Recorded May 10, 2004
REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #s 459 and 460 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

A bru­tal irony about the name of a prize race­horse gives this pro­gram its title. Owned by Prince Ahmed—one of the mem­bers of the Saudi royal fam­ily allowed to leave the U.S. right after the 9/11 attacks with­out being ade­quately interrogated—War Emblem won two thirds of horse racing’s famed Triple Crown. In the spring of 2002, War Emblem won the Ken­tucky Derby and the Preak­ness Stakes, and Mr. Emory noted at the time that the horse’s name was ironic in light of doc­u­mented sup­port by wealthy Saudis for Al Qaeda. This pro­gram high­lights alle­ga­tions that Prince Ahmed was one of three mem­bers of the Saudi royal fam­ily who func­tioned as liai­son per­son­nel to Al Qaeda. This infor­ma­tion was allegedly dis­closed dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion of Abu Zubaydah—a key Bin Laden aide.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The pre­cip­i­tous deaths of all three mem­bers of the Saudi Royal fam­ily (named by Zubay­dah) over the space of eight days in 2002; the sus­pi­cious air crash that took the life of the head of the Pak­istani air force—also alleged by Abu Zubay­dah to be in the pay of Bin Laden; the unusual inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods allegedly employed by the CIA to obtain the infor­ma­tion pro­vided by Abu Zubaydah.

1. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the evac­u­a­tion of key Saudis in the imme­di­ate after­math of 9/11, the pro­gram notes that one of the evac­uees had the same last name as one of the hijack­ers, who had received finan­cial sup­port from the wife of Prince Ban­dar, the Saudi Ambas­sador to the U.S. (For more about the evac­u­a­tion flights, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 334, 337, 423, 425, 454.) “Right after 9/11, four pri­vate Saudi jets were given spe­cial dis­pen­sa­tion to fly out of the US, begin­ning on Sep­tem­ber 15, 2001. The flight man­i­fests show­ing pas­sen­ger lists are now view­able on line at the web­site of Craig Unger, the author of House of Bush, House of Saud. As noted by Tom Flocco, the first flight cor­rob­o­rates ear­lier sto­ries of a fifth ‘phan­tom’ flight from Tampa to Lex­ing­ton on Sep­tem­ber 13, when all reg­u­lar flights were still grounded. All four flights car­ried mem­bers of the Saudi royal fam­ily. The first, from Lex­ing­ton, Ken­tucky to Lon­don, 9/15/01, also car­ried a young man, Ahmad A.M. Alhazmi, with the same fam­ily name as Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the hijack­ers.”
(“More on the Saudi Pri­vate Jet Flights right after 9/11” by Peter Dale Scott; p. 1.)

2. Among the other evac­uees was Prince Ahmad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz—the owner of War Emblem, the horse that won two thirds of horseracing’s triple crown in 2002. (Obvi­ously, that horse is the sub­ject of the program’s title.) “There is noth­ing to con­nect the two Alhazmis directly. But the hijacker Nawaf had already been con­nected in press sto­ries to the Saudi royal fam­ily, as the recip­i­ent of funds com­ing indi­rectly from the wife of Prince Ban­dar, the Saudi Ambas­sador to the United States. ‘Scan­dal struck again in Novem­ber 2002 and touched Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Prince Ban­dar bin Sul­tan, the long­time Saudi ambas­sador to Wash­ing­ton (and nephew of Prince Nayef). It was learned that money had gone from her purse to the pock­ets of two 9/11 hijack­ers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, by way of two Saudi inter­me­di­aries, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bass­nan (Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Stan­dard, 8/12/03). On the flight was the noted horse breeder Prince Ahmad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of the Ken­tucky Derby win­ner War Emblem. After return­ing to Saudi Ara­bia, he died sud­denly of a heart attack at the age of 43, his cousin, Prince Sul­tan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdul­lah, aged 41, was killed in a car acci­dent the next day, on his way to Prince Ahmad’s funeral. . . .” (Idem.)

3. The pro­gram high­lights infor­ma­tion that came to light after the cap­ture of Aby Zubay­dah, a key aide to Osama bin Laden. Zubay­dah dis­closed that War Emblem’s owner was among the con­tact points between Al Qaeda and the Saudi royal fam­ily. “Just how wrong this deci­sion was [to allow the Saudis to leave] became appar­ent sev­eral months later, when the war in Afghanistan was in full swing. On Thurs­day, March 28, 2002, act­ing on elec­tronic inter­cepts of tele­phone calls, heav­ily armed Pak­istani com­mando units accom­pa­nied by Amer­i­can Spe­cial Forces and FBI SWAT teams, raided a two-story home in the sub­urbs of Faisal­abad, in west­ern Pak­istan. They had received tips that one of the peo­ple in the house was Abu Zubay­dah, the thirty-year-old chief of oper­a­tions for Al Qaeda who had been head of field oper­a­tions for the USS Cole bomb­ing and who was a close con­fi­dant of Osama bin Laden’s.”
(House of Bush, House of Saud; by Craig Unger; Scrib­ner [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Craig Unger; ISBN 0–7432-5337-X; pp. 263–264.)

4. “Two days later, on March 30, news of Zubaydah’s cap­ture was spread­ing all over the world. At first, the admin­is­tra­tion refused to cor­rob­o­rate the reports; then it cel­e­brated the cap­ture of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda oper­a­tive every to be taken into cus­tody. ‘This rep­re­sents a very sig­nif­i­cant blow to Al Qaeda,’ said White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher. He called Zubay­dah ‘a key ter­ror­ist recruiter, an oper­a­tional plan­ner and a mem­ber of Osama bin Laden’s inner cir­cle.’” (Ibid.; p. 264.)

5. “Don­ald Rums­feld told a news con­fer­ence that Zubay­dah was ‘being given exactly the excel­lent med­ical care one would want if they wanted to make sure he was around a good long time to visit with us.’ The inter­na­tional media spec­u­lated as to what Zubay­dah might know, what he might say. On Sun­day, March 31, three days after the raid, the inter­ro­ga­tion began. . . .” (Idem.)

6. “ . . . First, they [CIA] admin­is­tered thiopen­tal sodium, bet­ter known under its trade­marked name, Sodium Pen­tothal, through an IV drip, to make Zubay­dah more talk­a­tive. Since the pris­oner had been shot three times dur­ing the cap­ture, he was already hooked up to a drip to treat his wounds and it was pos­si­ble to admin­is­ter the drug with­out his knowl­edge. Sec­ond, as a vari­a­tion on the good cop-bad cop rou­tine, the CIA used two teams of debriefers. One con­sisted of undis­guised Amer­i­cans who were at least will­ing to treat Zubaydah’s injuries while they inter­ro­gated him. The other team con­sisted of Arab Amer­i­cans pos­ing as Saudi secu­rity agents, who were known for their bru­tal inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques. The think­ing was that Zubay­dah would be so scared of being turned over to the Saudis, ever infa­mous for their pub­lic exe­cu­tions in Riyadh’s Chop-Chop Square, that he would try to win over the Amer­i­can inter­roga­tors by talk­ing to them.” (Ibid.; pp. 264–265.)

7. “In fact, exactly the oppo­site hap­pened. When Zubay­dah was con­fronted with men pass­ing them­selves off as Saudi secu­rity offi­cers, his reac­tion was not fear, but instead relief . . . . ‘The pris­oner, who had been reluc­tant even to con­firm his iden­tity to his Amer­i­can cap­tors, sud­denly started talk­ing ani­mat­edly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Amer­i­cans would tor­ture and then kill him. Zubay­dah asked his inter­roga­tors to call a senior mem­ber of the rul­ing Saudi fam­ily. He then pro­vided a pri­vate home num­ber and cell phone num­ber from m

emory. ‘He will tell you what to do,’ Zubay­dah promised them.’” (Ibid.; p. 265.)

8. More about Zubaydah’s fin­ger­ing of Prince Ahmed (War Emblem’s owner) and his role as con­tact per­son for Al Qaeda on behalf of the royal fam­ily: “The name Zubay­dah gave came as a com­plete sur­prise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of many leg­endary race­horses and one of the most west­ern­ized mem­bers of the royal fam­ily. On Sep­tem­ber 16, 2001, Prince Ahmed, of course, had boarded the flight in Lex­ing­ton as part of the evac­u­a­tion plan approved by the Bush White House.” (Idem.)

9. “Prince Ahmed was well known not just in Saudi Ara­bia, but also in pub­lish­ing cir­cles in Lon­don and horse-racing cir­cles in Ken­tucky. He was such an unlikely name that the inter­roga­tors imme­di­ately assumed Zubay­dah was lying to buy time. . . .The inter­roga­tors then keep their pris­oner on a ‘bare min­i­mum’ of pain med­ica­tion and inter­rupted his sleep with bright lights for hour after hour before restart­ing the Sodium Pen­tothal drip.” (Ibid.; pp. 265–266.)

10. In addi­tion, Zubay­dah named two other mem­bers of the Saudi royal fam­ily as Al Qaeda liai­son per­son­nel. “When they returned, Zubay­dah spoke to his faux Saudi inter­roga­tors as if they, not he, were the ones in trou­ble. He said that sev­eral years ear­lier the royal fam­ily had made a deal with Al Qaeda in which the House of Saud would aid the Tal­iban so long as Al Qaeda kept ter­ror­ism out of Saudi Ara­bia. Zubay­dah added that as part of this arrange­ment, he dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other mem­bers of the House of Saud as inter­me­di­aries, Prince Sul­tan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd’s, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a twenty-five-year-old dis­tant rel­a­tive of the king’s. Again, he fur­nished phone num­bers from mem­ory.” (Ibid.; p. 266.)

11. Zubay­dah alleged that Prince Ahmed had fore­knowl­edge of an impend­ing ter­ror­ist attack in the U.S. on 9/11. “ . . . The inter­roga­tors responded by telling Zubay­dah that 9/11 had changed every­thing. The House of Saud cer­tainly would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubay­dah dropped his real bomb­shell. ‘Zubay­dah said that 9/11 changed noth­ing because Ahmed . . . knew before­hand that an attack was sched­uled for Amer­i­can soil that day . . . ‘They just didn’t know what it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The infor­ma­tion had been passed to them, said Zubay­dah, because bin laden knew they could not stop it with­out know­ing the specifics, but later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could dis­close their fore­knowl­edge.’” (Idem.)

12. “Two weeks later, Zubay­dah was moved to an undis­closed loca­tion. When he fig­ured out that the inter­roga­tors were really Amer­i­cans, not Saudis, . . . he tried to stran­gle him­self, and later recanted his entire tale. As this book went to press, no one had con­vinc­ingly refuted [this] account.” (Idem.)

13. After dis­cussing Prince Ahmed’s pur­chase of War Emblem, the horse’s suc­cess in the Ken­tucky Derby and the Preak­ness, and the awk­ward pres­ence at the Derby of New York fire­fight­ers who had lost many of their co-workers on 9/11, the pro­gram high­lights Prince Ahmed’s curi­ous absence from the U.S. when War Emblem was run­ning in the Bel­mont Stakes. Prince Ahmed then died on 7/22/2002, allegedly of a heart attack. “ . . . But on June 8, Prince Ahmed did not even show up at the Bel­mont Stakes, the third part of the Triple Crown. ‘I’m dis­ap­pointed the prince wasn’t here,’ said trainer Bob Baf­feert. Ahmed was said to be tend­ing to fam­ily oblig­a­tions in Riyadh. An asso­ciate said that he did not know the nature of the oblig­a­tions. In any case, War Emblem stum­bled as he came out of the start­ing gate and came in eighth. About six weeks later, on July 22, Prince Ahmed was dead. News reports said the forty-three-year-old nephew of King Fahd had died in his sleep due to a heart attack.” (Ibid.; p. 268.)

14. Within eight days of Ahmed’s death, the two other mem­bers of the royal fam­ily alleged by Zubay­dah to have served as liai­son agents between Al Qaeda and the house of Saud had died under odd cir­cum­stances. “ . . . Ahmed was not the only per­son named by Zubay­dah to suf­fer ill. The next day, July 23, Ahmed’s cousin, Prince Sul­tan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, was killed in a one-car crash while en route to Ahmed’s funeral. A week later, on July 30, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a third mem­ber of the royal fam­ily who had been named by Zubay­dah, was found in the desert hav­ing appar­ently died of thirst.” (Ibid.; pp. 268–269.)

15. In addi­tion, the head of the Pak­istani air force (also alleged by Zubay­dah to be in the pay of Al Qaeda) died under strange cir­cum­stances, round­ing out the pat­tern of timely deaths around those revealed by Zubay­dah to have been asso­ci­ated with the ter­ror­ist group. The alleged rela­tion­ship between Bin Laden and Air Mar­shal Mushaf Ali Mir is inter­est­ing to con­tem­plate in con­nec­tion with some of the anom­alies about the per­for­mance of air units on 9/11. Cer­tainly, the head of the Pak­istani air force would have been an excel­lent con­sul­tant to pro­vide the attack­ers with inside infor­ma­tion about air defense tech­nol­ogy. “In and of them­selves, the three mys­te­ri­ous deaths do not con­clu­sively con­firm [the] asser­tion that Zubay­dah was telling the truth about Osama bin Laden and his high-level links to the House of Saud. Nor was that the end of it. Dur­ing his inter­ro­ga­tion, Zubay­dah had also said that Osama bin Laden had struck a deal with Pak­istani air force chief Air Mar­shal Mushaf Ali Mir, and had told him that there would be unspec­i­fied attacks on Amer­i­can soil on 9/11. Seven months after the Saudi deaths, on Feb­ru­ary 20, 2003, Mir and six­teen oth­ers were killed when their plane crashed in a north­west province of Pak­istan. Sab­o­tage was widely spec­u­lated to be behind the crash but could not be proved.” (Ibid.; p. 269.)

16. “Now, of course, the three men can­not be interviewed—not that the FBI didn’t have its chance at one of them. On Sep­tem­ber 16, 2001, after Ahmed boarded the 727 in Lex­ing­ton, Ken­tucky. He had been iden­ti­fied by FBI offi­cials, but not seri­ously inter­ro­gated. It was an inaus­pi­cious start to the just-declared war on ter­ror. ‘What hap­pened on Sep­tem­ber 11 was a hor­rific crime,’ says John Mar­tin, a for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial. ‘It was an act of war. And the answer is no, this is not any way to go about inves­ti­gat­ing it.’” (Idem.)

17. “As for the Saudis, they were not offer­ing any answers. On Sep­tem­ber 4, 2003, roughly two years after 9/11, Saudi embassy spokesman Nail al-Jubeir appeared on CNN and was asked by news­caster Paula Zahn, ‘Can you tell us unequiv­o­cally tonight that no one on board [these planes] had any­thing to do with either the plan­ning or the exe­cu­tion of the Sep­tem­ber 11 plot?’ ‘There are only two things that I’m sure about,’ al-Jubeir replied ‘That there is the exis­tence of God and then we will die at the end of the world. Every­thing else, we don’t know.’” (Idem.)