t byfield on Fri, 25 Jul 2003 08:58:37 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> cains and abels |
an interesting discrepancy in how the family members of terrorists are treated. on the one hand, we have, of course, mr. al-tikriti's two sons in iraq, where pragmatism has forced the US to stray pretty close to violating the very same provisions of the geneva convention it was squawking about earlier in the war, when squawking was convenient. (or are recently deposed 'regimists' merely 'enemy combatants' like those held in camp x-ray? i'd have thought being a senior member of a regime -- say, commander of regular military forces -- would make you about as official as it gets.) on the other hand, we have the family of mr. bin laden on in mid- september 2001: < http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/30/archive/main313048.shtml > Bin Laden Family Evacuated Sept. 30, 2001 (CBS) Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden's family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington. One of bin Laden's brothers frantically called the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington looking for protection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told The New York Times. The brother was sent to a room in the Watergate Hotel and was told not to open the door. the watergate -- nice touch. Most of bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. The young members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret place in Texas and then to Washington, The Times reported Sunday. texas -- nice touch. Many were terrified, fearing they would be lynched after hearing reports of violence against Muslims and Arab-Americans. They left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks. i bet random violence wasn't the only thing they were terrified about. in the southern arabian peninsula, if not throughout the areas tra- versed by bedouins, one well-established way to meet an old friend is to extend hospitality -- sometimes for quite a while -- to his family and friends. (maybe they went to crawford? nah, that'd be too good.) King Fahd, the ailing Saudi ruler, sent an urgent message to his embassy in Washington pointing out that there were "bin Laden children all over America" and ordered, "Take measures to protect the innocents," the ambassador said. It's a tragedy," Prince Bandar told the Times. "The elders" of the students "came to see me, and one of them was a bright boy from Harvard who like the others had absolutely nothing to do with this and yet we had to tell him to go home and wait until the emotions calmed down. And he told me that he never really appreciated why the Japanese wanted a memorial or an apology for their treatment in World War II. The student added, according to the prince, "I understand now that when you are innocent, in the face of emotion, nothing, not even common sense, can help argue your case." evidently, it did help OBL's family to argue their case -- so eloquently that the FBI chauffered them all over the US for a get-together! (i won- der who paid for that -- maybe a FOIA is in order?) Osama bin Laden is one of more than 50 children of a Yemeni-born migrant who made a vast fortune building roads and palaces in Saudi Arabia and his extended family spans the globe. Many have been educated in the United States and the family has donated millions of dollars to several American universities. Bin Laden is estranged from his family and from Saudi Arabia, which revoked his citizenship in the early 1990s after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen. OBL may be 'estranged' from his family -- that certainly seems to have been the FBI's presumption, bless their hearts -- but the ~900 pages of congressional report on 9/11 just declassified suggest that his ability to play well with others in his family may not have been the salient issue when it came to funding the hijackers: < http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1058868138569&p=1012571727088 > September 11 report raises Saudi question By Marianne Brun-Rovet and Edward Alden in Washington Published: July 24 2003 16:17 Last Updated: July 24 2003 19:27 The September 11 hijackers received foreign government support while they were in the US plotting the attacks on New York and Washington, according to the US Congress investigation into the attacks. The conclusion, contained in the declassified portions of the 900-page report released on Thursday, will raise new questions in particular about the role of Saudi Arabia, particularly because the administration insisted on deleting a 28-page section of the report that focused on the Saudi link. Senator Bob Graham, the former Democratic intelligence committee chairman who led the investigation, said the hijackers "received, during most of this time, significant assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal." He would not identify the government. The report also contains new evidence that US intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew far more about the activities of some of the hijackers than has been previously revealed. While the administration has insisted that the plot could not have been unraveled from the information available, a congressional source who briefed reporters said: "There was no smoking gun in the sense of all the details and the specifics in one piece of intelligence." She added: "But that is not the same as saying that this attack could not have been prevented." Despite the deletions, the report contains considerable new evidence regarding the role that Saudi Arabia may have played in supporting and shielding terrorists prior to the attacks. First, the report quotes a senior US government official and others that the Saudi government had consistently refused to co-operate on any US investigations involving Osama bin Laden. Secondly, it contains evidence of a more direct link to the attacks, particularly regarding the activities of Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national suspected of having ties with the Saudi government. Mr Al-Bayoumi was critical in setting up two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, when they first arrived in San Diego prior to the attacks. The pair was known by US intelligence agencies as early as 1999 to be connected with al-Qaeda, and had attended a high-level meeting of al-Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in January, 2000 that was monitored by the CIA. The report says that Mr Al-Bayoumi met with the two men in Los Angeles in January, 2000, just after a closed-door meeting that Mr Al-Bayoumi had at the Saudi consulate. The FBI was aware of meetings between Mr Al-Bayoumi and the two hijackers and considered them "somewhat suspicious" but failed to act, the report said. The report also revealed another major US intelligence failure prior to the attacks, which it called "perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11 plot." It said that the FBI had recruited a counter-terrorism informant in San Diego who had close links to Mr al-Hazmi and Mr al-Mihdhar, as well as with a third hijacker Hani Hanjour. The FBI's San Diego field office did not act on the information he supplied because the CIA had not made the FBI aware of their suspected links to al-Qaeda. The FBI agent responsible for the informant told the congressional committee that he would have acted if he had been alerted that the pair were likely al-Qaeda operatives. "It would have made a huge difference," he said . We would have immediately opened investigations. We would have done everything." compare the NYT's coverage of the same declassified report: < http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/politics/24CND-TERR.html > you'd hardly know saudi arabia existed. they never mention it. cheers, t # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net