US chose to keep silent about Saudi role in 9/11: Commentator

Press TV has interviewed John Steppling, an author and commentator in Norway, to discuss the recently declassified part of the 9/11 report regarding suspected Saudi ties to some of the hijackers involved in the terror events.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: The main question is why is the US forced to keep a silencer on Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks?

Steppling: Well they are not forced to keep silent about it; they choose to keep silent about it. By the way, the 9/11 event which has become so kind of magnified in the imagination of Westerners did not change the course of US foreign policy.

US foreign policy has remained the same since World War II actually and today a democratic president releases these previously classified files a couple days before the Republican Convention, he releases them in a difficult format, a picture PDF, and they are still heavily redacted. So there are no real secrets here.

Everybody knew Bandar who is now head of Saudi intelligence, I believe, that he had a close relationship with the Bush family going back to 40 years but Hillary Clinton has close ties with the Saudi royal family. At the Democratic Convention Khizr Khan gets up and talks, he has a close relationship with the legal firm that works for the Clinton’s and the Saudis, has offices in Dubai and so forth.

The Saudi government buys a lot of weaponry from the United States, a huge amount, and the Saudis also are heavily invested in the American economy. If Saudi Arabia withdrew all their money from the United States it would crash the economy but none of this is oppositional. I mean these people all work together. This is the deep state. This is the nature of the deep state and Israel has a hand in it and policy towards Syria and Iran of course is all connected and tweezing apart the tentacle of all this that reaches so very far is difficult and while it is interesting these now so-called 28 pages, while it is interesting, you have to have been relatively naïve not to know all of this already.

Bandar was supplying money to al-Bayoumi and Basnan. They were the handlers for the alleged hijackers, I underline the word alleged, we do not know what happened. It has all been obfuscated and mystified.

So it is interesting and yet media and the United States pretty much has remained, if not silent, dismissive of it. They never bring up Hillary Clinton’s connections to the Saudi family or Obama’s relationship, the US government relationship, all of it is a bit of a piece of theater for the public at this point.   

Press TV: How much does this involvement, Saudi Arabia’s involvement, further allow us to trace the roots of many terrorist attacks around the world, including the recent ISIS phenomenon back to Saudi Arabia and Israel for that matter?

Steppling: Yes, that is a very good question and it is really a good question and that is the more remained question in a sense because all of these terror attacks are given cover stories and that are incomplete at the very best, just incomplete, that the Saudi clearly has funded ISIS with US knowledge, with US assistance.

So you always have to look at the timing of these various terror attacks and wonder again. We all know who benefits from them, who benefits from the timing, but the Saudis are complicit in all of it and Saudi Arabia has close ties with Israeli intelligence too and I suspect they are complicit in all of it but all we can do is kind of speculate and look at the timing and trace links as best we can because they are certainly not going to tell us.

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