Posted on 09/01/2003 5:22:11 AM PDT by sarcasm
WASHINGTON - A top Al Qaeda leader in U.S. custody has detailed ties among Osama Bin Laden, Pakistani officials and members of the Saudi royal family, charging that some of them knew about the 9/11 plot in advance, according to a new book.
At one point, the captured operative, Abu Zubaydah, told his interrogators to call a Saudi prince who could get him off the hook, the book says.
The explosive revelations in Gerald Posner's new book, "Why America Slept," outline how U.S. agents missed numerous chances to unravel Al Qaeda's deadly plans to attack the U.S. Posner contends that after Zubaydah was nabbed in Pakistan in March 2002, the CIA gave him painkillers and sodium pentothal, a truth serum, to coax the former AlQaeda operations chief to spill terror leader Bin Laden's plans. They tricked him into thinking he was in a Saudi jail and sent in U.S. agents posing as Saudis to question him, the book says.
A relieved Zubaydah, who was actually in Afghanistan, ticked off telephone numbers for a senior member of the Saudi royal family who would "tell you what to do," Posner writes, according to Time magazine.
A U.S. intelligence official dismissed Posner's account of Zubaydah's interrogation yesterday. "I don't know who [Posner's] sources are, but it's not anybody who knows what they're talking about," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Questionable sources
Posner, a respected journalist whose previous books have sought to debunk conspiracy theories about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, said it's possible his Bush administration sources may have had an anti-Saudi bias.
He said the information was impossible to independently verify, but he judged it to be credible. "I had the feeling that within the administration ... there was a tug of war over whether this information should become public or not, with the prevailing opinion being that it should not," Posner told the Daily News yesterday.
The Saudi government - ruled by the Al-Saud royal family - has long denied supporting Al Qaeda or Bin Laden, the exiled heir to a prominent Saudi family's fortune. The Bush administration has sought to dampen criticism of Saudi Arabia - a key ally that only recently joined the war on terror. Saudi leaders were implicated as aiding terrorists in the scathing 9/11 report Congress issued this summer.
Yesterday, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said some Saudi royals may still be in cahoots with Bin Laden - or paid him off to buy their safety, as Posner's book charges.
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