posted July 15, 2004 07:20 PM              

quote:

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On the morning of September 13, 2001, a 49-year-old private eye named Dan Grossi got an unexpected call from the Tampa Police Department. Grossi had worked with the Tampa force for 20 years before retiring, and it was not particularly unusual for the police to recommend former officers for special security jobs. But Grossi's new assignment was very much out of the ordinary.

Two days earlier, terrorists had hijacked four airliners and carried out the worst atrocity in American history. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia. "The police had been giving Saudi students protection since September 11." Grossi recalls. "They asked if I was interested in escorting these students from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky."

Grossi was told to go to the airport, where a small charter jet would be available to take him and the Saudis on their flight. He was dubious about the prospects of accomplishing his task. "Quite frankly, I knew that everything was grounded," he says. "I never thought this was going to hap pen." Even so, Grossi, who'd been asked to bring a colleague, phoned Manuel Perez, a former F.B.I. agent, to put him on alert. Perez was equally unconvinced. "I said, 'Forget about it,"' Perez recalls. "'Nobody is flying today."'

The two men had good reason to be skeptical. Within minutes of the attacks on 9/ 11, the Federal Aviation Administration had sent out a special notification called a NOTAM - a notice to airmen - ordering every airborne plane in the United States to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible, and prohibiting planes on the ground from taking off. For the next two days, commercial and private aviation throughout the entire United States ceased. Former vice president Al Gore was stranded in Austria when his flight to the U.S. was canceled. Bill Clinton postponed travel as well. Major- league baseball games were called off. For the first time in a century, American skies were nearly as empty as they had been when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

Nevertheless, at 1:30 or 2 P.M. on the 13th, Dan Grossi received his phone call. He was told the Saudis would be delivered to Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar at Tampa International Airport.

When he and Perez met at the terminal, a woman laughed at Grossi for even thinking he would be flying that day. Commercial flights had slowly begun to resume, but at 10:57 A.M. the F.A.A. had issued another notice to airmen, a reminder that private aviation was still prohibited. Three private planes violated the ban that day, and in each case a pair of jet fighters quickly forced the aircraft down. As far as private planes were concerned, America was still grounded. "I was told it would take White House approval," says Grossi.

Then one of the pilots arrived. "Here's your plane," he told Grossi. "Whenever you're ready to go."

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If you want to read more, here's the link: http://www.wesjones.com/saudi1.htm

Jackie

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posted July 15, 2004 09:33 PM              

I guess US officials figuered they had worn out their welcome.

posted July 16, 2004 01:01 AM              

Did you read the whole story?
If you did, I believe that you understood what does that mean, but if you didn't have time, I can copy a part for you to understand.

quote:

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"It's a natural part of any investigation to seek out people who know the alleged suspect in the murder," says John L. Martin. who, as chief of internal security in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. supervised the investigation and prosecution of national-security offenses for 18 years.

"In the case of the Kennedy assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald's family, including his wife and mother, while not culpable, were looked upon for information about his background. In the case of Timothy McVeigh, McVeigh's family became a center of attention."

How could officials bypass such an elemental and routine part of an investigation during an unprecedented national-security catastrophe? At the very least, wouldn't relatives have been able to provide some information about Osama's finances, associates, or supporters?

A number of experienced investigators expressed surprise that the Saudis had not been interviewed. "Certainly it would be my expectation that they would do that," says Oliver "Buck" Revell, former associate deputy director of the F.B.I.

"Here you have an attack with substantial links to Saudi Arabia," John Martin says. "You would want to talk to people in the Saudi royal family and the Saudi government, particularly since they have pledged cooperation."

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posted July 16, 2004 04:56 AM              

Let's face it, the real perpetraters died in the process. Who the he11 could they prosecute? The fricken butler?

All they could do is get the probable (but not likely convictable) co-horts out of the country.

You can't arrest someone based on association, at least not in America, not at that time. So, maybe that law should be changed then? Is that what you're all suggesting?

Or, should that law only apply to foreigers?

posted July 16, 2004 11:42 AM            

If you won't take the word of the person who personally released the Saudis after consultation with the FBI who questioned them and said the FBI had no interest in questioning them further, then who the hell would you believe?

I know the left is not interested in the truth. The truth removes a lying allegation from their arsenal to beat up on the President.

I also know some think they're scoring political points but they only make themselves look utterly foolish as they endlessly repeat allegations which are proven to be lies.

Richard Clarke: Big Part of Moore's Movie 'a Mistake'

Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who served as a principal source for conspiracy filmmaker Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," said this week that the central premise of the film is "a mistake."

In an interview with the Associated Press, Clarke took issue with Moore's criticism that President Bush allowed prominent Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, to fly out of the U.S. in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

Saying Moore's version of the episode has provoked "a tempest in a tea pot," Clarke called his decision to make the bin Laden family flyout a big part of the film's indictment against Bush "a mistake."
"After 9/11, I think the Saudis were perfectly justified ... in fearing the possibility of vigilantism against Saudis in this country. When they asked to evacuate their citizens ... I thought it was a perfectly normal request," he explained.

In May, Clarke confessed that he and he alone made the decision to approve the flyouts.

"It didn’t get any higher than me,” he told The Hill newspaper. "On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”

Clarke told the 9/11 Commission the same thing in March, after first detailing the episode for Vanity Fair magazine last August - leaving plenty of time for Moore to adjust his film to the facts as recounted by his primary source.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/7/1/00111.shtml

Here's another favorite lie of the left.......that the Bush family was tied to the Caryle Group which reaped huge contracts from the Saudi government. The implication being that the Bush family through connections with the Saudi Royal family was able to steer Saudi business to the Caryle Group in which they had a business interest.

Records reveal there were no Bush family members associated with the Caryle Group when those contracts were let by the Saudi Royal family.

Again, if you won't believe Newsweek, then who the hell will you believe?

Facts are so damned inconvenient to the lies the left loves to tell. The left reminds me of the old saying in that "someone on the left tells a lie and 10,000 other leftists swear to it". The cast of thousands!

Newsweek: Moore Distorted Bush Saudi Ties
NewsMax Wires
Thursday, July 01, 2004

A central theme of Michael Moore’s controversial documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a bare allegation that Saudi Arabian interests provided $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush.

However, as a special Newsweek investigative report notes, there is really less – not more – than meets the eye re the dramatic Moore claim:

Nearly 90 percent of that claimed amount, $1.18 billion, comes from contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. The “Bush” connection: The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board once included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush.

But, points out Newsweek, former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998 -- five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm.

As for the sitting president’s own Carlyle link, his service on the board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor -- a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded.

The Carlyle Group is hardly a “Bush Inc,” noted Newsweek – but rather features a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. “Its founding and still managing partner is Howard Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm’s senior advisors is Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Cannard, Clinton’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.”

According to the report, the movie neglects to offer any evidence that Bush White House intervened in any way to bolster the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company’s interest was the cancellation of a $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001. Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld canceled the Crusader program the following year.

As to Moore’s dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks, the 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them "detailed questions." "Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country," the commission stated.

The entity in the White House that approved the flights wasn’t the president, or the vice president -- it was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton administration. Clarke has testified that he gave the approval conditioned on FBI clearance.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/6/30/224136.shtml

The left is running out of lies so I'm betting on some recycling. How about this one?

The war in Afghanistan is about getting an oil pipeline for UNOCAL.

Or this one?

The war with Iraq is all about stealing the Iraqi oil fields for American oil companies.