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Unanswered Questions : Thinking for ourselves.
Blowback in Riyadh
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 15 May 2003
The compounds were a holdover from the Saudi oil boom of the 1970s, a place where non-Muslims as well as Saudis seeking
distance from the hard social rules in Riyadh could have a drink, a place where their wives could wear a swimsuit to the
pool without being covered from head to toe. It was a place where you could be a Westerner in the beating heart of
Islam, driving distance from Mecca and Medina. The compounds had names – al Hamra, Vinnell and Eshbiliya – gated and
guarded communities for those doing long-term business in the Saudi capital.
At 11:25pm on Monday night, these protected compounds transformed into the newest battleground in George W. Bush's War
on Terror. Gunmen clashed with sentries, hands reached through barriers to slap buttons that opened the gates, and three
bomb-laden vehicles roared in to explode themselves and their drivers beside the choicest targets they could find. When
it was done, at least eight Americans were among the 29 people dead.
Secretary of State Colin Powell rushed out to proclaim that the attacks had the "earmarks of al Qaeda" due to the fact,
he said, that the whole thing was staged with multiple impacts brought home by suicide squads. In fact, the evidence of
al Qaeda involvement in this attack is almost beyond doubt.
The spokesman for al Qaeda, Thabet bin Qais, was quoted by reporters on May 7 – that is one week ago, for the record -
as saying, quite bluntly, that Osama bin Laden's forces were gearing up for a series of attacks. The London-based
Al-Majalla magazine received an email the day before the attacks from an al Qaeda operative named Abu Mohammed Ablaj.
The email described arms the operatives had stored and martyrdom squads that were about to attack. "Beside targeting the
heart of America, among the strategic priorities now is to target and execute operations in the Gulf countries and
allies of the United States," Ablaj wrote.
American agents on the ground in Saudi Arabia, upon hearing these warnings, tried in vain to get security beefed up
around these soft targets. These pleas were ignored until explosions rocked Riyadh.
George W. Bush, speaking at a rally in Indianapolis to promote his tax cut, said, "The United States will find the
killers, and they will learn the meaning of American justice."
Does this sound familiar? It should.
The Bush administration was warned many weeks before the 9/11 attacks that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were planning
to attack prominent American targets with hijacked commercial airplanes. The Egyptian, Israeli, Russian and German
intelligence services delivered these warnings in the strongest possible terms. On the home front, FBI officials like
Robert Wright, John O'Neill and the officers in the Minnesota branch were screaming that an attack was impending, that
we were unprepared, that we were ignoring the blood-obvious facts staring us in the face.
Nothing, but nothing, was done. The explosions came, the bodies dropped, and here we are. This is a microcosm of
September 11, right down to the Presidential reaction.
American justice did a bang-up job on the city of Baghdad, and the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were killed, maimed
and continue even today to die there can attest to the callous recklessness behind our idea of "Doing What Is Right."
Unsurprisingly, the war in Iraq did exactly nothing to make our citizens at home or abroad safer. The eight American
corpses who were blown sideways out of their homes in Riyadh are evidence enough of that. In fact, the scene at the
compounds in Saudi Arabia proves that our war did, in fact, make the world a more dangerous place.
The CIA calls what happened in Riyadh 'blowback.' There will be more, as promised by Thabet bin Qais, who said al Qaeda
had reorganized and was planning attacks against the United States on the scale of September 11. The bloodstains and
smoking craters in Riyadh indicate that these guys always keep their promises.
We went to war in Iraq on a number of flawed and blatantly incorrect premises. There is no fearful arsenal of mass
destruction weapons; there is no liberty for the Iraqi people; there were no terrorists, nor was there ever a connection
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. To fight this war, we drastically scaled back our operations in Afghanistan – the new
Bush budget has precisely no dollars set aside to pay for operations and democratization/reconstruction there – and
allowed al Qaeda to reassemble in safety. We also alienated the entire global community in the process. We need their
help, whether we like it or not, to get the intelligence required to stop these attacks.
"The United States will find the killers, and they will learn the meaning of American justice," said George. Will they
learn this meaning the way Osama bin Laden, still alive and free after almost two years, has learned it? Will they learn
it the way Saddam Hussein, still alive and free as well, has learned it? Thousands and thousands of Iraqi and Afghan
civilians have learned what justice means to George W. Bush. It means a terrible grinding death in the dirt while the
real killers get away.
Such a catalog of failure and shame is the Bush administration record to date. They walked away from the
Israel/Palestine talks and let that situation turn into a bloody horror. They pointedly ignored a vast array of warnings
about impending terror attacks in the summer of 2001 and let that situation turn into the nightmare we currently endure.
They fought a war in Afghanistan and walked away before the job was done, allowing the enemy to escape and regroup. They
poured vital resources into an Iraq war that did nothing to curb terrorism and did everything to inspire and motivate
the terrorists. They passed tax cuts and budgets that steal money from the coffers of Homeland Security – that means
cops and fire fighters and emergency response crews – to make sure their wealthy friends and corporate sponsors feel
well and truly loved.
September 11 did not remove from the earth the concept of right and wrong. It did not redefine the meaning of the words
Lie, Steal and Murder. It did not reinvent reality in the way Bush wishes it did. New York Governor George Pataki, at a
pro-Iraq-war rally on April 10, said, "The war started here on Sept. 11, 2001." This statement attempted to directly
connect the Iraqi civilians who were getting cluster-bombed with the deaths of those 3,000 who perished on that terrible
day. This was a lie, a wretched one, promoted for months by the Bush administration and promulgated by mouthpieces like
Pataki.
Now, in Riyadh, we see what we have won. We have been awarded courtside seats at the event of the century. George W.
Bush and his handlers believe 9/11 granted them the ability to reinvent America and the world according to their own
perverted ultra-conservative views. We will be lucky to live through it. If we are smart, we will get rid of these
wretches before too many more bombs go off, before too many more people die, before things go past the point of no
return, before America is a burned-out hulk crouching in defeat beside history's wide highway.
***********
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times bestselling author of two books - - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context
Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available at http://www.silenceissedition.com/ from Pluto Press. He teaches high school in Boston, MA. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.
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