STRANGEST
BEDFELLOWS EVER IN BIGGEST BRAWL IN D.C. It's GOP and Dems vs. GOP and Dems in 9/11-Saudi showdown, by
Garth Kant, 4/24/16, WND
WASHINGTON – The biggest
fight in Washington right now is over a bill that would allow families of 9/11
victims to sue Saudi Arabia, and it is unlike any other political battle in
memory in at least one unique and dramatic way.
It pits the strangest of
bedfellows against each other, with a combination of Republicans and Democrats
on either side. Among Democrats
supporting the bill are presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders, and Sens. Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer. They are joined by such
Republicans as presidential candidate Sens. Ted Cruz, John Cornyn and former
Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Among those opposing the
bill are President Obama and Republicans including House Speaker Rep. Paul
Ryan, Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Intelligence Committee chair
Richard Burr.
As it happens, President
Obama arrived in Saudi Arabia Wednesday for a 24-hour visit, but one highly
controversial topic unlikely to come up is key related issue: whether to
finally release 28 pages of classified documents from the 9/11 Commission
report that many strongly suspect implicate the kingdom’s government in helping
plan and execute the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America.
One reason is that Obama
apparently hasn’t even read those pages, telling CBS News on Monday, “I have a
sense of what’s in there.”
Someone who has read the
entire report is Bachmann, who also served on the House Intelligence Committee.
She told WND she viewed the documents in the classified setting.
Bachmann cannot comment
on what is in the still-classified 28 pages, but what she did say could explain
why the information has not been made public by Obama, and before him,
President George W, Bush.
“Established Saudi
involvement backing the terrorist act would profoundly alter the geopolitical
world stage,” she told WND.
That points to what is
likely the strongest reason for Obama not to bring up the 28 pages during a
visit in which he hopes to patch relations. Discussing possible Saudi
complicity in the deadliest attack on American soil would not be the message
the president wants to deliver to a regime observers says is livid over his nuclear
deal with Iran, which the kingdom believes poses an existential threat.
The Saudis were also
said to be furious with Obama over his recent comment that they and the
Iranians should “share the neighborhood.”
Additionally, the Saudis
are fuming over the bill that would allow Americans to sue the regime,
threatening to withdraw $750 billion in assets in America if it becomes law.
Obama has vowed to veto
the bill if it is passed, but he is opposed by virtually every other Democratic
leader and senator. The president has said it could expose Americans to
lawsuits abroad and damage relations with the Saudis. Bill-sponsor Cornyn disagreed,
saying, “This is really narrow provision, which only has to do with terrorist
attacks on our own soil.”
Relatives of 9/11
victims wrote Obama to say they were “greatly distressed” by his opposition to
the bill. They also urged him to release the 28 redacted pages from the 9/11
Commission report. Reid and many other Democrats, including ones who served on
the 9/11 Commission, also support the release.
Knowing that Bachmann
could not divulge what she has read in the report, WND asked her what U.S. policy
should be if the Saudis were eventually implicated in the 9/11 attacks.
“If an aggressor nation
backed an unprovoked act of war against America or our citizens, the United
States must respond in such a way that the aggressor nation, or terror actors
will think twice about trying the acts again,” she replied.
“The point is to make
the perpetrator regret their actions and then disable the enemies ability to
strike again. The U.S. should not announce its plan; it should act forcefully
with every means at our disposal, financial, diplomatic, militarily, with or
without our allies. That is what a sane superpower seeking to continue its
survival would do.”
Bachmann said it was
also very important to note that Saudi Arabia and Qatar finance 80 percent of
the mosques in America and train the imams who lead them, “often with the most
dangerous Islamic Shariah law-based ideologies.”
Therefore, she added,
“it would seem elementary that the U.S. government would prohibit foreign
financing and disallow speech, which in effect encourages incitement against
our people and our nation, speech which advocates the overthrow of our
government, which Shariah commands.”
The former congresswoman
also observed that the First Amendment does not protect speech that calls for
violence or the overthrow of our form of government, “as Islamic Shariah, and
many of these imams do.”
The saga of the law and
terrorism took another twist on Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a
ruling that families of terrorism victims could sue and collect damages from
Iran.
The court let stand a
2012 law that lets victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut,
Lebanon (that courts have linked to Iranian sponsorship), collect damages from
nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian bank funds.
Iran had complained that
Congress, by passing the law, had violated the Constitution by intruding upon
the authority of federal courts, but the Supreme Court rejected that argument.
And, in this case, the
Obama administration sided with the families of the victims, as did many
Democrat and Republican lawmakers.
Why did the Obama
administration side with the families of victims of Iran, but not with families
of what may be victims of Saudi Arabia?
WND posed the question
to Bachmann, who not only gained foreign-policy expertise during her stint on
the House Intelligence Committee, but is an attorney with two law degrees.
She cautioned that she
was just speculating on the Obama administration’s reasoning. “They tread
lightly with Saudi Arabia. Guilt has not yet been publicly established of Saudi
support for the 9/11 acts of terrorism. If guilt is established, then the
administration may be forced to act in response to public outrage. Perhaps
Obama is thinking, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ I don’t know.”
She noted another
possible consideration. “The political choices for the Obama administration, in
my opinion, will outweigh their concerns over the legal standard.”
Bachmann also observed a
key difference in the terrorist attack in Beiruit that killed 241 service
members overseas, and the massacre of 2,977 Americans, mostly civilians, on
U.S. soil.
“9/11 was a defining
moment in recent American history.”
And that’s when she made
the observation that may soon prophetic, because Obama said on Monday that
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is reviewing the 28 redacted
pages of the 9/11 Commission Report. If he decides there are no national security
reasons preventing the president from releasing the pages, it could change
everything.
As Bachmann said,
“Established Saudi involvement backing the terrorist act would profoundly alter
the geopolitical world stage.”
Comment
All 11
terrorists involved in the 9/11 attack were Saudis. We also thought that the
Saudi government pandered to its Jihadi Imams and feared being overthrown and
probably funded the 9/11 terrorists either on purpose or inadvertently. We know
that Islam and Sharia Law are incompatible with US law and culture. We believe Muslims need to stay in their own
countries and shouldn’t be allowed to immigrate to non-Muslim countries. They do not assimilate.
Muslim
actions, the words in their Quran, the brutality of Sharia Law, the take-over
of Europe and 40 years of being attacked by Muslim terrorists has made Americans
wary of Muslims being in the US. We
think those who want them here are determined to destroy the US. It would be no surprise if there was a
“smoking gun” in these documents. We
think the Arabs should spend less time studying the Quran and more time studying
technology and free markets to remove socialism and put their people back to
work.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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