Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Tuesday, 26 July 2016

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Why hasn’t Australian media reported the 28 pages on Saudi support for 9/11 & terrorism?

While it is a given that the Australian news media has virtually zero credibility, its collective blackout of the just-released 28 pages of the 2002 US Joint Congressional Report into 9/11 is still a shocker.

Those pages are of direct relevance and vital importance to Australia. They prove that the conspirators of the Iraq war just exposed in the Chilcot Report, including Australian Prime Minister John Howard, charged ahead with their illegal war after US authorities knew what these 28 pages revealed: that the government of Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, provided financial and logistical support for al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack.

To read or download a PDF copy of the 28 pages:
Click here for a copy on the US government’s website.
Click here for a copy on the CEC’s website.

The Joint Congressional 9/11 Report was completed and released—minus the 28 pages indentifying the Saudis—in December 2002, more than three months before the invasion of Iraq. The Australian media should be demanding to know what John Howard and his cabinet, some of whom are in the Turnbull government today, knew about the 28 pages before they committed to invading Iraq. Did they ask the Bush-Cheney White House why those pages were classified? And did they request, on the basis of our much-vaunted “Five Eyes” intelligence relationship with the USA, access to that intelligence? And if not, why on earth not—wouldn’t that indicate a willingness to turn a blind eye to evidence that would derail their war agenda, and show them up not as well-meaning though mistaken, as Howard insists, but as witting war criminals?

However, not only are Australia’s media outlets not asking these questions, barely any of them have even reported on the release of the 28 pages!

On 25 July’s excellent episode of the ABC’s Media Watch, host Paul Barry pointed out that in light of the Chilcot Report, the media has questions to answer about its role in peddling disinformation to manipulate the public to support the war.

The media’s silence on the 28 pages screams volumes about their collective integrity—they have none. They weren’t mere dupes on the Iraq lies, but witting participants. That includes, obviously, Iraq war co-conspirator Rupert Murdoch’s trashy rags, as well as the oh-so-sanctimonious The Age newspaper.

Media Watch pointed out that The Age on 14 March 2002 had reported fiction as fact, under the headline, “Western experts watch as Saddam replenishes his armoury of weapons of mass destruction”. Recently, in a 22 June 2016 letter to CEC leader Craig Isherwood, The Age editor Duska Sulicich defended her paper’s printing of equally blatant lies about the CEC, by citing content from the CEC’s website: “A great many Australians would not know the Citizens Electoral Council runs articles on its website stating the British royal family are funding global terrorism”, she wrote.

As it happens, Ms Sulicich was paraphrasing the CEC’s reporting of the suppression of the 28 pages! The pages name, repeatedly, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the USA at the time of 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as having funded the Saudi intelligence officers who assisted two of the 9/11 hijackers. Bandar was such a close friend of George W. Bush and the Bush family that his nickname was “Bandar Bush”. He is even closer to the British government and the British Royal Family, especially Prince Charles. In 1985 Bandar negotiated with Margaret Thatcher the al-Yamamah oil-for-arms deal, which is still ongoing, on which Prince Charles has been lead negotiator since the early 1990s, and which generated a US$100 billion plus slush fund, paid in kickbacks to Bandar and others, which has funded al-Qaeda and international terrorism. Tony Blair shut down a UK Serious Fraud Office investigation of al-Yamamah in 2006, which had revealed kickbacks paid from a confidential Bank of England account, administered by the UK Ministry of Defence, went into Bandar’s Riggs bank account in Washington, DC, the same account used to fund the Saudi officers who assisted the hijackers. This corrupt relationship between the British Crown and the Saudi royals funding al-Qaeda, and not the Saudis per se, is the real reason for the 28 pages cover-up.

In his 28 June reply to The Age, Isherwood suggested to Ms Sulicich, “Given that you found this information worth noting, why don’t you inform the public that’s what we say?” Better yet, report the release of the 28 pages, which prove what the CEC said!

At stake in this issue is not merely informing the public, but stopping international terrorism. If the content of the 28 pages had have been made public in December 2002 Bush, Blair and Howard would not have been able to invade Iraq and turn the Middle East into a hellscape. Instead, the world would have been able to confront the real apparatus behind international terrorism, especially its connections into the highest and most corrupt levels of Anglo-American power, including the British Crown and its intelligence agencies, the world’s most powerful and imperial banks such as HSBC, and the world’s biggest and dirtiest weapons manufacturers and dealers which profit from terrorism and war.

Here’s what you can do, personally, to fight to finally bring an end to international terrorism:

Read the 28 pages for yourself, to see what US authorities knew at the very time they were pushing for the invasion of Iraq (links above);
Take or forward copies or a link to the media and demand they read and report it;
Take copies to your federal and state MPs and local police and demand they read the pages too.

The CEC has been fighting to expose this scandal since 2007, in order to defeat terrorism once and for all. To join the fight, join the CEC!

Click here for a free literature package including a copy of the 28 pages and the CEC’s latest Australian Alert Service with an extensive feature on the 28 pages.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.