Biden Wants a Defense Pact With Saudi Arabia While 9/11 Victims Are Suing the Kingdom

Published

4 months ago

May 22, 2024

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American troops might be pledged to defend Saudi territory soon. President Joe Biden is seeking a ” mega-deal ” that would bind the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel into a Middle Eastern military alliance. After Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman last week, both governments announced that they had a ” near-final ” version of a defense pact worked out.

A group of 9/11 victims’ families wants something very different. For years, they have been suing the Saudi government, based on alleged contacts between Saudi officials and 9/11 hijackers. Earlier this month, the Saudi government argued that its officials had nothing to do with the attacks and motioned for the case to be thrown out. The families’ lawyers responded with a bombshell filing : They claim to have new evidence that the 9/11 hijackers were assisted by “a covert and illegal Saudi government platform” on American soil.

The families’ filing focuses on accused Saudi spy Omar Al Bayoumi, who hosted two of the future hijackers in southern California, and Saudi diplomat Fahad Al Thumairy, who allegedly sent an associate to help host them. The Saudi government argues that Bayoumi “had innocent motives: to help fellow Saudis who were new to the San Diego Muslim community and to get a referral fee from his apartment manager. Al Thumairy did not assist the hijackers at all.”

But the families cited several new pieces of evidence that have not been revealed to the public yetincluding FBI memos, home videos of Al Bayoumi, and phone surveillance recordsthat link Al Bayoumi and Al Thumairy to the hijackers. The families also have a ” smoking gun ” from British police, a notebook seized from Al Bayoumi that includes “a drawing of a plane, alongside a calculation used to discern the distance at which a target on the ground will be visible from a certain altitude.”

Former U.S. counterterrorism official Steve Simon, who assisted the families with their case and who was my colleague when I worked at the Quincy Institute two years ago, believes that support for the hijackers did not necessarily come from the top.

Saudi government motives “won’t be fully understood until the royal archives are opened, assuming that internal discussions were even recorded. But it does seem, in general, that the House of Saud ruled but did not govern; governance was typically for commoners,” he wrote in The Atlantic . “Without inquiring closely into the day-to-day operations of the religious and foreign-affairs ministries, the royals could not have had a clear idea of what was being done in their name, including the deployment of Saudis with diplomatic visas for the purpose of attacking the kingdom’s strongest, most reliable transactional partner.”

And the kingdom has changed a lot under bin Salman, who crushed the old Saudi religious establishment during his rise to power and now runs a much tighter ship . Still, the Saudi government does not seem keen to have U.S. courts dig up its past activities, especially since a majority of the American public already opposes a defense pact.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Israel seem to have very different ideas of what Biden’s mega-deal would mean for them. Last year, the Israeli side was quite optimistic. Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer stated that a Saudi-Israeli deal would be a ” reverse 9/11 .” But the war in Gaza has revived the Palestinian issue in Arab politics, and Saudi Arabia is now demanding Palestinian independence as a prerequisite to a deal with Israel.

This weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implied that he would reject a Saudi deal because an independent Palestine “will inevitably be a terror state.” At the same time, Saudi Arabia has been trying to do an end-run around Netanyahu, pushing for a ” less-for-less model ” that cuts Israel out of the pact. The Biden administration, however, believes that it can still get everyone on board.

“The integrated vision is a bilateral understanding between the United States and Saudi Arabia combined with normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, combined with meaningful steps on behalf of the Palestinian people,” Sullivan, the Biden adviser, said earlier this month. “All of that has to come together…you can’t disentangle one piece from the others.”

Politics

Angela Rayner to announce renters’ protections at opening of Labour Party conference

Published

3 hours ago

September 22, 2024

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Angela Rayner to announce renters' protections at opening of Labour Party conference

Angela Rayner will set out measures to protect renters from fire safety defects, damp and mould in her speech at the Labour Party conference.

The deputy prime minister, who is also the housing secretary, will commit to “building homes fit for the future” when she opens the party’s first annual gathering since winning the general election.

The package will include bringing forward a Remediation Acceleration Plan this autumn to speed up the removal of unsafe cladding on high-rise buildings.

Deadly cladding remains on more than half of all residential blocks of flats identified as at risk since the Grenfell fire in 2017.

The issue has come back into the spotlight following the conclusion of the inquiry into the tragedy, which found that “systematic dishonesty” contributed to the blaze that killed 72 people.

The announcement of the acceleration plan was thin on detail, but the government said it would go “further and faster to fix unsafe cladding and make existing homes safe”.

Other measures Ms Rayner will announce on Sunday include consulting on a new “decent homes standard” for the social and private rented sectors, and a new law to make landlords respond to complaints about disrepair within legally binding timescales.

These have already been announced as part of Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill, which builds on long-awaited legislation that was promised by the Tories but ultimately shelved ahead of the general election.

The law regarding repairs will be named after two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died as a direct result of exposure to mould in the social home his family rented in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

The Conservatives first proposed Awaab’s Law to cover the social rented sector, but Labour will extend it to cover the private sector in a move they say will help tenants in 746,000 homes with reported serious hazards secure faster repairs.

Commenting ahead of her speech, Ms Rayner, who has also pledged to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years, said: “Just because Britain isn’t working at the moment, it doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed.

“We will deliver for working people and, in doing so, show that politics can change lives.

“This Labour government is taking a wave of bold action to not only build the housing our country needs and boost social and affordable housing, but to ensure all homes are decent, safe, and warm.”

The speech comes as a donations row threatens to overshadow the optimistic mood of the party’s first conference while in government for 15 years.

The prime minister has come under scrutiny over the past week for the more than £100,000 worth of gifts he has accepted, including tickets to football matches, concerts and luxury clothes.

Following days of press coverage on the issue, it emerged on Friday that Sir Keir and his most senior ministers – Ms Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves – will no longer accept donations to pay for clothes.

On Saturday, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told Sky News that there had not been an undue influence in gifts accepted by her colleagues but “we don’t want the news and the commentary to be dominated by conversations about clothes”.

She defended the prime minister’s actions as being within the rules, saying that the taxpayer doesn’t fund these things “so MPs will always take donations, will always take gifts in kind”.

She added: “We expect our politicians to be well turned out, we expect them to be people who go out and represent us at different events and represent the country at different events and are clothed appropriately.

“But the point is that when we accept donations for that or for anything else, that we declare them and we’re open and transparent about them.”

Science

NASA Hubble Space Telescope Finds Unexpectedly High Number of Black Holes

Published

3 hours ago

September 22, 2024

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NASA Hubble Space Telescope Finds Unexpectedly High Number of Black Holes

An international team of researchers, led by scientists from Stockholm University’s Department of Astronomy, has discovered a higher number of black holes in the early universe than was previously recorded. Using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, this team found black holes among faint galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang event. These findings may help scientists understand how supermassive black holes were formed and the role they play in the evolution of galaxies. Hubble’s data was gathered from years of observations of the Ultra Deep Field region.

Supermassive Black Holes Found in Distant Galaxies

One of the key discoveries was the presence of supermassive black holes at the centre of several galaxies formed less than a billion years after the big bang. These black holes have masses equivalent to billions of suns, far larger than what scientists initially predicted.

Alice Young, a PhD student from Stockholm University and a co-author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, noted that these black holes either formed as extremely massive objects or grew rapidly in the early universe.

Observing Black Holes through Variations in Brightness

The research team re-photographed the same region over several years using Hubble, allowing them to measure changes in galaxy brightness. These changes are signals of black holes flickering as they swallow material in bursts. Matthew Hayes, lead author and professor at Stockholm University, explained that these findings help improve models of how both black holes and galaxies grow and interact over time.

Implications for Understanding Galaxy Formation

The research suggests black holes likely formed from the collapse of massive stars in the universe’s first billion years. These findings provide a clearer picture of black hole and galaxy evolution, which can now be better understood through more accurate scientific models.