Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 30 September 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

Obama’s terrorist-protecting JASTA veto defeated! Saudis, British panic

Barack Obama’s shameless but revealing veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) has blown up in his face. On 28 September both houses of the US Congress defied intense lobbying from Obama, the Saudis and the British—and a disgusting last-ditch effort by Kim “Bomber” Beazley—to vote overwhelmingly to override the veto, handing Obama the first such defeat in his eight-year presidency.

JASTA allows US victims of 9/11 to bring lawsuits in US courts against Saudi Arabia for its part in the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed 2,996 people. The Saudi role is revealed by the US Congressional Joint Inquiry Report on 9/11, in the 28-page chapter on the funding of that attack. The “28 pages” were suppressed—“classified”—from December 2002, when the rest of the report was released, until 15 July 2016, when the Obama White House finally released the pages, under enormous public pressure.

In brief, the 28 pages show that the US FBI and CIA knew that Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and his wife Princess Haifa, funnelled money from their account at the Riggs Bank in Washington, DC to two Saudi agents in San Diego who assisted the 9/11 hijackers.

The Saudi Arabian monarchy is hysterical, as are the British. Even though senior members of the Saudi regime recently admitted, to former US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, their support for terrorism going back to the 1960s, they deny their role in 9/11. They know that the lawsuits now allowed under JASTA will lead to a legal “discovery” process that will force the US government to hand over even more documents, such as 80,000 pages of FBI files on Saudis in Sarasota, Florida, who were connected to the 9/11 hijackers.

The British are hysterical, because their decades of harbouring and deploying terrorism, to further their strategic interests, could finally be laid bare for all of the world to see and condemn. The British elite are perversely open about the threat JASTA poses to them, as evidenced in the 26 September editorial of The Telegraph, “Barack Obama was right to veto the 9/11 Act and protect US allies like Britain”. The British Establishment mouthpiece wrote: “Britain’s intelligence and security agencies, MI6 and MI5, are also concerned about the implications of the proposed legislation, as it could make them vulnerable to hostile lawsuits by American lawyers attempting to prove that British-based jihadists have been involved in terror plots against US targets. Thus, while the original aims of JASTA may have been worthy, it seemed destined to prove self-defeating, both for the US and its most loyal allies.”

The British have been running terrorists for decades, often in partnership with the USA, such as in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their real concern regarding JASTA is its potential to expose their supporting role in 9/11 itself, through their corrupt arms-dealing relationship with the Saudis. As the UK Serious Fraud Office had started to investigate in 2006 before Iraq War criminal Tony Blair hurriedly shut it down, the British government’s Ministry of Defence authorised monthly payments to Prince Bandar, corrupt kickbacks for the British-Saudi al-Yamamah arms deal, which were made from a confidential account at the Bank of England into the same Riggs Bank account from which Bandar funded the 9/11 hijackers.

Australians should be outraged by the disgusting effort of former Defence Minister, ALP leader and Ambassador to the USA Kim Beazley, who this week claimed to be speaking for Australians when he lobbied against JASTA in a column in the US Congressional newspaper The Hill. “America’s friends appeal to Congress: Reject JASTA’s threat to War on Terror”, read the headline of Beazley’s article, in which he labelled JASTA a threat to the principle of sovereign immunity—which it isn’t—then launched into a strident defence of the Saudis, lying outright that they had nothing to do with 9/11.

One of the travesties of the cover-up of the Saudi role is that the perpetrators of the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq were able to imply Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 when they knew that the 28 pages had identified the Saudis as the culprits. In Australia, John Howard led the support for the Iraq war, but so did Kim Beazley behind the scenes in the Labor Party, part of a neocon rump including Kevin Rudd and Michael Danby who pressured the ALP to support their British counterpart Tony Blair. To his credit, then ALP leader Simon Crean refused to support the war, a position for which he has since been vindicated in the UK’s Chilcot Report of the Iraq Inquiry.

The overriding of Obama’s JASTA veto is an enormous victory in the fight against terrorism and for peace and security. We must now force an end to the regime change agenda launched by the USA and UK using 9/11 as the pretext, which has destroyed Iraq and Libya, and is now destroying Syria. To join the CEC’s fight:

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