Going After The Princes

by digby

Since it’s obvious that there is more than meets the eye about Cheney’s awesome plot to kill all the terrorists in their beds just like in the movies, I figured I’d throw out this little tidbit which came my way via email from a reader. I have no idea if it’s connected, but since we are all once again playing the old parlor game of “what was Cheney really up to?” I figured I’d throw it out there.

This is from a TIME magazine review of Gerald Posner’s book Why America Slept from 2003, in which he was portrayed as a great Al Qaeda mastermind who blew the lid off the Al Qaeda and Saudi royal family connection. But there are some actual facts involved which make one curious as to whether or not Cheney and the boys might have thought they really had something — and acted upon it:

In Posner’s stark judgment, the Saudis “effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade.” Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named. The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially “died of thirst” while traveling east of Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf Ali Mir, by then Pakistan’s Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants.

Obviously, this is all just Ouija Board stuff. But it is an intriguing reminder of just how rudiculously credulous both the government and the press were in those early days. Anything was possible. Certainly, assassinating Saudi princes is a hell of a lot more credible as something that would make Pete Hoekstra choke than orders for special forces to kill bin Laden in the dead of night. Talk about not passing the smell test …

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