The [Redacted] Report, With Adam Driver and Annette Bening: A Film That Presents Itself As Questioning The Questioning of 9/11 Suspects. . . Is, Indeed, About What’s Left Out And Questions Not Asked

Redaction oriented promotion for the film "The [Redacted] Report"

The promotion of the film, “The Report,” originally titled “The Redacted Report” (note the emphasized deletion) has been interesting in the way that it stresses what has been left out, the redactions.  In a clever bit of advertising promotion for this Amazon Prime feature (Vice Studios is also a producer) editions of the New York Times arrived in November with a wrap-around special section, looking like a newspaper section, titled “Truth Matters.” It was rendered almost entirely unreadable because the majority of the text appearing there was blacked out with redactions.  All you could supposedly make out on that section’s front page that it was something about the “White House, . . the Constitution,  . . .violations, . . etc.” 

. . .The back of the special section furnished a quote from Variety: “ . . by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs [i.e. to know?] now more than ever.”

A few days later the New York Times Arts section slathered on more enticement for the scandal-revealing film by running an article officially telling readers that something had been left out of the film, see:  The Report’ and the Untold Story of a Senate-C.I.A. Clash Hollywood Left Untold- `The Report,” about a 9/11 torture inquiry, omits a crucial episode.  By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, Published Nov. 15, 2019, Updated Nov. 16, 2019, or if you want the Times internet headline for the same story, The Adam Driver film dramatizes a contentious investigation into post-9/11 torture. But it leaves out a tense episode that could have buried the results altogether.

That Times story on the first page of its Arts section tells us that the “crucial episode” omitted about the “9/11 torture inquiry” that “could have buried the results” of the “contentious investigation” altogether was that the report was the subject of “a pressure campaign to keep the report under wraps” that included James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, citing a classified assessment and telling members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that release of the report “could lead to riots, attacks on American embassies and the killing of American hostages overseas.”

The big reveal, the hook based upon which the two Times headlines for the article were written, is that there were efforts to suppress that report, however, the whole movie is organized around tension involving efforts to suppress the report and its information. . .  And, despite what the two Times article authors claim, there is something very similar to their cited “episode” included in the film. . .  But having read the Times article (the internet version of the Times article includes the “teaser” trailer promoting it), you might be lured into thinking that, when you see the film, that you’ll know everything about what was left out . .

Is that so?  Not quite!  That’s why I am writing this article.

First, I don’t want to spoil things for anyone: See the film.  It has great performances, including by Adam Driver as the report’s chief investigator and Annette Bening as Senator Diane Feinstein, along with superb performances of many supporting actors like Jon Hamm.  The film also deals with very important issues.  You can feel good about the fact that they are issues that frequently don’t get the attention they should.  Indeed, they are issues that there are continual efforts to bury, just as the film is about attempts to bury the titular report of the title.

See the film, but see the film bearing in mind some of the points we’ll make in this article.

The film is docudrama.  Docudrama’s have a great advantage communicating in that they can synthesize complex stories for the public that could otherwise be exceedingly difficult to understand.  As human beings, our minds organize around narratives, stories that can be told around a campfire.  But when docudramas put their composite or narratively simplified characters up on the screen we lose sight of reality.  When blanks get filled in for the sake of moving the story along, we are likely to forget to ask questions about how those blanks could otherwise have been filled in or ought to have been. 

In the case of the film “The Report,” although it asks questions about how 9/11 suspects who were tortured were “questioned,” it doesn’t ask all the questions that are there to be asked despite the feeling that the film gives that it covers everything.  The film doesn’t ask questions about how a number of blanks that it fills in should have been filled in.

Before we get to those blanks and the questions that weren’t asked, let's look at a list of the many facts and issues the film does address.  The list makes the film appear almost seditious in the amount of criticism it is willing to direct at our government’s intelligence agencies.  Much of what is set forth on the list below is discernible by watching the trailer, but not all of it:

    •    9/11 scared people, made people scared it would happen again, so they would accept the crossing of boundaries that people wouldn’t accept before, many of them.  CHECK!
    •    People in the intelligence community actually foresaw that 9/11 was coming, but, somehow, those available insights were ignored allowing 9/11 to happen.  Decisions were specifically made not to investigate beforehand matters about the 9/11 events that would soon thereafter take place.  CHECK!
    •    Immediately following 9/11, huge amounts of increased funding flowed as a result thereof into the military-industrial-surveillance complex, with a virtual blank check going to the intelligence agencies included in that flow. For instance, just a small for instance, the unqualified private contractors who concocted methods of torture were paid over $80 million.  CHECK!    
    •    9/11 suspects were tortured by the U.S. government. CHECK!
    •    Torture is reprehensible and morally wrong (or at least most watching the film would concur). CHECK!
    •    Torture by the United States government is illegal. CHECK!
    •    When the United States government engages in such illegal torture, it creates a greater likelihood that members of our own military will be subject to similar treatment, while our country simultaneously loses the ability and grounds to prevent and object to it. CHECK!
    •    Those who are properly trained in our government know quite well that there are reliable, productive interrogation techniques that much more competently get information that don’t involve torture. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, yields false and undependable information. CHECK!
    •    The CIA that conducted such torture had a long, long, decades long knowledge that torture does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Torture sometimes kills suspects putting whatever information they potentially had out of reach. CHECK!
    •    The government’s switch over from interrogation techniques capable of yielding valuable information to torture techniques that wouldn’t work made it seem almost as if the government didn’t actually want real information.  CHECK!
    •    That if the government actually knew torture didn’t work (as apparently it did), it was even more illegal. CHECK!
    •    The CIA was making its plans (in November of 2001) to torture people before it had identified suspects from which it wanted any information.         
    •    Coercion, including using torture against suspects means that it becomes almost impossible to thereafter legally prosecute those suspects; thus it immunizes them from legal consequences. CHECK!  (That raises questions about what is actually intended with respect to the actual disposition of such individuals.  CHECK!) 
    •    The United States tortured people who had no connection in any way to attacks on the United States, and people whose potential for providing information was deceptively exaggerated– That included exaggerating to say that Abu Zubaydah with whom the torture program was initiated, had connections to top al-Qaeda leadership. CHECK!  The film notes that, of at least 119 people identified as having been tortured, more than one quarter of them should never even have been detained. CHECK!
    •    Torturing people creates hostility towards the Unites States generating new enemies.  CHECK!
    •    The Unites States Government lied to the public issuing statements that were false saying that its torture programs has been successful in obtaining information that prevented attacks. That included Dick Cheney falsely claiming on television that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden backed up by false statements of former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Mukasey.  CHECK!
    •    That Public Relations people advising the CIA wanted (e.g. the misinformation in the film “Zero Dark Thirty” that the CIA helped make) President Obama’s popular bin Laden raid connected to information obtained by torture even before and when there was never any ability to manufacture such links.
    •    The United States Government, for about as long as it could, attempted to cover up just about all of the above, including the titular “Report” of the film about all of this.  That suppression could include character assassination of the messenger.  It included lying within the government and suppression of internal dissent within the intelligence agencies. CHECK!
    •    The CIA reportedly destroyed, so as to make them unavailable, tapes of its torture sessions (The destruction is what launches “The Report”’s investigation), so that we cannot now know and witness for ourselves the kinds of statements the CIA interrogators attempted to coerce the people it tortured into making and, further, we cannot see the responses the tortured individuals provided. The tape destruction was something that Gina Haspel (now CIA Director) was directly responsible for.  CHECK!
    •    There are serious questions about the CIA spying on the congressional oversight investigations of CIA activities. That included unauthorized searches of the investigators’ computers. CHECK!    
    •    That those in the government responsible for such actions were promoted, not punished or held to account and that includes Gina Haspel, one of those at the CIA most responsible, who was promoted to become the head of the CIA under Trump.  The film’s end cards say “No CIA officers have been charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report.  Many were promoted. One became Director of the CIA.”  CHECK!

That’s a long list.  And the New York Times article provided assurance that the producers provided “an annotated script” documenting the facts incorporated into the film. (The Times article noted some only very minor liberties with the facts that it says were taken.)  So what did a film that accurately includes all this leave out?  What questions did the film fail to ask, filling in its docudrama blanks in such a way that could go unnoticed?

According to the Times, the film’s “heroes and villains are sketched in black and white.”  Maybe, but are the “villains” supposedly sketched as “black,” sketched in the right shades of black?  Are those shades as black as they should be?  Because we don’t know a lot of things for sure, we can only speculate about how black those shades should be.  That’s hard to do in a docudrama format, but it is a question that deserves asking.

The film’s trailer shows how the film conveys that those wearing the black hats in the film were acting with the intent “to gain intel and save American lives.”  Even as they are shown to be mendacious and deceiving, incapable of recognizing their own sadism, the film allows those wearing its black hats to be seen as essentially misguided and/or perhaps incompetent.  The Times even manages, in its discussion of the film, to back up the idea of this incompetence of government officials by finding an `independent expert,’ Edward Peters, author of a history of torture, to say that those in charge of the nation’s torture program were incompetent to the level that they were “so ignorant of the history of torture,” that they didn’t actually know that they were, without question, torturing people.  Really?: The advantage of being `inexpert’ about torture “history” when you are in charge running a torture program is that you have an excuse for failing to recognize when you are torturing people as your job?

The Times softened any possible judgment that could be leveled against the black hats in the film even further, by supplying, in its film discussion, information that 60 percent of visitors to the International Spy Museum in Washington “voted in favor of torture” (in response to a survey the museum created) if “suspected terrorists . .  may know details about future attacks.”  This was after the Museum Curators provided “video clips in which the [torture] program’s architects defended it and opponents of torture denounced it.”

The Times discussion ends with a note (via quotes from Senator Udall, an author of the report) that the legacy of the report’s “grim record” is that it could serve a possible “warning” if “future leaders” are tempted to use torture again.  But here we have the two Times co-writers of the article, who just saw the film, inserting into their article that discusses these `warnings,’ theories about how maybe those wearing the film’s black hats were possibly not all that bad, that maybe these black hats were only `inexpert’ about torture history, and maybe these black hats were somewhat representative of the 60% of the visitors to the Spy Museum exposed to the pro-torture arguments offered by those in government running these programs who were inexpert in such history.

The real subject here is not intended to be how the New York Times recontextualized the black hats of the film into arguably normal people; the subject here is intended to be the unquestioned suppositions the film itself supplies, almost unnoticeably, concerning about how black the hats of the black hats in the film might actually have been.

The film, presupposing to know them, continually ascribes defensible, even admirable motivations to those who conducted and ran the torture program.  The film has the composite character that stands in for the Gina Haspel and who delivers her supposed point of view say that she justifies what she is doing because, in the aftermath of 9/11 “we are not going to get beat again.”  To her fictional credit, the Gina Haspel composite character, in later scenes, expresses exasperation when it is clear that torture is not bringing forth “the truth,” and she shows irritation with the idea that, when torturing people, you have to supply those people with the words you want them to say (your own “intel” on the subject) to get them to repeat it back.– In other words, she shows irritation that torture is only effective to put the words of your own script in their mouths.

Another stand in character for the torturers who presents the views of those favoring torture tells the investigators in an earnestly overwrought fashion that the report investigators don’t know what worked or didn’t, and that those engaged in the program who were doing these things are “trying to protect this country from people who want to destroy everything we believe in.”  One of the chief torturer concocters says that after 9/11 he “wanted to do something to keep people safe.”*

(*Somewhere herein we have to note that film often has its character's use, just as in real life, the euphemism "EIT Program"_-- Enhanced Interrogation Technique Program--  for torture.) 

It is towards the end of the film that these presumed motivations of the torturers get emphatically vouched for one more time by Adam Driver playing the film’s trusted protagonist, the report’s chief investigator when he is squarely asked: “If the CIA knew that torture didn’t work, why did they continue to do it?”

Driver’s character, Daniel Jones responds: “After 9/11 everyone was scared, scared it might happen again, and the CIA would be blamed if it happened again.  Or maybe they were ashamed: How come the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth couldn’t keep its own people safe?”   

Actually, based on the film’s earlier revelations that the CIA knew torture didn’t work decades before, why did “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” in this instance, do it in the first place, let alone “continue” to do it?

Certainly, some of the people involved in conducting and running the torture program could have had such motivations as the film supplies, but to supply all of the top people running our intelligence agencies with such motivations, means that all of the top people at “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” if not simply sadists, had to be grossly incompetent and extraordinarily misguided, uninformed about the very things about which they are supposed to be expert.– Maybe as the author of the book on the history of torture says, because they don’t know their history?  How easy is this to presume, as is the film’s wont?

Even though the film emphasizes how the entire torture program never got any valuable information and although the film makes a brief reference to how over one quarter of the people tortured by the U.S. in its torture program “should never even have been detained,” it portrays a number of the key individuals being tortured mostly as if they are individuals who likely may be harboring just out of reach information that they are not giving up under torture.  We hear the suggestion that some of the tortured not giving information may “never be forthcoming or honest,” as if that was the point.  At another point, the torturers feeling stymied because they get no information, make out one of the men being tortured as seemingly crafty when they quote him as telling them that if they hurt him “he’d just make things up to get us to stop.”  We are similarly told that “KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitted he just told them what they wanted to hear to make it stop.”  The torturers in the film figure they are faced by `super-resisters’ who just give them stuff they already have, lies to make them stop, not the truth.  They decide they know about a man they are torturing only that “the truth is he’s lying.”

The film makes a big deal of the fact that those tortured just gave the CIA back information that the CIA already had.  As noted, the film included mention of how the only way to get more information from the tortured was to give the tortures more “intel” already in the hands of the CIA that the torturers could then extract from the tortured. This bounce back of information supplied by and already in the hands of interrogators is an inherent problem with torturing and coerced confessions.  It’s why everyone in these professions knows that coercion and coercive interrogation techniques are famous for yielding false confessions.  People are sent to prison for crimes the police want them to confess to in such situations, not crimes they actually commit.  (And, concomitantly, someone else is likely to go free.) 

The film avoids asking whether there would be any reason, other than utter incompetence, for the CIA to engage in and persist in so many interrogations where the result was simply statements bouncing back the “intel” the CIA came to those interrogations equipped with.  And even though coercion is famous for yielding false confessions, no more than exactly the story the interrogator wants recited back, the film doesn’t ask to what extent that statements bouncing back to the CIA the CIA’s own “intel” were perhaps false, verifying what might have been false information furnished by the CIA.

Unfortunately, the result of such unreliable investigative techniques is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  For instance, some of what is not known and needs to be discovered is the basis of and at the core of the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia for the Saudi government’s assistance of the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.  Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 is not mentioned in the film.— The film briefly mentions FBI Director Robert Mueller as one of those in government who is apparently suppressing the reporting of torture (an FBI agent explains that things went nowhere when he told the FBI about the torture- “They briefed Director Mueller and told me to get the hell out of there.”)– And the 9/11 families have introduced in their lawsuit an affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent saying Mueller, as head of the FBI, was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”

Throughout multiple administrations, the United States continues to have a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia–  That includes the entire extended time period during which“The Report” takes place.

The film certainly does not stress enough that, because torture increased the unreliability of investigations that needed to be conducted, there is much that we probably haven’t found out, and much that is difficult to presume we actually know.  Nonetheless, about some things, beyond the torturers’ motives, the film presumes to know– In what is probably intended to be one of the film’s hardest hitting dramatic moments, Adam Diver’s Daniel Jones protagonist says of KSM:

What they really did was make it impossible to prosecute a mass murderer like KSM, because if what we did to him ever came out in a court of law the case is over.  The guy planned 9/11, and instead of going to jail for the rest of his life the CIA turned him into a recruiting tool for a war we're still fighting.

What is remarkable in a sense, is that because the film is so methodically thorough, it makes what is left out obvious if you bring to it the kind of scrutiny we are engaging in here. It's a scrutiny the film invites given the way it revels in its wonkishly analytical delights.  The Guardian’s review of the film describes writer and director Scott Z Burns as having a “a fetish for competence porn (that’s watching hugely capable, incredibly smart people carry out difficult tasks with great aptitude)” which keeps the film on track as being about the thrill of dealing with the actual facts.

After I got to just about this point writing this article, I went hunting for reviews of the film.  So far I have found no review that points out the questions the film does not directly ask identified here.  Even an alternative press review such as the one in Counterpunch fails to pick this up.  Previously published reviews generally accept what the film communicates at face value.  The Rolling Stone review of the film actually reassures “Burns redacts nothing here” praising the film for its complete comprehensiveness.

Some of the most glowing reviews of the film hearken back to the film’s debut at the Sundance Film festival. Variety’s review of that time concludes, “`The Report’ is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see. .”  Sundance is where Amazon immediately picked the film up for distribution for $14 million.

I don’t see evidence that Amazon is failing to give the film the support it deserves, but many of the reviews of the film since Sundance proclaim it to be bland, dull and plodding, something I would absolutely disagree with, at least for those, like me, who have a part of their brain that lights up and activates with Andrew Sorkin type engrams and receptors when properly stimulated.  The Rolling Stone review endorses that Burns is correct in believing “that the granular details of cerebral inquiry into issues of morality are more than enough to hold our rapt attention.”

Because Amazon is streaming the film at the same time that it is playing in theaters, there is no way to report, interpret or make sense of any boffo box office figures that could help attract attention for the film.
               
An article in the Intercept reviewing the film (“If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters) spars with one aspect of the film to make an interesting point about the film’s ambiguity concerning whether it  stands up for the ethics of whistleblowing and those who resort to taking issues like these to the press.  The Intercept article also snarkily notes that the film gives some credit to the work of a “New York Times national security reporter,” but that the reporter who actually broke the story was Ali Watkins, a reporter at McClatchy (who later did a “stint” at the Times).  The Intercept has a page up saying that it “welcomes whistleblowers.” Unfortunately, the Intercept may not be the optimal publication to praise whistleblowing since it has provided treacherous shoals for whistleblowers seeking safe harbor there– The Internet is developing a very questionable record of "outed" whistleblowers who came to them anonymously and in confidence, i.e. Reality Leigh Winner and Terry James Albury.

What we have not so far mentioned here is that “The Report” adroitly explores the intricate multi-factored balances and interactions between the different departments and branches of government (and yes the press as fourth estate), and how this affects and involves labyrinthian constraints on getting anything done.  I’ll have to leave it to others who were tracking the political players more closely to decide how fair Burns’ film is to them.  (Burns says he voted for Obama twice, but the Obama administration gets roundly knocked, as it apparently deserved to be.)

Burns probably has a multilayered appreciation for the sort of politics involved in getting such a project done that is informed by his own experience.  Investigation and writing of the torture report was initiated in 2007 and the film chronicles how it took seven years to surmount the impediments involved for a summary of the report to finally be released. Burn’s reportedly took five years and 20 drafts to complete his screenplay, starting his work after the release of the report.  Vanity Fair reports that it wasn’t an easy film to get made. The magazine's article informs us that, towards the end, the film:

went from having a 50-day schedule to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to $8 million. Even with Driver—arguably the hottest male movie star of the moment—as the lead, Burns told press, “getting Hollywood to get behind a movie like this was difficult.”

Eight million dollars to make an important film like this is a paltry sum.

Just as redaction and compromise were continually issues in getting the report out as the film depicts, so too, we might expect that redactions, the leaving of certain blanks to be filled in only by the more astute viewers, were important to getting the film made.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it was made while redacting as little as it did.  The film is well worth seeing.

An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

I have what is now a many year tradition with Noticing New York, another blog I write (about real estate development in New York and associated politics), of publishing a seasonal reflection about the year on Christmas Eve.  (More about the Noticing New York tradition here.)  This year I deviated from my pattern of previous years to publish, as Noticing New York's seasonal reflection, a letter I wrote to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about peace.   There is a little bit more about my decision at Noticing New York.
Because the letter I wrote concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued as national issues here in National Notice, perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace here in National Notice.  So, on this Christmas Eve, following a few days after the winter solstice and coming not many days before the day that officially starts our country's new year, may we all move forward to a more blessed future and I hope that I have written something that is worth passing along so that it may have some beneficial effect.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false “confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

Look Who’s All On The Same Brooklyn Book Festival Panel This Week Discussing U.S. Press Freedom!: Jim Acosta, Suzanne Nossel, and Joy Reid– All of Whom Have Very Astute Critics As To Whether They Actually Support Press Freedom

The Brooklyn Book Festival has a panel this Sunday at 3:00 PM, (St. Francis College Founder’s Hall, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, New York 11201) “PEN Presents: Breaking the News with Jim Acosta, Suzanne Nossel, and Joy Reid.”

Supposedly, the panelists, moderated by Jami Floyd of WNYC (only 30% listener supported) will be talking about “What is the state of press freedom in the United States?” and the ability of the public “news consumers” to discern “fake” versus “real” news.

The interesting thing is that while each of these panelist may get held up as some kind of journalism hero, each of them have their critics with astute observations as to what they are truly about-

Jim Acosta?  Jim Acosta’s standing up for the First Amendment press freedoms has been criticized as a sham.  July 13, 2019, Jim Acosta was promoting his book “Enemy of the People” about defending the First Amendment at the Newseum.  Matt Orfalea captured Acosta on video as he asked Acosta to stand up for the press freedom of Julian Assange who is being pursued by the United States for publishing information about this country’s war crimes.  Acosta embarrassed himself mightily in a sickening spectacle, exquisitely documented by Mr. Orfalea.

See: 

Jim Acosta Refuses to Defend Free Press & Julian Assange (FULL) 

I first saw this video at a live Jimmy Dore Show (his radio show is carried on WBAI radio 99.5 FM- 100% listener supported) in Brooklyn.  Jimmy Dore is a comic who gets almost all his mileage in humor about politics that simultaneously;y teaches media literacy, as in don’t believe what the corporate media serves up to you as truth.

Speaking of Jimmy Dore. . .

Joy Reid?  Joy Reid has made herself a perfect target for Mr. Dore’s comically expressed scorn.  Joy Reid has gone after Susan Sarandon.  Ms. Reid scoldingly tweeted:

    Susan Sarandon is...
    - not a feminist
    - anti-Obama
    - unbothered by Hollywood sexual harassment
    - and still convinced Hillary Clinton would have been more dangerous than Trump
    My god, she’s Phyllis Schlaffley!

Mr Dore tweeted in response:

Joy Reid is..
-not a journalist
-anti-Progressive
-unbothered by corporate propaganda,
-and still pretends Neoliberalism isn't the problem
My god, she has no integrity!

Mr. Dore has more than one YouTube segment up taking Ms. Reid to task. See:

Joy Reid Self Owns In 3 Tweets, (Like a typical MSNBC on-air personality, Joy Reid’s paycheck depends on her pretending to not understand the problem.) March 13, 2018

MSNBC Host Caught Smearing Actual Journalist & Cries Wolf (taking on the fact that Joy Reid trying to say that Juliane Assange published inaccurate information— he didn’t.), July 9, 2017

Proof MSNBC Tells Hosts What To Say On Air, September 17, 2017

Suzanne Nossel?  Suzanne Nossel has been taken on by some heavyweights

Here are some:

Truthdig: The Hijacking of Human Rights, by Chris Hedges (Chris Hedges “On Contact”can be heard on WBAI, 100% listener supported), April 08, 2013

The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. . .

. . . Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists” . . .

. .  Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan — NATO: Keep the Progress Going.

. . . She worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report, which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. . . . She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. . . .she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will look for leadership that is bold and strident . . .

Is this the résumé of a human rights advocate in the United States? Are human rights organizations supposed to further the agenda of the state rather than defend its victims?

Antiwar.blog: An Appeal to PEN: Exec. Director Suzanne Nossel Must Go, by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley, April 3, 2013.   

Suzanne Nossel is a disturbing choice as the new executive director of PEN, American Center (PEN), an American branch of the worldwide association of writers and related professions devoted to free expression and "the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world." The stark contrast between the statements of Arthur Miller and Suzanne Nossel above is enough to sound an alarm. But Nossel’s career path, the masters she has served, the stances she has taken and the activities she has sponsored demonstrate profound differences with PEN. . . . She is an embodiment of the ongoing, and all too successful, cooption of the Human Rights movement by the U.S. government.

* * * *

Nossel had previously worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Nossel is often credited with coining the phrase "Smart Power" (1), which Clinton repeated interminably in her Senate confirmation hearings to characterize how she would run State and which Nossel defined in a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs as "assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military." . . .

* * * *

Before working at State, Nossel worked at Human Rights Watch, which has come under increasing criticism for its distorted accounts of the Chavez government in Venezuela and other official enemies of the US. And before that she worked at the UN under Richard Holbrooke as the Clintons masterminded the bombing of Yugoslavia and. . .

* * * *

PEN Shows No Concern for Julian Assange or Bradley Manning.

. . . Today a search on the PEN, America, web site readily yields entries for Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, but nothing is to be found for "Bradley Manning "or "Julian Assange"! That in itself speaks volumes about Nossel’s PEN. As Chomsky and others have often pointed out, the primary duty of intellectuals is to critique their own ruling elite. After all, we can most affect our own rulers and it is their actions we are most responsible for. And that is what requires genuine courage. Criticizing elites in countries that are America’s official enemies is an easy and secure career path.

Salon: Deferring Justice: Clinton emails show how State Dept. undermined U.N. action on Israeli war crimes–  U.S. government boasted it "deferred" the Goldstone Report through "political work," preventing justice for Gazans, by Ben Norton and Jared Flanery, November 20, 2015.

Nossel's career reflects the revolving door between the U.S. State Department and human rights organizations. As a former deputy assistant secretary of state, Nossel proclaimed in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in 2011, "At the top of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair treatment at the Human Rights Council."

* * * *

. . . Under the leadership of Nossel, Amnesty International-USA came under fire from anti-war groups like CODEPINK for creating ads featuring the words "NATO: Keep the progress going" superimposed over Afghan women in burqas. In a 2012 Wellesley College discussion with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Nossel also spoke positively of the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, and lamented that there was "a continued impasse" in the Security Council that prevented similar "forceful action" against Syria.

Are these the people we should be listening to on the subject of press freedom?  Is this the panel that should be at the Brooklyn Book fair?  They all seem, for entirely unsupportable reasons, to be against Julian Assange and against giving him the support that free press advocates should be giving him.

Plus, should they be telling us what "fake" news is?  They all seem to be promulgating fake news.

Maybe it all the more insidious that Brooklyn Fair has some legitimately liberal and progressive speakers on some of its panels.  Bill McKibben will be speaking about climate.  I've written about Lewis Hyde and his writing about the public commons.  He will be speaking.

But snuck in among these speakers will be ringers like Jim Acosta, Suzanne Nossel, and Joy Reid, delivering deceptive messages.

Another favorite ringer we've spotted likely delivering a deceptive message is Eric Klinenberg, who will be delivering an address to New York City Librarians telling them how to defend NYC libraries and what is at stake in terms of their survival.  Really?

Postscript For Our National Notice “How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller?” Series: A NY Post Article “Robert Mueller Helped Saudi Arabia Cover Up Its Role in 9/11 Attacks” Evokes Consideration Of The Strange FBI/Saudi Khobar Towers Bombing Investigation

Appearing above in the end: former FBI Director Louis Freeh, Saudi Prince Bandar ("Bush"), and Robert Mueller- Read about the peculiar investigations that connect them

This article started out as, and is essentially, the postscript I wrote for the last article in a three-part series of articles all addressing a very serious question: How trustworthy is Robert Mueller and his Russiagate report?  The three articles provide an in depth profile and history of Mr. Mueller and his career (including his frequent collaborations and overlaps with William Barr) very different from what you think you might know from reading Mr. Mueller’s Wikipedia page.  See:

It’s Now A Three-Part Series: How Trustworthy Is Robert Mueller and His Russiagate Report?

Two days after I finished that last article, The New York Post published an article I couldn't ignore or avoid referencing in the series since it was one more example of Robert Mueller impeding investigations; this time it was about Robert Mueller helping Saudi Arabia cover up its role in the 9/11 attacks.  Researching Mueller and the impediments he threw up to protect the Saudis in that investigation, led me to more research about an investigation that was apparently also impeded by the FBI protecting the Saudis, the Khobar Towers bombing investigation. . .  . Robert Mueller was involved in the unsatisfactory outcome of that investigation as well.

Here then, is the full postscript I felt compelled to write about those two investigations involving apparent manipulations by the FBI to protect the the Saudis.  It also stands up excellently as an article all on its own.

Postscript (09/08/2019):  Two days after I published this article another opinion piece story was published about Mueller in the New York Post that, although it's quite pertinent, is not incorporated in the main body of what I wrote: Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks: suit, By Paul Sperry, September 7, 2019.

The article, reporting on the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia and at least one affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent submitted therein says that “former FBI investigators say” Mueller, as head of the FBI, was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks” that they uncovered, that “also involved foreign intelligence officers,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”

That:

Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis. 

FBI Agent Mark Wauck said, Mueller, who used to be his boss, has a long history of acting as a “servant of the deep state,” or the permanent DC ruling class, and, in the article, another former US counterintelligence official is reported to assert: “Bottom line is, Mueller did not do an investigation on people involved in the 9/11 attacks who were connected to the Saudi government, . . . . he was not interested in investigating [Saudi] terrorists who murdered Americans.”

The article includes seven bulleted paragraphs providing more details fleshing out this picture more fully.
  
Khobar Towers Apartment Complex Bombing Research Update.  In addition, the New York Post article (partly through Zero Hedge  and some articles in it by Eric Zuesse with links I researched) led me to more investigation respecting the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex.  As noted in the body of my own article, Mueller, as deputy attorney general, directed that bombing to Comey, for prosecution in Virginia.  The investigation and ensuing prosecution continued well into the era that Mueller was heading the FBI.  It turns out to be another investigation where probably obscurant FBI involvement seems to have been extremely unhelpful in determining the truth.

The story of the FBI investigation of Khobar Towers bombing also necessarily deeply involves Mueller's boss when it happened, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Freeh's top-level coordination with top Saudis in shaping the investigation and the official story.  Freeh was FBI Director until June 21, 2001.  Mueller took over as the next appointed FBI Director.

In 2006, the Washington Post reported the ruling of a federal judge in the case in Virginia that Iran was responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing.  The theory of the ruling was that the Iranian government “financed and directed the bombing by a militant Saudi wing” of the Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah.  The judge’s ruling ordered Iran to pay $254 million to the families of the Americans who died in the attack.  The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, said that "overwhelming" evidence had been presented and that the  “totality of the evidence at trial . . . firmly establishes” Iran’s responsibility.   The judge’s finding was based on a trial without any Iranian participation.  Iran insisted it had “no connection to the bombing.”  The ruling about the “overwhelming evidence” required reversal of “a lower magistrate judge who said evidence linking the Iranian government to the bombing was not convincing.”

And the timing of the ruling came just as the Bush administration was resisting “recommendations that it engage in diplomatic talks with Iran” with hopes to “enlist Iran's help in stabilizing Iraq and the Middle East.”   The effect of the ruling, said the Washington Post, was to throw up a hurdle for those wanting such obvious benefits of such a “rapprochement with Iran.

But Hezbollah, blamed in the ruling as having a “wing” in Sunni Saudi Arabia, is a Shia Muslim group, and the New York Times, in August of 1996, reported, quite inconsistently with the ruling, that the suspects reported to have confessed to the bombing at that time were (emphasis added) “native Saudis, who are all Sunni Muslims with no outside connections to either Iran or Iraq.”

After Lamberth's 2006 ruling, in 2007, former Defense Secretary William Perry said that the evidence that Iran was behind the bombing, i.e. the “strongly believed” theory of the FBI, was not to his own satisfaction (or at the time President Clinton’s).  Thus was avoided a fairly significant “contingency plan to attack Iran” that would have entailed striking “a number of their military facilities that would have weakened -- substantially weakened ... the Iranian navy and air force.”

It gets more complicated when you next theorize who may have actually been responsible for the bombing.  Perry (speaking in 2007, as noted) theorized “in retrospect” that it was “probably masterminded by Osama bin Laden.”  That was probably an easy to believe theory, easy for many to swallow after 9/11.  Perry was not the only one who so theorized, BUT. . .

In his 2007 interview Perry suggested that Saudi officials “tried to discourage” the theory that the bombing was ordered by Iran, because  the Saudi's “feared what action we would take,” i.e. the contingency plan of the U.S. attacking Iran.  Is that true?  Consideration of whether it is true has to be evaluated in terms of the general hunger the Saudis have had over the years (along with the other members of the triumvirate alliance of Israel and the United States) for militarily expressed hostilities with Iran.

In any event, it is reported that in a number of respects neither the FBI, nor Saudi Arabia were keen to see any investigation or transparency that would bring out the facts of the event, and there is much to consider about reported collaboration between the FBI and Saudi Arabia that suppressed discovery and tended conceal facts in various related investigations.  That extends to concealment of the Saudis' own supportive involvement in terrorism, plus a fair amount of what was likely misdirection in considering Iran as culpable.

Apparently, facts about the involvement of Saudi royals and government officials in supporting terrorism (and other corruption and disreputable conduct) was not intended for the eyes of normal FBI agents who could follow up on it and see where it leads.

In 2003 investigative journalist Greg Palast, reported that in 1994 Mohammed Al Khilewi, a Saudi diplomat, defected to the United States “with 14,000 pages of documents from the kingdom’s sealed file cabinets.”  Al Khilewi’s New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told Palast that FBI agents (two F.B.I. agents and an Assistant United States Attorney) “who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil” and would not take the documents when he said to the FBI, “Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We’ll even pay for the photocopying!” Palast’s suggestion is that the order not to accept the documents came from the top, President Clinton.

It’s pretty much agreed that the documents included damning stuff: Investigative journalist Sy Hersh, in a similar account in a 2001 article for the New Yorker described the information as “depicting the Saudi royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and financial support for terrorists.”  Hersh says neither Al Khilewi or his lawyer heard anything further from federal authorities, and that Al-Khilewi, granted asylum, was living under cover.  According to a Vanity Fair article, Khilewi said the Saudi royals “responded by threatening his life” and the U.S. government “offered him little protection.”

Hersh’s New Yorker article also said that National Security Agency electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family demonstrated to analysts that in “1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region.”

The controlling interactions between the FBI and the Saudis, in shaping the narratives and allowing facts to surface were handled at the top.  Much of it through Louis Freeh and Prince Bandar (the Saudi Ambassador), who as we'll get on to, had important relationships.  Hersh said in his article that a government expert on Saudi affairs told him that Prince Bandar  "dealt exclusively with the men at the top, and never met with desk officers and the like. "Only a tiny handful of people inside the government are familiar with U.S.-Saudi relations," he explained. "And that is purposeful.""

What couldn't be revealed included the following: According to Hersh's account, American intelligence said the Saudis refused “to help the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. run `traces’—that is, name checks and other background information—on the nineteen men,” most of them from Saudi Arabia, identified as having taken part in the 9/11 attacks.

One of the most pitiful, and at the same time illustrative sagas respecting the Khobar bombing investigation and how the FBI and Saudi's collaborated to shape the narrative they apparently wanted is the story of  Hani al-Sayegh. Much of his story was told in an article by Gareth Porter.

In 1997 Canada arrested Hani al-Sayegh, a 28-year old Saudi, because the Saudis accused him of taking part in the Khobar Towers attack.  To avoid “deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty” al-Sayegh agreed to a plea bargain: Transferred, instead, to United States he would admit to having proposed “an attack on U.S. personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.”

However, al-Sayegh was “steadfastly” denying “any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing.”  And in fact, he never admitted being involved in taking part of any attack of any kind on U.S. personnel that actually took place.  He admitted only to surveiling sites for the Iranians for possible retaliatory attacks if Iran was attacked.  That notwithstanding, it's reported by Gareth Porter that U.S. officials “supporting the Saudi version of the Khobar story” leaked to the Washington Post a false story* that was published supported with quotes from U.S. and Saudi officials saying that Iran was the "organising force" behind the Khobar bombing, even though, what “al-Sayegh actually told FBI agents in a series of interviews in Ottawa and Washington, however, contradicted the leaked story, according to sources familiar with those interviews.”

(* The article is reported by Gareth Porter is supposed to be dated April 14, 1997, but no such article now seems now to be available on the Washington Post site.  The closest such article appears to be a March 28, 1997 article.  However, ghost text from the article appears to show up on an archive page from The Guardian.  The Wayback Page for the Washington Post, does show that there was, indeed, such an article on that date- see images below- that it was one of the "top stories" in "International News" that day.  The Wayback page has a link for the actual story, but for some reason, clicking it- as opposed to the other stories that can be found that way- brings up an entirely wrong story, which is instead about Zaire.  The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.)  

Wayback Machine

Top Story in International News!-

Above, information about a disappeared Washington Post article concerning how Clinton may have to go to war? "Iranian Aide Linked To Saudi Bombing Suspect

U.S. and Saudi intelligence authorities have linked a senior Iranian government official to a group of Shiite Muslims suspected of bombing an American military compound in Saudi Arabia last year. If Iran is proven to have been involved, the Clinton administration could be pressured towards military or economic retaliation."

Ultimately, in 1999, the U.S. deported al-Sayegh to Saudi Arabia where the FBI assumed (“widely”) that he would be beheaded on his return, because Hani al-Sayegh continued to deny “either that he was involved or the Iranians had anything to do with Khobar.”  In other words, al-Sayegh could have saved his life by providing to the U.S. authorities the false admission the U.S. and Saudis apparently wanted badly.

An earlier Washington Post opinion piece observed respecting the lack of potential for justice and truth finding if al-Sayegh was deported:

deporting him to Saudi Arabia might indeed subject him to torture and eventually execution, without ever establishing the truth of his involvement. In fact, serious questions have been raised about the entire Saudi investigation in the Khobar Tower incident. It has been six months since Saudi officials disclosed the arrest of dozens of Saudi Hezbollah supporters for involvement in the barracks bombing. However, the investigation has suffered from lack of support, even within government circles and among those opposed to Hezbollah and other militant groups. Senior Saudi officials privately complain that they are being kept in the dark, the Consultative Council is not involved and no public debate on the bombing has been permitted in the media or elsewhere outside the official line.

Notwithstanding leaks about their guilt, the suspects have not been formally charged. None has been permitted to consult lawyers, although many if not all will face the death penalty when they are formally charged.

Never charged with the crime for lack of evidence, the FBI still listed Hani al-Sayegh was still listed as one of the charged in the indictment in June of 2001.  Gareth Porter astutely observed that the announcement of the indictment, June 21, 2001, was on Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

Even for those who might have once considered al-Sayegh guilty according to the story that was being pushed by the FBI and Saudis, the reasons for sending him back to Saudi Arabia are tough to fathom.  A commentary in Time magazine by Tony Karon when it was happening began: "Run that one by again: The United States doesn't want to try a man suspected of a bomb attack that killed Americans — and they're sending him home?!" 

After the U.S. sent al-Sayegh to his fate with the Saudi's, the Washington Post ran an October 29, 2000 article that was very complimentary about FBI Director Louis Freeh's "global police agency . . . anti-terrorism mission."  The article looked like it had been sourced by Freeh.  It reported that al-Sayegh was given to the Saudis because "Freeh made a secret deal with Saudi Prince Naif, brother of King Fahd."*  "Secret deal?": Not so secret any longer!   . . . To complicate things, there is more than one version of this October 29 article, what is perhaps the original (not now available at the Washington Post Site, "FBI's Uneasy Role: Work in Lands with Brutal Police," currently available from the Orlando Sentinel, "FBI's Uneasy Role: Work in Lands with Brutal Police" with the (bylined "Washington Post") and another "New Global Role Puts FBI in Unsavory Company" (a later edition?- bylined "David A. Vise").  We will work principally with the first, syndicated article, probably the more widely seen one. 

(* Investigative journalist Greg Palast, reported that the law firm- Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld- the law firm of Vernon Jordan, President Clinton’s friend and political adviser, was involved but, so far, I find no trace of a trail to follow up on that.)

The October 29, 2000 article was clever in its `have your cake and eat it too' reporting, perhaps a little too clever.  It cited "Freeh's oft-stated message about the FBI's need to respect 'human dignity' and the tenets of democracy while fighting crime," but this pre-9/11 article managed to argue that returning al-Sayegh for expected torture was probably a good thing.  It explained contextually that al-Sayegh was going "where human-rights groups say torture is routinely used."  (So "human-rights groups say," I guess not the Washington Post itself.)  The article even managed to put an assessment that torture could be good in the mouth of a Human Rights Watch researcher (Clarisa Bencomo*): "the information that may come out of this is more useful or worthwhile to them than the possibility of this guy being tortured or executed."  Of course that's totally contrary to the fact that it is well understood that the information generated by torturing people tends to be false and highly unreliable; it is far too often what the torturer wants to hear, rather than the truth. 

(* Interestingly, Ms. Bencomo had earlier, rather contradictorily, provided her observation in the Washington Post about Mr. al-Sayegh: “The United States . . . did not have sufficient evidence to try him in U.S. courts”and “the last time Saudi Arabia had bombing suspects in custody, it executed them without a trial. . . . No one knows if he is guilty or innocent. Without a fair trial we will never know.” Contradicting the later WaPo article quoting her, she says: “Both U.S. and international law prohibit returning persons to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be in danger of being tortured.”  The import of the WaPo article is that Freeh and the FBI clearly knew of the likelihood of torture, but Ms. Bencomo seems to have been informed by somebody that, at least pretextually that wasn’t the case: “The United States says it received assurances that Mr. Sayegh wouldn't be tortured.” Then she worries that al-Sayegh hasn’t seen a lawyer and might have been.)

The article was interesting in what it suggested the reader might, or might not imagine.  It said that Freeh's pact with the King's brother "permitted FBI agents to watch Hani Al-Sayegh's interrogation through a one-way mirror and submit questions to his Saudi inquisitors, officials familiar with the arrangement said."   But, while setting it up for supposition, the article did not clearly say that FBI agents had actually watched or asked questions as the pact may have permitted.  While it might challenge the squeamish to imagine FBI agents watching torture through a "one-way mirror," the article said "FBI officials say they have seen no indication Al-Sayegh has been tortured"  . . . That's without actually giving the slightest indication of what the reader should be expected to believe the FBI did see or watch, if anything.

The second version of the article says, "A friend of Al-Sayegh says that he has been tortured in prison, an allegation that Saudi officials deny."   The second version of the article, which is longer and may appear more neutral and fully considered without actually being so,  also says, "Saudi officials have denied requests from Amnesty International to visit Al-Sayegh in prison." The second version of the article also has a lot more puffery about just how wonderful Freeh is as a man, and as an FBI agent ("down-to-earth," "high-energy," "likes to go jogging" with the new guys, "a frenetic globe-trotter," "on the cutting edge of technology").  It also credits Freeh with birthing  Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC), and depicts SIOC cheerfully as James Bondian.  There is, of course, much to controvert the flattering portrayal of Freeh: See the May 3, 2001, press release of Judicial Watch speaking of Freeh’s “legacy of corruption” while itemizing instances- Judicial Watch Rejoices at Resignation of FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Something else that disappeared from the internet (via the Wayback machine):  Judicial Watch Rejoices at Resignation of FBI Director Louis Freeh

Rather than include any warning about the consistent unreliability of torture, the Washington Post article said that "Freeh and others argue that the FBI's approach is necessary to save American lives," and that a man who was "the FBI's top agent in Saudi Arabia" said that the FBI was "able to thwart at least a couple of major incidents" with such [torture obtained?] information from the Saudi government.  Stirring is a certain amount of extra blood lust, the second longer version of the article "the FBI is pressing for even greater access" to the results of the sometimes lethal and arbitrary Yemeni interrogations "criticized" by the State Department.  In that longer version, an expert who seemingly implies there could somehow be a reasonably high quotient of "good information" obtained this way says, "They do not ask, 'How did you question them?' They will just ask, 'Is it good information?'"

The article even included an assurance that such involvement of U.S. FBI law enforcement officers with torture ("police tactics, including torture and a lack of due process, that would be barred in the United States") through such "unsavory company" was essentially legal: "U.S. law does not prohibit the bureau from developing close ties with foreign governments whose practices, laws and ethics differ dramatically from those in the United States." 

This pre-9/11 Washington Post article, venturing all this post-9/11 rhetoric ends, not only by saying that despite "the moral issues posed," FBI officials say this is what they need to fight terrorism effectively, it goes on to say it's needed to address the "complex challenge of pursuing an international terrorist such as Osama bin Laden."  "Osama bin Laden"?  The second longer version of the article saw even further into the future, explaining, "bin Laden is the head of an anti-Western radical Islamic movement that experts say would survive even if he were killed or captured."

Will these torture interrogation yield at least a few confessions?  The longer version of the Washington Post article communicates that al-Sayegh departed for Canada as "as Saudi authorities began rounding up hundreds of members of the Shiite minority," with "200 people being incarcerated and tortured for the same attack."  . .  If you remember, in "Casablanca," "Round up the usual suspects," was code for `we are going to pass over the actual perpetrator.'   In the Unites States, when we seek such a semblance that our police and peace officers aren't letting crimes go unsolved we tend to round up hapless black and brown people.


Let's back up to remember also that in 1996, the New York Times was reporting that Saudi officials said that they had evidence linking some of the detainees to the four men who were condemned and beheaded the previous November in connection with the bombing in Riyadh (five Americans and two Indians were killed).  So again, with their beheading, that information and ability to test the evidence was lost.  In the same article the Times was saying that it was "reported, and then denied by the Saudis, that six Saudi Muslim fundamentalists, all former Afghan-trained fighters, had confessed to carrying out the June [Khobar] bombing"; that it was "confirmed that dozens of Saudi men are indeed being detained and questioned intensively," but "'As far as I know, Prince Nayef is keeping the Americans away from all the details at this point,'' he said. ''But we are sure the young men have indeed confessed to the bombing, - that Saudi authorities ''are still refusing to let United States investigators see the suspects.''

After Louis Freeh left the FBI one of the questionable things he went on to do was represent Saudi Prince Bandar ("Bandar Bush"), the Saudi Ambassador in connection with the British-based BAE/ a.k.a. British Aerospace arms trafficking and bribery investigation that U.S. prosecutors at the Justice Department Justice Department are said to have initiated in May of 2008.  Whenever he might have been hired, Freeh was out in the open representing his client Bandar's interests in a March 19, 2009 interview aired April 7, 2009, as part of a Frontline film “Black Money”  (transcript available online). 

The Frontline film was about what was presented as the “shadowy” world of bribery; the “concealed, camouflaged, a whole world of conduct that rarely sees the light of day” where  “You get pots of black money that nobody sees, nobody has to account for, . . . you can do anything you like with.”  That included Bandar's participation in such shadowy transaction, in one specific case to the tune of $2 billion.

The Frontline film seemed to assure that a crackdown on that world was then being initiated.  Freeh's freakish representation of Bandar in the film was there to be observed by alert viewers as what was perhaps a conflict of interest.  Frontline provided a supplemental web page extending its exchanges with Freeh about Bandar, which has comments posted by the public reacting to it that are worth reading.  The interview was a few years after the suspect 2006 court ruling on the Khobar Towers bombing backing the ultimately suspect FBI/Saudi theory that blamed Iran, but comments hearkened back to earlier events.  For instance, two of them read in part:

Comment: . . When . . .   your internal counter terrorism chief [goes] to work for the country where most of the hijackers came from, what can you say.

Comment: . . The first time I ever heard of FBI director Freeh was when I watched Frontline's "The Man Who Knew".* In that program he seemed to be the one who was instrumental in getting rid of FBI agent John O’Neill. John O’Neill was the counter-terrorism expert who had been tracking Al Qaeda for six years.

(* Aired October 3, 2002- Transcript online.)

Frontline's supplemental web page has an interesting "FOOTNOTE 5: Exoneration?"  (Note Frontline's question mark.) The footnote basically deals with the fact that Prince Bandar, though his wife, was implicated in funding a number of the men named as 9/11 hijackers.  Demanding some mulling over, it reads:

Freeh says that when the FBI investigated Riggs Bank accounts under the control of Prince Bandar, "...they exonerated our client, Prince Bandar and his family with respect to any money laundering or any terrorist financing, because you remember that was really the focus as to whether two individuals who were Saudis who had connections with two of the [9/11] hijackers were using any monies from those [Riggs Bank] accounts to finance it."

"It was very unusual. In the public statements what they said is they found there was no activity, in the accounts that showed any wrongdoing by my client or members of his family. It's an extraordinary conclusion to make. But the government found no money laundering and no evidence of any terrorist financing and absolved my client and his family, which is a very extraordinary result."

FRONTLINE inquired to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice about the "public statements" that "exonerated" Prince Bandar. The FBI responded saying it was unable to locate anything that matched what the former Director was referring to. Inquiries with the Department of Justice were met with instructions to contact the FBI. When asked to provide a copy of a statement or a private letter that may have been sent to him or his client, Mr. Freeh did not respond.

The 9/11 Commission found "no evidence that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal [wife of Prince Bandar] provided any funds to the [9/11] conspiracy, either directly or indirectly," but made no further reference to the Riggs Bank accounts or to accusations of money laundering.

Is it a "conflict of interest" for Freeh to represent Prince Bandar, an obvious "revolving door" problem?  Some might view it differently, those who instead see a "consonance of interest" between what the FBI wants and what the Saudis want, a common interest in the story the FBI and the Saudis both want to tell.

Gareth Porter saw Freeh’s subsequent legal defense work for Prince Bandar, appearing in the British case about the arms trafficking bribery, as connected to what was, in metaphorical terms, Freeh’s role, while FBI director, as Bandar and the Saudis’ defense lawyer, particularly in the Khobar bombing case.  (See: Exclusive-Part 5: Freeh Became "Defence Lawyer" for Saudis on Khobar) Defense from what?  That question posits that the Saudis need to be defended against the perceptions or conclusions respecting their own culpability as they supported terrorism, including their own acts that very likely were, in ways, truly responsible for the Khobar bombing.

Nevertheless, the goals of Freeh's FBI may have themselves been served: Porter notes that Freeh testified before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was "critical in achieving the FBI’s investigative objectives in the Khobar case."

While Porter starts his Part 5 article by describing the acceptance by an FBI team (a team that Freeh sent to Saudi Arabia in 1998) of the confessions to the Khobar bombing of eight men from the Minority Shia sect whom the Saudis held, he shows how suspect those confessions were.  He details another case where “four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian had confessed” to three car bombings in Riyadh.  He recites in excruciating detail how the falsehoods of these Riyadh bombing confessions were systematically tortured out of these individuals to match a prewritten Saudi interrogation script.

Porter argues that with “blatant pro-Saudi bias” Freeh “effectively shut down” the probe of the Khobar bombing, pushing “a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing . . . tainted by the likelihood of torture.”

Louis Freeh’s seemingly intentional obtuseness in terms of appropriately discerning information about Saudi Arabia and its culpability comes up again in terms of his relationship with counterterrorism chief John O’Neill. O’Neill is referred to above as being the subject of Frontline’s “The Man Who Knew",” and O’Neill’s being pushed out of the FBI by Freeh.

O’Neill and Freeh get mentioned in a 2011 Vanity Fair article by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.  The article was about what was included in Congress’s Joint Inquiry (and then for a long time censored and withheld from release) about the connections between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers and how the U.S. government buried and ignored evidence with respect thereto.  The article asks many good questions although some may almost inevitably head off in the direction of false leads.

The article recounts:

On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s [i.e. around the time of the Khobar bombing investigation], F.B.I. director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. “You’ve got to be kidding,” retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. “They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”

The article goes on to say that O’Neill continued to be openly frustrated that “all the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” remained out of reach because they “are in Saudi Arabia.”

We can't get O’Neill's own version of this story now or any of his thinking, including about the Khobar bombing, because, in one of the bizarrely peculiar aspects of the 9/11 story, O’Neill was in the towers and reported killed on 9/11.  He had just taken a job there as head of security.

But to go back to Robert Mueller; that's who we started with when we began this tour reviewing the FBI/Saudi Khobar Towers bombing investigation.  It's where we must end too: Robert Mueller took over where Louis Freeh left off to bring the matter to it unsatisfactory conclusion.