Robert Baer
Robert Baer is a former CIA case officer who is sometimes claimed to support the idea that "9/11 was an inside job". However, the source quotes, like "'the evidence points at' 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job" (source) seem a little vague. What does that mean, exactly?
When we look elsewhere for clues, we find Baer frequently expressing a belief that there was significant Saudi involvement in 9/11 that's not been made public:
BUZZFLASH: Well, according to numerous accounts, although it’s hard to tell how extensive, the Saudis were allowed to fly members of the royal family and others out of the United States immediately after September 11th without questioning, on private Saudi jets. I believe I read one account of a security guard, a retired police officer in Florida, who was asked to accompany a member of a scion of a Saudi family who was at a university in Florida to Lexington, Kentucky, which I believe was a meeting point for many of the departing planes. [BuzzFlash Note: Since this interview was conducted in August, the issue of the Bush administration allowing bin Laden and Saudi families to leave the U.S. without questioning, within hours after 9/11 when U.S. airspace was closed, has been confirmed.]
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: One of the Florida papers, a mainstream daily, recounted this police officer's experience, and how he arrived on the tarmac in Lexington, and there was a whole fleet of Saudi jets there.
BAER: It’s crazy. There's a Syrian who's been convicted in Chicago and he has a Saudi wife. The Saudi embassy issued her a passport so was able to flee the U.S.; even though she was part of the case and shouldn’t have left. And the Saudis didn't really let us question Bayyumi [Bayyumi had showed up in San Diego with thousands of dollars and helped settle two Saudi 9/11 hijackers] But it was a controlled interrogation. You don’t get anything out of that.
BUZZFLASH: And it took awhile to arrange that.
BAER: Two years -- a guy that had met two of the hijackers and helped finance their stay!
BUZZFLASH: And wasn’t Bayyumi the guy that the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. sent money to?
BAER: The wife of the Saudi ambassador claimed that she gave the money to charities. As it turned out, the money was going into an account under a Jordanian woman's name. And the Jordanians and the Saudis despise each other. The chances of a Saudi princess sending money to a Jordanian woman without somebody's recommendation are highly improbable. But we don't know who made the recommendation, because we’re not getting the answers. We’re not holding Saudi Arabia accountable.
BUZZFLASH: Well, given that Saudi Arabia has 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves? Is that right?
BAER: Yes.
BUZZFLASH: And given that they have on deposit nearly a trillion dollars in the United States, and given all the intermingled business relationships, and the fact that they buy planes from Boeing, and the Carlyle Group is intertwined with them, what pressure could be put on them? What leverage does the United States have to actually get them to really crack down on the terrorist roots of many of the acts of terrorism?
BAER: Well, you hit the nail on the head. We don’t have a lot of pressure points because we’re so dependent on this oil. You could get rough with these people, but the problem is: Would the regime fall? As much as I despise Al Sa'ud, I wouldn’t want the regime to fall, for our benefit. It could lead to chaos. And I think that’s the problem Bush has: What do you do with these people that are clearly hiding something from 9/11, and have just said we’re not going to cooperate?
The Interior Minister said that 9/11 is a Zionist conspiracy. He said the Saudis had nothing to do with it. He stiffed Freeh [Louis Freeh, former FBI director] when he went out there in ’96 – just refused to see him. I don’t care what Freeh says now. He refused to see him, and no one did anything. The Saudis, and their arrogance, have gotten away with this for a long time because they think they have enough money to buy people off. Their attitude is: You don’t want to buy our oil, don’t buy it. We’ll sell someplace else. And what would happen if they did impose another embargo? Do we invade? I offer that possibility at the end of my book, but that’s if nothing else works. If the place is ready to go down, you have to consider it.
It wouldn't be an Iraq-like invasion with the stated goal of imposing democracy. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would be to save our economy.http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/12_baer.html
(We've just snipped a little of this, but Baer has much more to say. Please read the whole piece.)
However, Baer has also clearly said that al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Here's a Time article from October 2007, for instance:
For Islamic radicals, the legitimacy of attacking the Cole was never in doubt. The U.S. was at war with Islam, and the Cole, a Navy guided missile destroyer, was a military target. It didn't matter in the least to the attackers that in reality there wasn't a war between the U.S. and Islam. Or that the Cole's sailors were non-combatants.
The objectives of the Cole's attackers were equally clear in their minds: Drive the United States out of the Arab peninsula, bring down the American puppets in the Gulf — the Saudi royal family — and create an Islamic caliphate that would truly protect the two holy places, Mecca and Medina.
None of the objectives, of course, were met. But for the attackers, the battle lines were clear, at least until 9/11. That's when that kind of clarity evaporated, as al-Qaeda decided, dropping any pretense of a conventional war, to slaughter civilians.
That distressing reality was further underscored by the Bali attacks, which, while having much less of an effect than 9/11, removed any doubt about the nature of the war we were entering. The first Bali suicide bomber blew himself up in a nightclub filled with foreigners on vacation. A second suicide bomber outside the nightclub blew himself up in a van. The intent was to kill as many people as possible. It not only didn't matter to al-Qaeda that it was killing civilians, but it also didn't matter that many of the victims were Muslim Indonesians; it was indiscriminate slaughter, which was in fact exactly what they wanted.
Bali and 9/11 were proof enough to many Americans that radical Islam is at war with the West; that there is nothing to negotiate, such as the withdrawal of our troops from Saudi Arabia or peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis; that the battlefield is everywhere, with everyone a combatant.
It was this mind-set, this gut reaction to Bali and 9/11, that drew us into two wars without end, Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the same reaction that has led to such excesses as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and allegations of torture.
Still, as we reassess the war on terrorism, as we should, let's never lose sight of the fact that it was al-Qaeda that started it all by switching course and deciding to slaughter civilians in Manhattan and Bali.http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1670883,00.html
And in December 2007 Baer told us that he didn't believe the WTC "was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with":
CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has admitted that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners, including a central figure in 9/11, Abu Zubaydah. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators from members of al-Qaeda and other terrorists who might try to retaliate. He also claims that the tapes were made to safeguard against unlawful treatment of detainees, and that they were only destroyed after it was confirmed that suspects were not being tortured.
At a time when Congressional Democrats are trying once again to pass a torture ban, it's a given that the revelation is going to further inflame the torture debate — since the tapes apparently showed harsh interrogation techniques. The assumption will be that the CIA did not want the tapes seen in public because they are too graphic and could lead to indictments.
But more to the point, the revelation will raise another question: What other evidence has the CIA destroyed? And can the CIA be trusted to tell us? The CIA had told the 9/11 Commission, when it formally requested such materials, that there was no taping of interrogations. CIA lawyers also told federal prosecutors trying the Zacarias Moussaoui terror case that the agency did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge and Moussaoui's defense lawyers. The CIA insists that the tapes destroyed were not the ones in question.
I would find it very difficult to believe the CIA would deliberately destroy evidence material to the 9/11 investigation, evidence that would cover up a core truth, such as who really was behind 9/11. On the other hand I have to wonder what space-time continuum the CIA exists in, if they weren't able to grasp what a field day the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are going to have with this — especially at a time when trust for the government is plumbing new depths.
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.
It isn't going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him. One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts. Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There's nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.
If this sounds like paranoia, it is. But the CIA certainly is not helping by destroying evidence. And they should know better than to destroy evidence in the biggest criminal case in American history. More than anything what we need right now is complete and total transparency on 9/11.http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1692518,00.html
When Baer says that "'the evidence points at' 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job", then, he's clearly not going along with all the theories usually associated with that position. Be wary of sites or individuals who use his name to support their case, unless and until they can produce a more definitive statement from Baer that details exactly what he means.