Book Review: The Eleventh Day -- The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden

We all know by now that President G.W. Bush and his bloodthirsty companions Cheney & Rumsfeld were determined to go to war with Iraq, notwithstanding the lack of evidence linking them to 9/11 or the non-existence of WMD. Why they are still walking the streets and not looking at the world through parallel vertical bars remains a mystery. If Bill Clinton was impeachable for fibbing about his sordid personal life, isn't sacrificing lives and resources based on fabricated evidence also a crime against the State? (Watch this interview if you think it isn't!)

Well, if that's not enough to raise your hackles, let me recommend a book that most certainly will. The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, is a complete game-changer, a meticulously researched treatise on why it was actually our good friends the Saudis who helped finance Al-Qaeda's operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh yes, by the way, all fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers were themselves Saudis, not Iraqis or Iranians or Syrians. Does that not look like a red flag big enough for the Bush Administration to see?

Mind you, even though President Bush — whose monetary and family ties to the Saudi royals is well-documented in the book House of Bush, House of Saud — had full knowledge of who perpetrated the horrendous crimes that autumn day ten years ago, he allowed all of his Saudi confederates to fly home from the United States without being questioned. When no other planes were allowed in the air, the white-robed and bearded thoroughbred horse owners and their families boarded a nice big jumbo jet and went home very, very quietly.

According to the authors' analysis, the 9/11 Commission Report "fudged or dodged the full truth about U.S. and Western intelligence before the attacks. And the issue of whether the terrorist operation had the support of other nation-states or powerful individuals within those nation-states." If you're starting to smell petro-dollars in this whole affair, your senses are well-attenuated. The authors detail a post 9/11 "struggle to keep the fabled U.S.-Saudi friendship from falling apart."

No problem — the Saudis kept the oil flowing (9 billion barrels worth) in the two weeks after the attack, the President met cordially with his buddy, Prince Bandar (smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony with him, in fact) and then in 2002 welcomed Crown Prince Abdullah himself to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. If that doesn't sound a little too cozy to you, take it from Republican Senator Bob Graham, a co-chair of the Joint Inquiry: "9/11 couldn't have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By 'the Saudis,' I mean the Saudi government….[and that included] the royal family."

Bless Bob Graham for his honesty and honor when it comes to rendering these important events accurately. And what looms most suspiciously in the same Joint Inquiry is the fact that 28 pages were redacted by the Bush Administration for reasons having to do with national security. For the record, both Graham and his co-chair, Republican Senator Richard Shelby, consider that redaction to be a smokescreen meant to protect the guilty. "In Graham's view," the authors report, "Bush's role in suppressing important information…should have led to his impeachment and removal from office."

The authors, Swan and Summers, have done all of the required heavy lifting to elucidate these critically important historical events. It leaves the various conspiracy theorists left to babble in the dark, and calls into question why the Saudis were never called to account. The real reason? They had given Bin Laden bushels full of cash to fund his operations as protection money so he wouldn't attack them first! And how do the amoral, money-grubbing Saudi royals respond to these allegations? "We put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them," said Prince Sultan. "I think the Zionists are behind these events."

Well, if that kind of magical thinking doesn't raise motivate you to explore further, I don't know what will. We all are responsible for the government officials we empower, and must perforce read this important book, in order to know why private money and power prevail over the disclosure of vital historical facts. Bush and Cheney are free men, while the 9/11 victims still haven't had their day in court. Here's hoping all that will change courtesy of this amazing work of reportage.