, they almost succeeded in knocking over one Twin Tower into the other one and could have killed 100,000 people or something.
That's how Clinton's administration began.
And then you have Riyadh, and then you have the Khobar Towers, you have the bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.
You have the attack on the coal, and I think a botched attack in the same method, a rubber dinghy packed with explosives.
And on and on.
I mean, there's so many great reporters, Lawrence Wright and James Bamford, and so many people who've written about the history of the Ramzi Youssef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Osama Bin Laden, the axis of killing people.
And yet, here's Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, is basically the number one obstacle between the truth of all of this being clear to American policy makers, and I guess Prince Bandar having a bad reputation at the cocktail party or something.
Well, Louis Freeh, in this storyline, specifically on the Khobar Towers, is a kind of a symbol, if you will, a poster child, for the larger problem of the national security law enforcement officialdom of the United States, essentially putting their personal and institutional interests ahead of the interests of the American people, in terms of being safe from a terrorist attack.
And I say that because, just to complete the little bio here of Louis Freeh, after having served as the de facto defense attorney for Prince Bandar and the Saudis over the Khobar Towers bombing, and their record, their atrocious record, of having tried to prevent any real investigation, in the spring of 2009, Louis Freeh emerges as the actual, the formal defense attorney for Prince Bandar, in a major case in the UK courts, in which he was accused of having taken billions in bribes in an arms deal.
So, suddenly we find out that Louis Freeh was in fact on Bandar's payroll.
And we don't know, of course, how long he had in fact been on Bandar's payroll, and under what guise, but clearly there's a thread here that runs from almost the beginning of his investigation through today, in which he was being essentially suborned by Prince Bandar on behalf of the Saudi government, and gotten to essentially defend their interests, instead of defending the interests of the American people.
And I think, I say that this is a symbol of a broader problem, because it's very clear that the Defense Department, the NSC, the U.S. military, all preferred to see this as a problem of Iranian responsibility, rather than face the truth that the Saudis were behind it, because of their vested interest in the Cold War between the United States and Iran.
Well now, what about the victims' families?
Because you've got 19 killed here, hell, you've got 372 wounded who are still alive, some of them must be angry about this, you've got dead kids, I mean, what percentage of kids who died there's fathers are veterans too, you know what I mean?
There's got to be some kind of organized effort to be angry about this issue among the survivors of the dead, no?
Well, there certainly should be.
I would imagine that there would be, to the extent that they are aware of this story, to the extent that it's gotten to them, and I have no information at this point about how widely this has gotten to people who have a personal stake in the truth of this matter, but to the extent that they have been able to read this, I would think that it would make them extremely angry with Louis Freeh, and that they would be demanding some accountability, and some retribution, in fact.
I remember one time in, say, 96, 97, at a public appearance, a lady in the audience yelled at Bill Clinton, you suck!
And it was a reference to him not, you know, basically putting our troops out there with no protection, just like Beirut, basically, leaving them sitting docks and getting 19 guys killed at Khobar Towers, and he had her arrested by the Secret Service and held overnight on no charges.
I guess he never thought of the enemy combatant status or whatever, but, you know, he does suck.
The fact of the matter is, and you know what, I think this is why so many leftists are 9-11 truthers, Gareth, is because they don't want to admit that 9-11 is Bill Clinton's fault, that he was bombing Iraq and blockading Iraq, strangling it to death for his entire eight years in office, doing so from Saudi Arabia, creating this terrorist enemy against us, and then refusing to do a damn thing about it.
Michael Shoyer and his guys, Michael Shoyer's told me before, he and his team gave Bill Clinton 10 different chances to kill Osama Bin Laden that Bill Clinton did not take.
What'd he do?
He bombed an antibiotics factory in Sudan and condemned a bunch of innocent people to die.
And left us wide open for, you know, the Dick Cheneys and George Bushes of the world to sit there and do nothing as an attack is approaching this country that kills 3,000 people and then justifies now the murder of a million people.
Well, you know, I would simply add to what you said about Clinton and the White House, that if you really look carefully into the record of the national security establishment during this period that you're talking about, none of those institutions, those individuals, with very rare exceptions, really wanted to get into preparing for real war with Al-Qaeda or with Bin Laden.
They were not at all interested in pursuing Bin Laden.
This was a non-state actor, and that was not their business.
They regarded their business as fighting state actors, fighting state armies.
That's what they're bread and butter is about.
That's how they justify their being.
That's how they justify their budgets, their roles, their missions.
And Bin Laden simply was not of interest.
And that's why, in my view, the viewpoint of the neocons and of the Bush administration was the viewpoint of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
And the disinterest in those forces, which characterized the Bush administration, and I think to a lesser extent, absolutely, the Clinton administration, was also broadly shared within the military, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council.
Well, now, let's not be naive either.
What about what the truthers would say, that at the very least, these guys wanted an enemy.
And they wanted, as they wrote in Rebuilding America's Defenses there at PNAC.org, that there would be nothing more beneficial to the neoconservative foreign policy than to have a Pearl Harbor attack.
And that maybe it would be better to continue to piss these guys off, and at the same time, leave them alone, so that they could have an attack spectacular enough to go have that war that nobody wanted to go fight before.
Well, I mean, I can't comment on the possibility that the neocons were behind 9-11, or were knowledgeable of 9-11, or deliberately provoked 9-11.
I mean, you know, it's theoretically possible.
But I have to say that I think the real truth is that their point of view, their fundamental worldview was such that they simply refused to entertain the notion that the real enemy, the real problem, if you will, for U.S. national security was not a state enemy in that part of the world, but people who we were, in fact, provoking by continuing to extend our military presence further and further into the Middle East, and specifically in Saudi Arabia.
Well, and in fact, I completely agree with that.
And if you look at the 1990s and what the American Enterprise Institute was up to, every time Al-Qaeda did anything, they tried to push this Laurie Milroy, Judith Miller conspiracy theory that Ramzi Youssef was really an Iraqi secret agent who killed the real Ramzi Youssef and was pretending to be him, and that Al-Qaeda was really nothing but a front for the Mubarak.
Yes, I mean, this simply, I think, points up the reality that no theory, no notion is too outrageous or too outlandish to be entertained by the people who need to have an enemy, and the enemy that is most convenient for the military and its friends in Washington, D.C.
Yes, and for the truthers, the military and its friends in Washington, D.C. is enemy enough.
That's good enough for me, too.
All right, well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your effort on this series, Gareth, and your time on the show today.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Scott.
Thanks.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for IPS News.
He's got a five-part series.
You can find all of it at original.antiwar.com.
Saudis tried to pin Khobar bombing on Iran.
Saudi account of Khobar bore telltale signs of fraud.
U.S. officials leaked false story blaming Iran for Khobar attack.
FBI ignored evidence of bin Laden role in Khobar attack, and Freeh became defense lawyer for Saudis on Khobar attack.
