Newly released documents reveal the FBI suspected that a plane hired to transport members of the bin Laden family from the United States back to Saudi Arabia might have been chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. The documents raise new questions about the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks.
Truthout reviewed the 224 pages of newly released documents over the past two days.
A heavily redacted FBI report on the incident begins by describing a private jet that was hired to pick up members of the bin Laden family that were in the US eight days after the 9/11 attacks. "The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden," according to the declassified pages of the FBI investigation titled PENTTBOMB (page 3).
Subsequent references to the chartered flight in the released documents state that it was "chartered by the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC" (page 106). The possibility that the flight was arranged or paid for by Osama bin Laden was not addressed again in the subsequent 221 pages released by the FBI.
The FBI report was prepared in response to an October 2003 Vanity Fair magazine article by Craig Unger which raised questions about the FBI procedures after 9/11 that allowed six planes of Middle Eastern nationals to fly out of the United States. Most of the people on these planes were members of the Saudi Royal family, the wealthy rulers of Saudi Arabia, who have high-level contacts with the Bush administration. One plane, Ryan International Flight 441, made four stops around the country on September 19, 2001 to pick up members of the bin Laden family. According to the FBI, these individuals were half-siblings or the children of half-siblings of Osama bin Laden with no connections to the international terrorist. Critics accuse the FBI and possibly the White House of being complicit in allowing individuals with direct connections to Osama bin Laden to flee the country after the attacks. The FBI maintains that their interviews, conducted primarily at airports right before the nationals were to board planes, were sufficient and did not garner any actionable intelligence or warrant the detention of any of the nationals.
A set of documents compiled by the FBI in 2003 sheds some light on the procedures the FBI followed prior to allowing the bin Laden family members and other Saudi nationals to leave the country in the weeks following 9/11. The documents also raise new questions.
An internal FBI email described the effort to collect and compile all of the information about the Saudi nationals. "The point of this mess is a sort of damage assessment of those people leaving the US" (page 136).
The documents were obtained by the conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents had previously been released but all mention of Osama bin Laden and the bin Laden family were blacked-out by the FBI. After a protracted legal fight, these FBI redactions and their accompanying explanations were ruled unacceptable by a Washington, DC District Court judge, who ordered the FBI to reassess the redactions and re-release the report.
Judicial Watch made the re-released report public on Wednesday, with many of the blacked-out sections restored. All mention of Osama bin Laden or the bin Laden family were made readable, revealing the sentence stating that Osama bin Laden may have chartered the flight that collected members of the bin Laden family in the days following the attacks.
It has never made sense that there was no national outcry, or even an investigative report, about the connection between the Bush and Bin Laden families. One wonders what Fox News, or even CNN, would have done had Bill Clinton had the kind of connections with the Bin Ladens that Bush had. And now, if the controversial flight out of the country carrying members of the Bin Laden family following the 9/11 attacks turns out to have been chartered by the supposed "black sheep" of the family, it debunks the entire notion of Osama Bin Laden as being somehow unaffiliated with the rest of his family.
So why WAS George Herbert Walker Bush in a meeting with members of the Bin Laden family on the morning of the attacks anyway? And why WERE the Bin Laden family members allowed to leave the country? And if this plane was chartered by Osama Bin Laden, then put the pieces together. And once you do that, it it at all still possible to believe the official story?
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