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HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD -- THE SECRET RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD'S TWO MOST POWERFUL DYNASTIES |
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: 9/11 Just before 6 a.m. on September 11, President Bush awoke at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort, an island enclave in the Gulf of Mexico, near Sarasota, Florida. He put on his running shorts and, accompanied by his Secret Service men, took a four-mile jog. [1] Meanwhile, in Washington, the top brass of the Carlyle Group and scores of prospective investors began getting ready for an investors' conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington. It was their custom to serve coffee and breakfast pastries at about 7:30 and to start the presentations half an hour later. Among those attending were James Baker, Frank Carlucci, and, representing the bin Laden family, Shafig bin Laden, one of Osama's many brothers. At 7:59 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston's Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles. Five Al Qaeda operatives were seated aboard, one of whom, Abdulaziz Alomari, had gained entree to the United States without even having to go to the onsulate himself -- thanks to the Visa Express program recently instituted in Saudi Arabia. At about the same time, Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, the two Saudis who indirectly received money from Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, stood in Washington's Dulles International Airport, getting ready to board American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles scheduled to leave at 8:10. They were accompanied by three compatriots -- Salem Alhazmi, who was possibly Nawaf's brother, Majed Moqed, a twenty-four-year-old operative about whom little is known, and Hani Hanjour, the Saudi who took flying lessons in Phoenix and who, the FBI had noted, was so curious about airplane security. Two of the Saudi operatives on the plane, Khalid Almidhar and Salem Alhazmi, also had entered the United States using the Visa Express program. At about 8:13, the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 began. [i] It soon veered dramatically off course from its scheduled destination, L.A., and went toward New York instead. At 8:46, the plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
At that moment, President Bush's motorcade was on its way to the Emma E. Booker elementary school in Sarasota. When he arrived just before 9:00, Karl Rove rushed up to the president, took him aside in a hallway, and told him about the plane crash. "What a horrible accident," Bush replied. According to White House communications director Dan Bartlett, who was also present, Bush, a former pilot, asked if the cause had been bad weather. [2] Accounts differ as to whether Bush was informed about the attack before this or not, but it is clear he had been told about the first crash by nine o'clock. [3] At about 9:03 Bush entered the second-grade classroom. The occasion was an opportunity to promote his education policies. Altogether, with his staff, members of the media, and the students, there were about 150 people in the room. Bush was introduced to the students and posed for pictures with them. Then the teacher led the students in reading exercises. At this point there was no reason for Bush to think the crash was anything more than a tragic accident. Just as Bush entered the classroom, however, United Airlines Flight 175, which had also been hijacked after its departure from Boston, crashed into the second World Trade Center tower. One of the many ironies of the attack was that Marvin Bush, the president's brother, owned stock in and had served as a director of a company, Stratesec, that handled security for three clients that figured prominently in the attack -- United Airlines; Dulles Airport, from which American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked; and the World Trade Center itself. Conspiracy theorists have tried, with little success, to make something of the connection, even though Marvin Bush left the board of Stratesec prior to 9/11. [ii] Nonetheless, this connection between the House of Bush and the breakdown in airport security, potentially a political embarrassment, never gained prominence in the mainstream press. At the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., those attending the Carlyle Group's investment conference were glued to TV monitors showing the attack in progress. According to one source, after the second plane hit, Shafig bin Laden removed his name tag. He and James Baker, the source added, left shortly thereafter in separate cars. Captain Deborah Loewer, the director of the White House Situation Room, who was traveling with Bush, also saw the second crash on television while she was at the elementary school in Sarasota. "It took me about thirty seconds to realize that this was terrorism," she said. [4] She immediately told Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, who whispered to Bush, still in the classroom full of second-graders, "Captain Loewer says it's terrorism." Then the classroom was silent for about thirty seconds. [5] In the back of the room, press secretary Ari Fleischer held up a pad of paper for Bush to see. "Don't Say Anything Yet" was written on it in big block letters. [6] Bush nodded his assent. Finally, he picked up the book to read a story called "The Pet Goat" with the children. In unison, the children read aloud, "The Pet Goat. A-girl-got-a-pet-goat. But-the-goat-did-some-things-that-made-the-girl's-dad-mad." As the reading continued, Bush said, "Really good readers, whew! ... These must be sixth-graders!" [7] The reading continued for eight or nine minutes, and at 9:12, Bush left the room. [8] By this time, the entire world was aware that a truly historic event was taking place. Thousands were dead or dying. Millions of people across the country, especially in New York and Washington, were in a state of panic. At 9:30, Bush addressed the nation. "Today we had a national tragedy," he said. "Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country." Then he vowed "to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand." To the overwhelming majority of Americans the attacks had come completely out of the blue. Within the intelligence world, however, many knew who was behind them and Richard Clarke was one of those people. "This is Al Qaeda," he said as soon as a third hijacked jet crashed, this one into the Pentagon. [9] CIA director George Tenet was eating breakfast with former senator David Boren at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington when he was told about the hijackings. He instantly came to the same assessment. "This has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it," he said. [10] At 10:06, a fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, crashed about eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, its hijackers apparently having been overpowered by passengers. It did not take long to confirm that bin Laden was the perpetrator. Almost immediately after the attacks, celebratory phone calls from bin Laden operatives were intercepted by the National Security Agency. But over the next chaotic few hours, rather than move to strike just Al Qaeda, various high-ranking officials within the Bush administration saw the attack as an opportunity to pursue another agenda. At 2:40 p.m., Donald Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on retaliatory plans -- not just to take out Osama bin Laden, but also to go after Iraq's Saddam Hussein. According to notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide that day and later obtained by CBS News's David Martin, Rumsfeld said he wanted "best info fast, judge whether good enough to hit SH" -- meaning Saddam Hussein -- "at the same time, not only UBL," the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden. "Go massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying, "sweep it all up, things related and not." [11] In 1998, Rumsfeld had been a signatory to the Project for a New American Century's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" letter, which had called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps this was the "new Pearl Harbor" that had to take place if PNAC's policies were to be implemented. Meanwhile, the president spent the day flying around the country in Air Force One from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska before returning to Washington. For much of the day, he was protected by U.S. Air Force servicemen in full combat gear. That night, before going to bed, President Bush dictated some observations into his diary. "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." [12] He added that because he was not a military tactician, he would have "to rely on the advice and counsel of Rumsfeld, [General Henry] Shelton [then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], [General Richard] Myers and Tenet." [13] Several people were conspicuously absent from the list -- Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and others. But chief among them was Richard Clarke. The man who knew more about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda than anyone in the country and who had devoted his professional life to defeating them went unmentioned. *** Prince Bandar did not go to the Saudi embassy in Washington on the day of the disaster, [14] but he was no doubt very busy. The relationship between the House of Bush and the House of Saud that he had so laboriously reassembled just before the attacks was now in tatters. It was as if in one horrifying moment all the extraordinary contradictions in that relationship -- one that married the guardians of Israel with the guardians of Wahhabi Islam, that joined a secular, consumerist democracy with a puritanical theocratic monarchy -- had suddenly been exposed. Thousands of innocent people had been killed in America and most of the killers were Saudi. In good times, Bandar was known for his ingratiating charm and puckish bonhomie, for his dazzling parties "where there was more chilled vodka in little shot glasses than I've ever seen," as one guest remembered. [15] There was also the Bandar who delighted in weaving a web of intrigue and participating in covert operations. Now came the Bandar who could be a commanding presence in a time of international crisis. A virtuoso at spinning the media, he quickly conjured up a reality that entirely dissociated his country from bin Laden and the terrorists and reaffirmed Saudi Arabia's solidarity with the United States -- as if the secret brinksmanship of two weeks earlier had never taken place. He swiftly launched an international media campaign with PR giant Burson Marsteller. He went on every network news show imaginable, repeating the message that the alliance was still strong. Saudi Arabia was America's friend in a hostile Arab world. Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with terrorism. "We in the kingdom, the government and the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated with terrorism to be connected to our country," he told a press conference. [16] In every venue, he told the world that the widespread reports that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi were wrong because "his citizenship was terminated a long time ago because of his terrorist activities." And when he was asked about the financing of terrorism, Bandar told a reporter that charity was required by Islam and that the Saudi government had no evidence that Saudi money was going to Al Qaeda. [17] Even as Bandar emphasized his friendship with the United States, he had another pressing item on his agenda. For hundreds of wealthy Saudis, it was not unusual to spend most of the summer in the United States. Some stayed over for the racehorse sales in Lexington, Kentucky, in September and then returned home in the fall. But now Arabs were being arrested all over the United States. Hundreds of Saudis in the United States -- members of the royal family and relatives of Osama bin Laden among them -- feared reprisals if they stayed in the country. They needed to leave immediately. King Fahd himself had mandated that everything possible be done to protect them and return them to the kingdom. Fear was not the only motivation. "It's a perception issue for them back home," said a source who participated in the events that followed. "It looks really bad [to Wahhabi clerics] if the royal family is in the lap of luxury in the U.S. during a crisis." It was essential that the Saudis be granted special permission to return even while U.S. airspace was severely restricted. At the time, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, key figures in the Bush administration who could facilitate such an operation were holed up in the Situation Room, a small underground suite with a plush eighteen-by-eighteen-foot conference room in the West Wing of the White House. Live links connected the room's occupants to the FBI, the State Department, and other relevant agencies. Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other officials hunkered down and devoured intelligence, hoping to ascertain whether other terrorist attacks were imminent. The most powerful officials in the administration came and went, among them Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Donald Rumsfeld. Within the cramped confines of that room, Richard Clarke chaired an ongoing crisis group making hundreds of decisions related to the attacks. Sometime shortly after 9/11 -- he doesn't remember exactly when -- Clarke was approached in the Situation Room about quickly repatriating the Saudis. "Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country," Clarke says. "My role was to say that it can't happen until the FBI approves it. And so the FBI was asked -- we had a live connection to the FBI -- and we asked the FBI to make sure that they were satisfied that everybody getting on that plane was someone that it was O.K. to leave. And they came back and said yes, it was fine with them. So we said, 'Fine, let it happen.'" [18] Clarke, who left the government in March 2003 to run a consulting firm in Virginia, adds that he does not recall who initiated the request, but that it was probably either the FBI or the State Department. Both agencies deny playing any role whatsoever in the episode. [iii] "It did not come out of this place," says one source at the State Department. "The likes of Prince Bandar does not need the State Department to get this done." A White House official says that no such operation took place. Richard Clarke's approval for evacuating the Saudis had been conditional upon the FBI's vetting them. "I asked [the FBI] to make sure that no one inappropriate was leaving," he says. "I asked them if they had any objection to Saudis leaving the country at a time when aircraft were banned from flying." Clarke adds that he assumed the FBI had vetted the bin Ladens prior to September 11. "I have no idea if they did a good job," he says. "I'm not in any position to second-guess the FBI." But despite the evidence to the contrary, FBI officials assert that the Bureau had no part in the Saudi evacuation. The Bureau played no role in facilitating these flights, according to Special Agent John Iannarelli, the FBI's spokesman on counterterrorism activities. Bandar, however, went on CNN and said that the FBI played a critical role in the evacuation. [19] On Thursday, September 13, Bandar had planned to meet Bush at the White House to discuss the Middle East peace process. The meeting went forward as scheduled, but in the aftermath of the attacks, even the urgent demands of the peace process had to take a backseat to the historic catastrophe two days earlier. Until this meeting, Bandar had seen Bush as someone who did not measure up to his father, but on this occasion he seemed to be truly his own man. [20] The two men went out on the Truman Balcony where they lit up cigars and discussed how they might best deal with captured Al Qaeda operatives. It is not known whether the two men talked about the evacuation at that time. In any case, the operation to begin flying out approximately 140 Saudis had already been initiated by Bandar. According to Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi embassy, the flights received approval from "the highest level of the U.S. government." [21] Al-Jubeir added that he did not know if there were private conversations in which Prince Bandar and the president discussed letting the bin Ladens and other Saudis begin to travel even while U.S. airspace was shut down. The White House declined to comment on the issue. Thus, there are many unanswered questions about who authorized the operation. Did the president know? Did the elder George Bush or James Baker intervene? Or did Bandar go through his old friend Colin Powell in the State Department? Both the elder George Bush and James Baker declined requests for interviews for this book. Nevertheless, a massive and elaborate operation to fly the Saudis out of the United States was already under way. At about 4:30 that afternoon, Dan Grossi and Manuel Perez, the two private detectives in Tampa, had already departed for Lexington, Kentucky, in a Learjet, accompanying three young Saudi men even though private aircraft were still banned from U.S. skies. Sources familiar with the flight said that one of the men was a young Saudi royal. According to the Tampa Tribune, another was the son of a Saudi army commander. [22] The third Saudi passenger has not been identified. According to Grossi, about one hour and forty-five minutes after takeoff they landed at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, a frequent destination for Saudi horse-racing enthusiasts, the most famous of whom was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd. The father of the forty-two-year-old Prince Ahmed, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, was the powerful governor of Riyadh and one of the Sudairi Seven and had worked closely with Osama bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs during the Afghanistan War in the eighties. Ahmed had gone to college at the University of California at Irvine and eventually become chairman of Saudi Arabia's Research and Marketing Group, a publishing company with offices in Saudi Arabia and England. But in Kentucky and the world of horse racing, Ahmed was far better known as the owner of many of the top racehorses in the world. In 1994, he and a college friend launched the Thoroughbred Corporation, which bought and trained famous horses such as Sharp Cat, Lear Fan, Royal Anthem, and the greatest of all, the 2001 Horse of the Year, Point Given, which won two legs of racing's Triple Crown. [23] Prince Ahmed had come to Lexington for the annual September yearling sales. The sale of young racehorses had been suspended on September 11 but resumed the very next day, during which Ahmed bought two horses. "America is home to me," he said. "I am a businessman. I have nothing to do with the other stuff. I feel as badly as any American and I am extremely astonished by [the terrorism]. We have had terrorism in Saudi Arabia and we know how painful it is." [24] Meanwhile, he made plans to leave the country as quickly as possible. According to the New York Times, sometime after the attacks but before September 14, members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision first to a secret assembly point in Texas and later to Washington. [25] [iv] On Friday, September 14, the nation's 200,000 private planes were cleared to fly. The paralyzed air transportation system slowly ramped up again with new security measures instituted all over the country to thwart hijackers. Initially, Bandar's operation had required, and obtained, White House approval. Now such permission was no longer necessary to fly. But the Bush administration had launched a global war against terror. Within days of the attacks, the FBI was circulating a list of more than one hundred suspects to airlines and more than eighteen thousand law-enforcement organizations. FBI director Robert Mueller said the investigation had generated more than thirty-six thousand leads. There were hundreds of search warrants and subpoenas, and seizures of computers and documents. Agents conducted hundreds of interviews around the country. [26] All over the United States, Arabs were being detained. Attorney General John Ashcroft asserted that the government had to take "people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a threat to America." [27] The central question now became whether Saudi royals and their friends would get special treatment from the Bush White House when a massive international crackdown was under way. In the context of the global manhunt and war on terror, didn't it make sense to at least interview Osama bin Laden's relatives and other Saudis who, inadvertently or not, may have funded him? Nevertheless, as Bandar's massive operation to get the Saudis out of the United States continued, the FBI repeatedly declined to interrogate or conduct extended interviews with the Saudis. In addition to the Tampa-Lexington flight, at least seven other planes were made available for the operation. According to itineraries, passenger lists, and interviews with sources who had firsthand knowledge of the flights, members of the extended bin Laden family, the House of Saud, and their associates also assembled in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Orlando, Washington, D.C, Boston, Newark, and New York. Arrangements for the flights were made with lightning speed. One flight, a Boeing 727 that left Los Angeles late on the night of September 14 or early in the morning of the fifteenth, required FAA approval, which came through in less than half an hour. "By bureaucratic standards, that's a nanosecond," said a source close to the flight. [28] Payments for the charter flights were made in advance through wire transfer from the Saudi embassy. A source close to the evacuation said such procedures were an indication that the entire operation had high-level approval from the U.S. government. "That's a totally traceable transaction," he said. "So I inferred that what they were doing had U.S. government approval. Otherwise, they would have done it in cash." According to the source, a young female member of the bin Laden family was the sole passenger on the first leg of the flight, from Los Angeles to Orlando. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, boarding any airplane was cause for anxiety. But now that the name Osama bin Laden had become synonymous with mass murder, boarding a plane with his family members was another story entirely. To avoid unnecessary dramas, the flight's operators made certain that the cockpit crew was briefed about who the passengers were -- the bin Ladens -- and the highly sensitive nature of their mission. However, they neglected to brief the flight attendants. On the flight from Los Angeles, the bin Laden girl began talking to an attendant about the horrid events of 9/11. "I feel so bad about it," she said. "Well, it's not your fault," replied the attendant, who had no idea who the passenger really was. "Yeah," said the passenger. "But he was my brother." "The flight attendant just lost it," the source said. [29] *** When the 727 landed in Orlando, Khalil Binladin, whose estate in Winter Garden was nearby, boarded the plane. [30] After a delay of several hours, it continued to Washington. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the Saudis had chartered a customized DC 8 that belonged to the president of Gabon and was equipped with two staterooms (bedrooms) and sixty-seven seats. According to a source who participated in the operation, the Saudis had hoped to leave Las Vegas on September 14, but were not able to get permission for two days. "This was a nightmare," said a source. "The manifest was submitted the day before. It was obvious that someone in Washington had said okay, but the FBI didn't want to say they could go, so it was really tense. In the end, nobody was interrogated." According to the passenger list, among the forty-six passengers were several high-level Saudi royals with diplomatic passports. On Sunday, September 16, the flight finally left for Geneva, Switzerland. The FBI did not even get the manifest until about two hours before departure. Even if it had wanted to interview the passengers -- and the Bureau had shown little inclination to do so -- there would not have been enough time. [31] At the same time, an even more lavish Boeing 727 was being readied for Prince Ahmed bin Salman and about fourteen other passengers who were assembling in Lexington. If they felt they had to leave the country, at least it could be said that they were leaving in luxury. The plane, which was customized to hold just twenty-six passengers, had a master bedroom suite furnished with a large upholstered double bed, a couch, night stand, and credenza. Its master bathroom had a gold-plated sink, double illuminated mirrors, and a bidet. There were brass, gold, and crystal fixtures. The main lounge had a fifty-two-inch projection TV. The plane boasted a six-place conference room and dining room with a mahogany table that had controls for up and down movement. [32] The plane left Lexington at 4 p.m. on Sunday, September 16, and stopped in Gander, Newfoundland, en route to London. And so they flew, one by one, mostly to Europe, where some of the passengers later returned home to Saudi Arabia. On September 17, a flight left Dallas for Newark at 10:30 p.m. [33] On September 18 and 19, two flights left Boston, including the 727 that had originated in Los Angeles. According to a person with firsthand knowledge of the flights, there is no question that they took place with the knowledge and approval of the State Department, the FBI, the FAA, and many other government agencies. "When we left Boston every governmental authority that could be there was there," says the source. "There were FBI agents at every departure point. In Boston alone, there was the FBI, the Department of Transportation, the FAA, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Massachusetts state police, the Massachusetts Port Authority, and probably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. There were more federal law-enforcement officials than passengers by far." [34] In Boston, airport authorities were horrified that they were being told to let the bin Ladens go. On September 22, a flight went from New York to Paris, and on September 24, another flight from Las Vegas to Paris. According to passenger lists for many but not all of the flights, the vast majority of passengers were Saudis, but there were also passengers from Egypt, England, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Sudan, and Syria. "Not many Saudis like to do menial work," said a source, explaining the other nationalities. Passengers ranged in age from seven years old to sixty-two. [35] The vast majority were adults. There were roughly two dozen bin Ladens. "Here you have an attack with substantial links to Saudi Arabia," says John L. Martin, who as chief of internal security in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department supervised investigation and prosecution of national security offenses for eighteen years. [36] "You would want to talk to people in the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government; particularly since they have pledged cooperation. And you would want them to voluntarily submit to interviews that would not necessarily be hostile." Martin further says that he was particularly surprised at the way the Saudis seemed to be making the rules. "It is an absolute rule of law enforcement that the agent or officers conducting the interviews control the interview, and that the persons of interest, suspects, or prospective defendants do not set the ground rules for the interview," he says. [37] On September 20, while the Saudi evacuation was still quietly under way, President Bush formally declared a global war on terror in a dramatic speech before Congress. Fortress America, supposedly impregnable, was in a state of shock. The grisly totals were always changing, but at the time, the estimated number of the dead, missing, and injured people was more than thirteen thousand. [38] For security reasons, Vice President Cheney did not even attend the president's address in the capital. America was united behind the president as never before. "Our war on terror ... will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," President Bush vowed. [39] "We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest," he added. "And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists. "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." [40] Four days later, on September 24, President Bush held a press conference with Colin Powell and treasury secretary Paul O'Neill at which he announced the freezing of assets of twenty-seven individuals or entities that may have been funneling money to terrorists. Although the list looked substantial, in fact many of the named targets had been identified by Richard Clarke long before. Both Bush and Powell made a point of praising the Saudis. "As far as the Saudi Arabians go ... they've been nothing but cooperative," Bush said. "Our dialogue has been one of -- as you would expect friends to be able to discuss issues. And my discussions with the foreign minister, as well as the ambassador, have been very positive." [41] "That's exactly right, Mr. President," Powell added. "They have not turned down any requests that we have presented to them." But in fact, the United States was not particularly demanding of Saudi Arabia. Even after the attacks, Visa Express, the program that allowed three of the 9/11 hijackers to enter the United States without even having to stop by the consulate, and which was described by a consular official as "an open-door policy for terrorists," was continued. [42] In the thirty days after 9/11, the U.S. consulate in Jeddah interviewed only 2 out of 104 applicants. No one was rejected. [43] And when the United States did make demands of them, the Saudis were not particularly helpful. When U.S. troops attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11, the Saudis refused to allow the United States to use Saudi territory to stage military operations. All over Europe authorities rounded up suspected terrorists and froze bank accounts -- but Saudi officials did not follow suit. "Saudi Arabia is completely unsupportive as of today," Robert Baer, the former CIA officer and author of Sleeping with the Devil, said a month after 9/11. "The rank-and-file Saudi policeman is sympathetic to bin Laden. They're not telling us who these people were on the planes." [44] Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA who worked in Saudi Arabia for that agency, added that even though tens of millions of dollars were flowing from Saudi Arabia to Al Qaeda, "We're getting zero cooperation now [from the Saudis]." [45] William Hartung, a foreign policy and arms industry analyst at the World Policy Institute, attributed the Bush administration's softness on the Saudis to its vast shared economic interests. "If there weren't all these other arrangements -- arms deals and oil deals and consultancies -- I don't think the U.S. would stand for this lack of cooperation," Hartung said. "Because of those relationships, they have to tread lightly." [46] Indeed, even as the fires at Ground Zero continued to burn, even as America measured its grief, new deals with the Saudis were in the works or already being signed. [47] Chief among them was a $25-billion gas-exploration project in Saudi Arabia involving eight huge oil companies, [48] [v] spearheaded by Crown Prince Abdullah and the minister for foreign affairs, Prince Saud al-Faisal, and with James Baker's firm, Baker Botts, playing a key advisory role. [49] [vi] On September 14, Stephen Matthews, a partner at Baker Botts, lauded the Saudis for removing bureaucratic obstacles and for other developments "that have increased Saudi Arabia's attractiveness as an investment destination." On Friday, September 21, Robert Jordan, the Baker Botts attorney who had been nominated earlier as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, finally testified in confirmation hearings before the Senate. Jordan, who had represented President Bush during the Harken insider trading fracas, appeared at the hearing accompanied by James Doty, a Baker Botts partner who had represented Bush when he bought into the Texas Rangers baseball team and who had been general counsel of the SEC during the Harken investigation, and by James A. Baker IV, a Baker Botts partner whose father was the former secretary of state. [50] Also accompanying him at the hearing was Steven Miles, another Baker Botts partner, who launched the firm's Riyadh office ten years earlier and who had played a key role in expanding its Middle East practice. [51] Jordan testified that the day after the attacks of September 11, "Saudi Arabia released a statement in which it declared Saudi oil exports to the U.S. to be stable, adding that any export shortfalls on the international market will be filled by OPEC. These are welcome words, indeed." When it came to the Saudi role in 9/11, he said, "The tragedies of this magnitude show us who our real friends are. We call on the Saudis to fulfill their pledge of cooperation, and we seek with them to build an international coalition against terrorism. They have answered that call superbly." [52] Jordan added that he was extremely interested in potential investments in the oil and gas sector in Saudi Arabia. "[I] have been really gratified, Senator, to note the gas concession that has been granted to three consortiums, two of which are led by Exxon-Mobil, into development of the gas fields in Saudi Arabia. ... I certainly will have this high on my agenda." [53] Jordan was not asked about nor did he comment on the fact that many high-level Saudis refused to accept that Saudis were involved in he attacks, and instead blamed 9/11 on unnamed "Zionists." Even a year later, Prince Nayef Ibn Abd-Al-Aziz, the powerful minister of the interior, made such charges. "Who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them?" he asked. "... I think [the Zionists] are behind these events. ... It is impossible that nineteen youths, including fifteen Saudis, carried out the operation of September 11." [54] Jordan's approach to Saudi Arabia was not out of sync with the policies that had linked the United States and the Saudis for several decades, policies that were deeply flawed because they were blind to the rise of Islamist terror, but that in many ways had been spectacularly fruitful for the United States, producing a stable, secure flow of oil that had lasted for decades. No two figures played a bigger role in those policies than George H. W. Bush and James Baker. But at certain points in history, a policy outlives its utility. By the mid to late nineties, the Clinton administration had recognized that it was no longer advisable to craft Saudi-American policy solely with an eye toward the pursuit of oil as a strategic resource. Certainly by the time of the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, security officials had begun the delicate task of pressuring the Saudis to crack down on terrorism. Now, however, even in the wake of one of the worst catastrophes in American history, the Bush administration continued to ignore the Saudi role in terrorism. It had approved the Saudi evacuation and it continued to act as if the House of Saud and the Saudi merchant elite could in no way be complicit with the act of terror that had just taken place. *** Just how wrong this decision was became apparent several months later, when the war in Afghanistan was in full swing. On Thursday, March 28, 2002, acting on electronic intercepts of telephone calls, heavily armed Pakistani commando units, accompanied by American Special Forces and FBI SWAT teams, raided a two-story house in the suburbs of Faisalabad, in western Pakistan. [55] They had received tips that one of the people in the house was Abu Zubaydah, the thirty-year-old chief of operations for Al Qaeda who had been head of field operations for the USS Cole bombing and who was a close confidant of Osama bin Laden's. Two days later, on March 30, news of Zubaydah's capture was spreading all over the world. At first, the administration refused to corroborate the reports; then it celebrated the capture of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operative ever to be taken into custody. "This represents a very significant blow to Al Qaeda," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. He called Zubaydah "a key terrorist recruiter, an operational planner and a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle." Donald Rumsfeld told a news conference that Zubaydah was "being given exactly the excellent medical care one would want if they wanted to make sure he was around a good long time to visit with us." [56] The international media speculated as to what Zubaydah might know, what he might say. On Sunday, March 31, three days after the raid, the interrogation began. For the particulars of this episode there is one definitive source, Gerald Posner's Why America Slept, and according to it, the CIA used two rather unusual methods for the interrogation. [vii] First, they administered thiopental sodium, better known under its trademarked name, Sodium Pentothal, through an IV drip, to make Zubaydah more talkative. Since the prisoner had been shot three times during the capture, he was already hooked up to a drip to treat his wounds and it was possible to administer the drug without his knowledge. Second, as a variation on the good cop- bad cop routine, the CIA used two teams of debriefers. One consisted of undisguised Americans who were at least willing to treat Zubaydah's injuries while they interrogated him. The other team consisted of Arab Americans posing as Saudi security agents, who were known for their brutal interrogation techniques. The thinking was that Zubaydah would be so scared of being turned over to the Saudis, ever infamous for their public executions in Riyadh's Chop-Chop Square, that he would try to win over the American interrogators by talking to them. [57] In fact, exactly the opposite happened. "When Zubaydah was confronted with men passing themselves off as Saudi security officers, his reaction was not fear, but instead relief," Posner writes. "The prisoner, who had been reluctant even to confirm his identity to his American captors, suddenly started talking animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would torture and then kill him. Zubaydah asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family. He then provided a private home number and cell phone number from memory. 'He will tell you what to do,' Zubaydah promised them." [58] The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of many legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the royal family. On September 16, 2001, Prince Ahmed, of course, had boarded the flight in Lexington as part of the evacuation plan approved by the Bush White House. Prince Ahmed was well known not just in Saudi Arabia, but also in publishing circles in London and horse-racing circles in Kentucky. He was such an unlikely name that the interrogators immediately assumed that Zubaydah was lying to buy time. According to Posner, the interrogators then kept their prisoner on a "bare minimum" of pain medication and interrupted his sleep with bright lights for hour after hour before restarting the Sodium Pentothal drip. [59] When they returned, Zubaydah spoke to his faux Saudi interrogators as if they, not he, were the ones in trouble. He said that several years earlier the royal family had made a deal with Al Qaeda in which the House of Saud would aid the Taliban so long as Al Qaeda kept terrorism out of Saudi Arabia. Zubaydah added that as part of this arrangement, he dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other members of the House of Saud as intermediaries, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd's, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a twenty-five-year-old distant relative of the king's. Again, he furnished phone numbers from memory. [60] According to Posner, the interrogators responded by telling Zubaydah that 9/11 had changed everything. The House of Saud certainly would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubaydah dropped his real bombshell. "Zubaydah said that 9/11 changed nothing because Ahmed ... knew beforehand that an attack was scheduled for American soil that day," Posner writes. "They just didn't know what it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The information had been passed to them, said Zubaydah, because bin Laden knew they could not stop it without knowing the specifics, but later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could disclose their foreknowledge." [61] Two weeks later, Zubaydah was moved to an undisclosed location. When he figured out that the interrogators were really Americans, not Saudis, Posner writes, he tried to strangle himself, and later recanted his entire tale. [62] As this book went to press, no one had convincingly refuted Posner's account. *** Meanwhile, the subject of Zubaydah's story, Prince Ahmed, had very different concerns on his mind -- horse racing. The previous year Ahmed had experienced extraordinary success with his three-year-old colt, Point Given. Ahmed had been devastated when Point Given came in fifth in the Kentucky Derby. In early April 2002, while Zubaydah was still being interrogated, Prince Ahmed, knowing he didn't have a horse for the Kentucky Derby, was watching satellite TV in Riyadh when he saw War Emblem win the Illinois Derby by six lengths. "I was very impressed, so we got the door open, got the horse for a reasonable price and we go for it," the prince told a New York Times sports reporter. "We were thinking Derby." [63] And why wasn't the CIA thinking Prince Ahmed, who was due to return to the United States for the Derby? According to Posner, senior CIA officials had ordered a thorough investigation to see whether there was any truth to the assertions Zubaydah had made during his interrogation. About a month afterward, they issued a report that corroborated some statements he had made but that was largely inconclusive. Then they quietly approached Saudi intelligence to ask whether Prince Ahmed could have been an Al Qaeda contact. The Saudis assured them that that could not possibly be the case. That left the administration with nowhere to go -- unless it wanted to create an international incident. And so, on May 7, 2002, Prince Ahmed's War Emblem entered the Kentucky Derby as a 20-1 shot. It was a gorgeous day at Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville. Eight months after 9/11, however, America was still in mourning, and at 5:15 p.m., about fifty minutes before the race, a trumpet played taps, and the crowd of 145,000 attending the country's premier horse racing event fell silent. Firefighters from New York City's Ladder Company 3 on East Twenty ninth Street were the guests of honor, standing at attention in front of the winners' circle. Twelve members of the company had lost their lives in the World Trade Center attack. [64] Post time was 6:04. War Emblem had the number-five position in the wide-open, nineteen-horse field with no strong favorite. Before the gun, the trainer gave jockey Victor Espinoza his instructions: Sit still. The horse likes a quiet jockey. "I've never seen this horse before," Espinoza said. "Just don't move until the last minute, he told me probably a hundred times. Finally, I listened to him." [65] War Emblem broke cleanly at the gate and took the lead in front of Proud Citizen. And that was it. He pulled away at midstretch, holding the lead wire to wire, winning by four lengths. A few people jeered as Prince Ahmed made his way to the winners' circle, but that did not seem to bother him. "Everyone respects me here," he said. "Everybody actually makes me feel so good, sometimes I'm embarrassed. The American public treats me better than in Saudi Arabia." [66] "It's a great achievement," he added. "This was important for me and it's an honor to be the first Arab to win the Kentucky Derby." Columnist Jimmy Breslin, covering the Derby for Newsday, did not fail to notice Prince Ahmed's self-satisfaction. "Prince Ahmed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia held up the winner's cup and gloated with the thought of the million and more he made with the win, and did this in the presence of firefighters from Ladder 3," Breslin wrote. "... I wondered right away if Prince Ahmed had done anything to let us know he was sorry and could he do anything to assist after what bin Laden and other homegrown degenerates did to this city. ... But the guy did nothing. What are you bothering me for, the prince said in Louisville, I am in horse racing, not politics." [67] Two weeks later, War Emblem won the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore. Prince Ahmed's colt now had a shot at being the first Triple Crown winner since Seattle Slew in 1977. After the win, a reporter asked Ahmed how much he wanted to win the triple. "As badly as I want my son and daughter to get married," he replied. "Really bad. To win the Triple Crown would really knock me out." But on June 8, Prince Ahmed did not even show up at the Belmont Stakes, the third part of the Triple Crown. "I'm disappointed the prince wasn't here," said trainer Bob Baffert. [68] Ahmed was said to be tending to family obligations in Riyadh. An associate said that he did not know the nature of the obligations. In any case, War Emblem stumbled as he came out of the starting gate and came in eighth. About six weeks later, on July 22, Prince Ahmed was dead. News reports said the forty-three-year-old nephew of King Fahd had died in his sleep due to a heart attack. [69] As Gerald Posner has reported, Ahmed was not the only person lamed by Zubaydah to suffer ill. The next day, July 23, Ahmed's cousin, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, was killed in a one-car crash while en route to Ahmed's funeral. A week later, on July 30, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir. a third member of the royal family who had been named by Zubaydah, was found in the desert, having apparently died of thirst. [70] [viii] In and of themselves, the three mysterious deaths do not conclusively confirm Posner's assertion that Zubaydah was telling the truth about Osama bin Laden and his high-level links to the House of Saud. Now, of course, the three men cannot be interviewed -- not that the FBI didn't have its chance at one of them. On September 16, 2001, after the Bush administration had approved the Saudi evacuation, Prince Ahmed boarded the 727 in Lexington, Kentucky. He had been identified by FBI officials, but not seriously interrogated. It was an inauspicious start to the just- declared war on terror. "What happened on September 11 was a horrific crime," says John Martin, a former Justice Department official. "It was an act of war. And the answer is no, this is not any way to go about investigating it." As for the Saudis, they were not offering any answers. On September 4, 2003, roughly two years after 9/11, Saudi embassy spokesman Nail al-Jubeir appeared on CNN and was asked by newscaster Paula Zahn, "Can you tell us unequivocally tonight that no one on board [these planes] had anything to do with either the planning or the execution of the September 11 plot?" "There are only two things that I'm sure about," al Jubeir replied. "That there is the existence of God and then we will die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don't know." [71] _______________ [i] One tantalizing detail whose meaning has never been fully explained concerns an unpublished memo from the FAA based on a phone call from a flight attendant on board Flight 11 who asserted, contrary to subsequent reports that only box cutters and plastic utensils had been used as weapons, that a hijacker had shot and killed a passenger on board. The memo said, "The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PFI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American Airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operation Center and informed [sic] that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in 9B at 9:20 am. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin shot by Satam al-Suqama. One bullet was reported to have been fired." However, according to Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, "Events were unfolding minute by minute like they would in any crisis. People were reporting what they believed to be happening, but the preliminary information is frequently wrong. If you talk to the FBI about it, they have absolutely no information that there was a shot, and they have reviewed all the tapes." Because the plane crashed into the World Trade Center, it is unlikely that a gun could have been found in the wreckage even if it had been on the plane. The memo can be found on the website of journalist Edward Jay Epstein at http://edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid9popup.htm [ii] It is worth noting, however, that one of Marvin Bush's coinvestors was Mishal al-Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, which was rescued and restored to power by Marvin's father during the Gulf War of 1991. The al-Sabah family is the same ruling Kuwaiti family that helped the elder George Bush make his fortune through Zapata Off-Shore forty years earlier. And, of course, it is the family of Nayirah, the fifteen-year-old girl whose false congressional testimony helped launch the Gulf War. [iii] After portions of this book were published in Vanity Fair, Colin Powell, in a September 7, 2003, appearance on Meet the Press, was asked about the repatriation. "I don't know the details of what happened," he said. "But my understanding is that there was no sneaking out of the country; that the flights were well-known, and it was coordinated within the government. But I don't have the details about what the FBI's role in it might or might not have been." [iv] The FBI said the Times report was "erroneous." [v] ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Philips Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Marathon Oil, Conoco, and France's TotalFinalElf. [vi] In October 2001, George Goolsby, the head of the energy law practice at Baker Botts, said the firm was "excited" about the openings for international energy firms in Saudi Arabia's gas sector, and that its Riyadh office was involved with "two to three clients, particularly in the second phase" of the project. He added that the opportunities are "still at a very conceptual stage." A few weeks later, in November 2001, Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton, also a Baker Botts client, won a $140- million deal to develop Saudi oil fields. In January 2002, Neil Bush, the president's brother, would travel to the Middle East to help line up investors for his educational software company, Ignite! Learning (Michael Isikoff, "Neil Bush Raising Money for Educational Software Firm," Newsweek, February 4, 2002). In a speech at the Jeddah Economic Forum at the Hilton Hotel, he advised Saudis that it was time for them to fight the U.S. media by engaging in a massive PR campaign: "The U.S. media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be influenced through a sustained lobbying and PR effort" (Khalil Hanware and K. S. Ramkumar, "Win American Hearts Through Sustained Lobbying: Neil Bush," Middle East Newsfile, January 22, 2002). [vii] Posner's account is quite controversial, so it is worth noting that his reputation as an investigative reporter has been made largely from debunking conspiracies, as he did in Case Closed, his book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As to his methodology in reporting this episode, he writes, "The information about those raids, the capture of top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, and his subsequent transfer, interrogation, and the results of those questioning sessions comes from two government sources, both in a position to know the details of Zubaydah's capture and interrogation, as well as his admissions. Both sources separately provided information. Their accounts often overlapped and confirmed each other in important aspects. Without any possibility of independently verifying much of the information, I have had to make a judgment about the sources themselves. In this instance, I believe them to be credible, knowledgeable, and truthful about what transpired. Additionally, an intelligence report on the dispersal and capture of al Qaeda operatives has confirmed some of the interrogation techniques discussed in this chapter. And finally, a Defense Intelligence Agency employee has independently also acknowledged the accuracy of some of the interrogation methods" (Why America Slept, p. 181). [viii] Nor was that the end of it. During his interrogation, Zubaydah had also said that Osama bin Laden had struck a deal with Pakistani air force chief Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, and had told him that there would be unspecified attacks on American soil on 9/11. Seven months after the Saudi deaths, on February 20, 2003, Mir and sixteen others were killed when their plane crashed in a northwest province of Pakistan. Sabotage was widely speculated to be behind the crash but could not be proved. _______________ Notes: 1. "George and Laura," Early Show, November 1, 2002, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/29/earlyshow/leisure/books/main527361.shtml . 2. Sharon Churcher, "The Day the President Went Missing," Daily Mail, September 8, 2002. 3. "Springfield Native Told President of Terrorist Attacks," Associated Press, November 26, 2001, www.directsourceradio.com/links/11262001120N.html. 4. Ibid. 5. Jennifer Barrs, "From a Whisper to a Tear," Tampa Tribune, September 1, 2002, www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/2002/tampatribune090102.html . 6. Ari Fleischer, "Voices of 9-11: 'God Bless You, Mr. President,"' National Journal, August 31, 2002. 7. Nancy Gibbs, "Special Report: The Day of the Attack," Time, September 12, 2001, www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,174655-3,00.html . 8. David E. Sanger and Don Van Natta Jr., "In Four Days, a National Crisis Changes Bush's Presidency," New York Times, September 16, 2001. 9. Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta Jr., "Planning for Terror but Failing to Act," New York Times, December 30, 2001. 10. Charles Gibson, "Terror Hits the Towers," ABC News, September 14, 2001, http://www.abcnews.go.com/onair/DailyNews/sept11_moments_1.html . 11. David Martin, "Notes from an Aide to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Say Iraq Was Considered an Attack Target as far Back as 9/11 Despite No Evidence of Involvement," CBS News, September 4, 2002. 12. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, p. 37. 13. Ibid. 14. Interview with Nailal-Jubeir. 15. Maureen Dowd, "A Golden Couple Chasing Away a Black Cloud," New York Times, November 27, 2002. 16. "America Under Attack," ABC News Special Report, September 12, 2001. 17. Judith Miller with Kurt Eichenwald, "A Nation Challenged: The Investigation; U.S. Set to Widen financial Assault," New York Times, October 1, 2001. 18. Interview with Richard Clarke. 19. Carol Costello, David Ensor, and Rula Amin, "Bin Laden Family Believes Osama Is Alive," CNN Daybreak, March 19, 2002. 20. Elsa Walsh, "The Prince: How the Saudi Ambassador Became Washington's Indispensable Operator," New Yorker, March 24, 2003. p. 48. 21. Interview with Nail al Jubeir. 22. Kathy Steele, Brenna Kelly, and Elizabeth Lee Brown, "Phantom Flight from Florida," Tampa Tribune, October 5, 2001. 23. Cindy Pierson Dulay, Horse-races.net, www.horse-races.net/library/aa072202.htm . 24. Bill Christine, "Bomb Scare Interrupts Card," Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2001, pt. 4, p. 3. 25. Patrick E. Tyler, "Fearing Harm, Bin Laden Kin fled from U.S.," New York Times, September 30, 2001, p. A 1. 26. Jules Crittenden, "Attack on America: Feds Make First Arrest in Manhunt; U.S. Air Force Lost Frantic Race Against Time During Hijackings," Boston Herald, September 15, 2001. 27. Charles M. Madigan, "Bush Boosts Police Powers," Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2001, p. 1. 28. Interview with source with firsthand knowledge of the flight. 29. Ibid. 30. Kevin Cullen and Andrea Estes, "Bin Laden Kin, Family Weighed Staying in U.S.," Boston Globe, September 21, 2001. 31. Interview with source with firsthand knowledge of the flight. 32. Specification sheet for BOEING 727-100 EXEC. 33. Confirmation of flight/vendor agreement. 34. Interview with source with firsthand knowledge of the flights. 35. Passenger lists prepared by Saudi embassy. 36. Interview with John L. Martin. 37. Ibid. 38. Byron York, "The bin Ladens' Great Escape," National Review, September 11, 2002. 39. "President Bush Addresses Joint Session of Congress and the Nation Regarding Last Week's Terrorist Attacks," CBS News Special Report, September 20, 2001. 40. "'Our Resolve Must Not Pass'; Text of President Bush's Speech to Congress," Columbus Dispatch, September 20, 2001, p. A4. 41. "President Bush Addresses Joint Session of Congress and the Nation Regarding Last Week's Terrorist Attacks," CBS News Special Report, September 20, 2001. 42. "President freezes Terrorists' Assets," White House Press Releases, Office of the Press Secretary, September 24, 2001. 43. Joel Mowbray, "Open Door for Saudi Terrorists: The Visa Express Scandal," National Review Online, June 14, 2002, www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment_mowbray061402.asp . 44. Ibid. 45. David Willman and Greg Miller, "Saudi Aid to War on Terror Is Criticized," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2001. 46. Ibid. 47. Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers, and Maggie Mulvihill, "U.S. Ties to Saudi Elite May Be Hurting War on Terrorism; U.S. Businesses Weave Tangled Web with Saudis," Boston Herald, December 10, 2001. 48. Lisa Beyer, "Inside the Kingdom; Saudi Arabia," Time, September 15, 2003, p. 38. 49. Stephen Matthews, "Investing in Saudi Arabia," Middle Eastern Economic Digest, September 14, 2001. 50. "Analysis: Globalisation of Law Firms," Petroleum Economist, October 23, 2001. 51. Testimony of Robert Jordan, Ambassadorial Nominations, Chaired by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI), Federal News Service, September 21, 2001. 52. Lawyer, February 5, 2001. 53. Testimony of Robert Jordan. 54. Ibid. 55. Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, p. 181. 56. Bob Drogin, "U.S. Studies Loot Seized with Captured Al Qaeda Leader," Los Angeles Times, Apri1 3, 2002. 57. Posner, Why America Slept, pp. 187-88. 58. Ibid., p. 188. 59. Ibid., p. 189. 60. Ibid., p. 190. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p.191. 63. William C. Rhoden, "Winning Formula? This Year It Was Money," New York Times, May 5, 2002. 64. Jimmy Breslin, "No Apology After Big Win," Newsday, May 7, 2002. 65. King Kaufman, "Still Life with Horse," Salon, May 5, 2002. 66. Rhoden, "Winning Formula? This Year It Was Money." 67. Breslin, "No Apology After Big Win." 68. Beth Harris, "War Emblem's Owner Skips Belmont Stakes," Associated Press, June 6, 2002. 69. "War Emblem Owner Dies," Sports Network, July 22, 2002. 70. Simon Wardell, "Three Royal Princes Die Within a Week," World Markets Analysis, July 30, 2002. 71. Paula Zahn, "Saudis Evacuated from United States After 9/11?" CNN, September 4, 2003, transcript # 090409CN.V94.
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