Eric Zuesse

A bill is expected to come up for a vote in the U.S. Senate on Friday September 9th that could enable Saudis to be prosecuted for financing the 9/11 attacks, but the Saudi royal family are pouring millions into buying key members of Congress to block the vote. On 17 March of this year, the Sauds set up in Washington a PR operation to persuade members of Congress to block it. Furthermore, as International Business Times also reported about that matter, “In October, the Saudi government signed a contract to be represented by the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm run by Clinton campaign fundraiser Tony Podesta.” What happens this Friday could culminate these efforts by the family that owns Saudi Arabia, to, essentially, lock-in their U.S. immunity.

As has now been established by overwhelming evidence, the Saudi royal family paid, and oversaw the positioning in the U.S., of some if not all of the 9/11 jihadists. (That article links through to all of the key evidence on this.) For fifteen years, 9/11 families have sought to remove the Sauds’ immunity from prosecution, which George W. Bush and Barack Obama insisted upon continuing. On 17 May 2016, a bill to allow this matter into U.S. courts passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate, despite a threat by the Sauds to bring down the U.S. economy if this bill becomes law.

The Republican head of the U.S. House, Republican Paul Ryan, has been trying to find a way to block the matter from coming to a vote. His Republican colleague Representative Peter King of New York is trying to force Ryan to bring it to a vote. As stated by Politico on September 7th, King says that Ryan:

“has told him that he’d back the bill if Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) supports it. Goodlatte’s aides wouldn’t comment on the issue, but King said the Virginia Republican informed him multiple times that he supports the measure. ‘Ryan said so long as Goodlatte approves it, he would approve it. And I spoke to Goodlatte, and [Goodlatte] said he approves it and supports it,’ King told POLITICO. ‘There is no reason now for it not to come to a vote. The House Judiciary Committee chairman supports it. It should be over and done. Cut and dry.’ King added: “There is no reason for delay.”

The reason why 100% of U.S. Senators had voted for the legislation wasn’t that all Senators want it to pass; for many Senators the purpose was instead to hand this hot potato on to the House and then (if they pass it) on to the President (Obama, who promises to veto it), so as to drag this matter out until after the November 8th elections, after which time they’ll all be freed-up for enough of them to vote for the Sauds on it so as to kill this bill.

Right now, it’s just a postponing-action in Congress.

On September 5th, two officials of the George W. Bush Administration, John Bolton and Michael Mukasey, headlined an op-ed in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, “The Folly of Fighting Terrorism by Lawsuit: The House should kill a dangerous bill that would lift sovereign immunity in some terror cases”. They said that this matter should not be determined by judges in courts, but by the Congress’s power to declare war and the President’s power to serve as the Commander-in-Chief (the same approach that has preserved the existing immunity from prosecution). They said: “To invite unelected, life-tenured judges to interfere in areas constitutionally assigned to the branches charged with making and declaring war is folly.”

Here is how Britain’s Daily Mail put this matter on 19 May this year: Saudi Arabia’s “Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said his country would sell up to $750 billion in US treasury securities and other assets before the bill puts them in jeopardy.”

Buying U.S. Presidents and members of Congress will cost them far less.

Jimmy Carter has said that in today’s United States:

Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.

A dollar paid by a member of the Saudi royal family (or any other foreigner) smells just as sweet to a U.S. Government official as does a dollar paid by an American, especially in the current era of untraceable offshore accounts. And that’s also the reason why Congress is planning to vote on Obama’s unpopular TPP treaty after the election.

UPDATE: On September 9th, the U.S. House unanimously passed the bill to remove the Sauds’ immunity. This is historic, and though Obama has promised a veto, a veto-override by both houses of Congress is now practically assured (because it requires a two-thirds majority in both houses, and because each house voted 100% against the President on this). Perhaps the U.S. bond to the Saud family, which started in earnest in 1945, is finally ended. Perhaps they’ll dump $750B in Treasuries.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.