Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Wednesday, 11 February 2015

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

Prince Charles’s Saudi associates named in new 9/11 law suit

On 3 February, members of the families killed or wounded in the 9/11 attacks filed a 4,000 page law suit in New York against those whom they claim sponsored the attacks. The story featured the following day on the front page of the New York Times. Among the Saudi royals named in the lawsuit as key orchestrators and financiers of 9/11, are two intimate associates of Prince Charles for decades: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and his brother-in-law Prince Turki bin Faisal. As long time top officials of Saudi intelligence, both are acknowledged sponsors of the rise of Al-Qaeda and were two of only eight foreign royals whom Charles invited to his wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005. Both men have also long served as officials or financiers of Charles’s Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, into which Bandar has personally poured tens of millions of dollars and whose Strategy Advisory Committee is chaired by Turki.

Charles has come under heavy criticism recently in the UK for his shameless role over the past three decades as Britain’s chief arms salesman to the Saudis, typified by a 3 February article in the London Times headlined “Charles is very secret weapon in dealings with the Gulf”, and by Charles’s protestations cited in a just-released biography, Charles: The Heart of a King, by Catherine Mayer, that he “no longer wants to promote arms sales in Gulf States”. He just attended the funeral of Saudi King Abdullah on 24 January, and is now back in the Gulf once again from 6-12 February, for which his personal spokesman protested, “The Prince of Wales’ upcoming visit to the Middle East is not about sales of defence equipment.” Such denials are not surprising given that it is a matter of public record that during the course of his now 10 state visits to Saudi Arabia since the 1980s, Charles did indeed broker hundreds of billions in arms deals to the Gulf States, in particular to Saudi Arabia, including the infamous Al-Yamamah deal.

But Charles’s relations with the Saudi sponsors of Al-Qaeda and ISIS go much deeper than simply peddling arms to brutal regimes. He claims to be horrified by ISIS’s mass slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East—sponsored by none other than his friends the Saudis and the Qataris—and by the “radicalisation of Islamic youth in the UK”. He bemoaned the latter in an 8 February BBC Radio 2 Sunday Hour interview, but this he blames not on his own protection of the financiers of the terror network who recruit such youth, but on the internet and a youthful “search for adventure and excitement”.

But here is the reality: Charles has himself personally intervened with British law enforcement authorities to stop investigations into international terrorism, in particular into the UK side of 9/11. This was chronicled already in 2005 in the book Saudi Babylon: Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud. Wrote authors Mark Hollingsworth and Sandy Mitchell, a former Saudi torture victim:

“Prince Charles’s relationships with prominent House of Saud members have created serious problems and obstacles to UK agencies investigating claims of Saudi financing of international terrorism, according to Special Branch sources.”

Exemplary is Hollingsworth’s detailed account of an extraordinary meeting at New Scotland Yard in April 2003 between terrorism investigators and lawyers for families of the victims of 9/11, who were already then preparing to sue Prince Bandar and Prince Turki for supporting international terrorism and for supervising 9/11 in particular. In that meeting, detective-chief inspector Stephen Ratcliffe, the Special Branch officer in charge of tracking terrorism financing, stated, “Our ability to investigate the Saudis is very limited,” and made it unmistakably clear that the main reason was Prince Charles. (pp. 46-47)

The people of Britain and Australia, where this man will be the next king, must join with the campaign in the US to end the cover-up of the sponsors of international terrorism, by demanding a full investigation of the role of the British Crown, in the person of Prince Charles, in protecting this network. A good place to start would be with Charles’s Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Besides Princes Bandar and Turki, a list of its other Saudi and Qatari founders and leading officials over the years reads like a Who’s Who of the major financiers and advocates of international terrorism. Those relationships are indeed reflective of what a recent press release from Charles’s Clarence House praised as “the long-standing and respectful relationships which exist between the Royal Family and the ruling families in the Gulf.”

It is precisely those “long-standing and respectful relationships” between the British and Saudi royals that must now be investigated. Otherwise, when a new mass terror attack hits the UK or Australia in the coming weeks as is now widely expected, you can thank Prince Charles.

Click here for a free copy of the Nov./Dec. 2014 New Citizen which includes the articles, “Charles of Arabia and the Al-Qaeda/ISIS Nexus” and “British SIS/ASIO Planning a Terrorist Attack on Australia?”

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