Mothra said:
We talking about the same Iran whose proxies have killed more American servicemen in the last 40 years than any other country in the world?
If you watch the video from start to finish, you'll learn a great deal. One of the things that you'll learn is that this is not a correct statement.
For example, you probably buy Louis Freeh's official FBI line that Iran was responsible for the Khobar Towers attack. In reality, Bin Laden's Al-Aqeda organization was behind it.
"Assessing al-Qa`ida's Role
The principal reason to suspect al-Qa`ida's involvement is the fact that Usama bin Ladin had a motive to attack. Since late 1990, Bin Ladin had expressed deep dissatisfaction with the U.S. military presence in his native Saudi Arabia, a presence he considered a violation of the sanctity of the "Land of the Two Holy Places." In August 1996, he declared war on U.S. troops in the Arabian Peninsula. Although this declaration postdates the Khobar bombing, Bin Ladin had declared his readiness to attack U.S. troops several years earlier in informal settings 7. Moreover, Bin Ladin applauded the Khobar operation in a number of statements and interviews after the attack 8.
Many would also argue that Bin Ladin also had the operational capability. Al-Qa`ida-linked militants undertook several military operations overseas in the early 1990s, from an alleged assassination attempt on the former king of Afghanistan in Rome in November 1991, to the hotel bombings in the Yemeni port of Aden in December 1992, to guerrilla warfare in Somalia in 1993. There is also evidence that Bin Ladin sought to operate in Saudi Arabia from approximately 1994 onward. In mid-1994, Saudi authorities allegedly intercepted a shipment of explosives sent by al-Qa`ida from Sudan to Saudi Arabia 9. According to a declassified Iraqi document, Bin Ladin met with an Iraqi government representative in Khartoum in early 1995 and discussed "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia 10. The Yemeni jihadist Nasir al-Bahri has also said that Bin Ladin "opened branches of the al-Qa`ida organization in Saudi Arabia" in 1996 11.
The third reason to suspect al-Qa`ida involvement is that prior to the Khobar bombing Saudi Arabia experienced two violent attacks by Saudi Arab Afghans 12. The first was the so-called al-Hudhayf incident in November 1994, in which Abdallah al-Hudhayf threw acid in the face of a police officer to avenge the arrest of the leaders of the moderate Islamist opposition two months earlier 13. The second attack was the November 1995 car bombing of the U.S. training mission to the Saudi National Guard in central Riyadh, in which five Americans and two Indians were killed 14. In their televised April 1995 confessions, the four alleged perpetrators, three of whom were Arab Afghans, said they were influenced by Usama bin Ladin, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Saad al-Faqih 15. Although the Riyadh attack was initiated "from below" and not orchestrated by Bin Ladin himself, it showed that Sunni militants were able and willing to use car bombings against U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia 16.
Finally, a specific piece of intelligence would seem to link Bin Ladin to Khobar. A retired CIA official has said that two days after the bombing, the National Security Agency intercepted phone calls from al-Qa`ida second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri and Ashra Hadi (head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad) allegedly congratulating Bin Ladin on the Khobar attack."
The reality is that Sunni muslims from a variety of nations have been responsible for the overwhelming majority of attacks against US citizens over the past half century.
To borrow from Reagan, the problem isn't that you don't know things. The problem is that so much of what you know just isn't so.
