Blowback in Riyadh
By William Rivers Pitt
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 u that means cops and 
fire fighters and emergency response crews u 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 william.pitt{at}truthout.org is a New York Times best-
selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context 
Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto 
 
Press. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.

(c): t r u t h o u t 2003

                         -==-

Source: Truthout - http://truthout.org/docs_03/051503A.shtml

Cheers, Steve..

---