Questions for George of Arabia

Question #3: Who attacked the United States on September 11—a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?

I’m sorry, Mr. Bush, but something doesn’t make sense. You got us all repeating by rote that it was Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the attack on the United States on September 11. Even I was doing it. But then I started hearing strange stories about Osama’s kidneys.

It turns out that there have been reports on Osama’s health problems for years. For example, in 2000 The Associated Press reported,

“. . . a Western intelligence official said [Osama] is suffering from kidney and liver disease. Bin Laden has kidney failure and ‘his liver is going,’ the official said. . . . He said bin Laden’s followers were trying to find a kidney dialysis machine for their ailing leader.”

After September 11, these reports escalated. I was watching Hardball with Chris Matthews one night on MSNBC, and one of the guests—a Taliban expert—said, “. . . Osama bin Laden appears to need dialysis treatment for his kidney problem, so he’s got to be close to some dialysis. He really can’t travel far.”

Did he just say “dialysis”? The world’s biggest monster, the most sinister, evil man on all of planet Earth—and he can’t even piss in a pot without help? I don’t know about you, but if I’m told to be seriously frightened by an evildoer, especially the top evildoer, I want that evildoer to have all his bodily functions working at 110 percent! I want him strong, scary, and omnipresent—and the possessor of two working kidneys. How am I supposed to be supporting all these Homeland Security measures when the lead bad guy is flat out on a table somewhere hooked up to a kidney machine?

Suddenly, I don’t know who or what to trust. I started to ask other questions. How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, hooked up to dialysis, have directed and overseen the actions of nineteen terrorists for two years in the United States and then plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets? How did Osama do this? I mean, I can’t get this computer to stop crashing every time I type the word “gingivitis.” I can’t get a cell signal from here to Queens! And he’s supposed to have pulled off all of September 11 from his little cave, 10,000 miles away? What was he doing, then, when we started the bombing over there? Was he running from cave to cave in Afghanistan with his tubes and dialysis machine trailing behind him? Or, um, maybe there was a dialysis machine in every third cave in Afghanistan. Yeah, that’s it! A real modern country, Afghanistan! It has about fifteen miles of railroad track. And lots of dialysis machines, I guess.

None of this is to say that Osama isn’t a baddie or even that he didn’t have something to do with the attacks. But it seems that maybe a few journalists might want to ask a few commonsense questions, like how could he have really pulled this off while his skin was turning green and he was living in a country with no Kinko’s, no FedEx, no ATMs. How did he organize, communicate, control and supervise this kind of massive attack? With two cans and a string? Yet, we’re told by you to believe it. The headlines blared it the first day and they blare it the same way now two years later: “Terrorists Attack United States.” Terrorists. I have wondered about this word for some time, so, George, let me ask you a question: If fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been North Korean, and they killed 3,000 people, do you think the headline the next day might read, “NORTH KOREA ATTACKS UNITED STATES”?

Of course it would. Or if it had been fifteen Iranians or fifteen Libyans or fifteen Cubans, I think the conventional wisdom would have been, “IRAN (or LIBYA or CUBA) ATTACKS AMERICA!”

Yet, when it comes to September 11, have you ever seen the headline, have you ever heard a newscaster, has one of your appointees ever uttered these words: “Saudi Arabia attacked the United States”?

Of course you haven’t. And so the question must—must—be asked: WHY NOT? Why, when Congress releases its own investigation into September 11, you, Mr. Bush, censor out twenty-eight pages that deal with the Saudis’ role in the attack? What is behind your apparent refusal to look at the one country that seems to be producing the “terrorists” that have killed our citizens?

I would like to throw out a possibility here: What if September 11 was not a “terrorist” attack but, rather, a military attack against the United States? What if the nineteen were well-trained soldiers, the elite of the elite, unquestioning in their duty to obey their commander’s orders? That they lived in this country for nearly two years and were not discovered—that takes a certain amount of discipline, the discipline of a soldier, not the erratic behavior of some wild-eyed terrorist.

George, apparently you were a pilot once—how hard is it to hit a five-story building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just a hair, they’d have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone’s air force.

The Saudi Air Force?

What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? The House of Saud, according to Robert Baer’s book, is full of them, and the royal family—and the country—is in incredible turmoil. There is much dissension over how things are being run, and with the king incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in 1995, his brothers and numerous sons have been in a serious power struggle. Some favor cutting off all ties to the West. Some want the country to go the more fundamentalist route. After all, this was Osama’s originally stated goal. His first beef wasn’t with America, it was with the way Saudi Arabia was being run—by Muslims who weren’t true Muslims. There are now thousands of princes in the royal family, and many observers have commented that Saudi Arabia is on the brink of civil war, or perhaps a people’s revolution. You can only behead so many of your citizens and then, before long, they lose their heads and go crazy and overthrow your ass. That is what is on the “To Do” list for many Saudi citizens these days, and the royals are

circling the wagons.

A 1999 article in the political journal Foreign Affairs pretty much spelled out why: “Like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia would like to leave bin Laden in Afghanistan. His arrest and trial in the United States could be highly embarrassing, exposing his continuing relationship with sympathetic members of the ruling elites and intelligence services of both countries.”

So, did certain factions within the Saudi royal family execute the attack on September 11? Were these pilots trained by the Saudis? One thing we do know: Nearly all the hijackers were Saudis and they were apparently able to enter the United States legally, thanks, in part, to the special arrangement set up by our State Department and the Saudi government that allowed Saudis to get quickie visas without going through the normal vetting process.

Mr. Bush, why have the Saudis received red-carpet treatment?

Sure, we need their oil. And, yes, they received the same kissy-face welcome from all the presidents before you.

But why have you blocked attempts to dig deeper into the Saudi connections? Why do you refuse to say, “Saudi Arabia attacked the United States!”?

Mr. Bush, does this have anything to do with your family’s close personal relationship with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia? I would like to think that’s not possible. But what is your explanation? That it was just some nut in a cave (who just happened to be on dialysis)? And, after you couldn’t find this nut, why did you try to convince us that Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11 and al Qaeda, when you were specifically told by your

intelligence people that there was no connection?

Why are you so busy protecting the Saudis when you should be protecting us?