Biden’s DOJ continues with relish to publish declassified documents on Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies and diplomats’ links to 9/11 terrorists
The revelations have been coming with increasing regularity since last September, the 20th anniversary of the attacks, and have become yet another bludgeoning cudgel from Washington on Riyadh.
The documents released the other day have become some of the most scandalous. They revealed the names of two employees of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles – Mana and Johar – who greeted would-be terrorists upon their arrival in the US and held meetings with them right in the diplomatic building.
The appearance of these documents is particularly telling as the Senate does take up consideration of the NOPEC Act – which allows the DOJ to sue OPEC and impose sanctions on cartel member countries – for creating disadvantages for the US in the oil market.
The law has been under discussion since the Clinton era. It may never be finally adopted. But it is the same whip that the US is threatening Saudi Arabia and the UAE – at a time when the Gulf monarchies are refusing to engage with Washington, are not responding to Biden’s calls and are drifting towards China and Russia.
As for declassification of documents on the events of 20 years ago, it provides grounds for imposing sanctions – as the US can then not only strangle the Persian Gulf economically. They might, for example, recognize these monarchies as sponsors of terrorism by trying to bring about regime change there.
Biden’s short-sighted foreign policy has already turned into a de facto beginning of the end of the petrodollar system. The UAE predicts a rise in oil prices to $400 a barrel in the event of a final freeze in relations with the United States. And this will threaten not only destabilisation of the entire Middle East – but also economic collapse for an already sanctions-weary liberal world order.
Malek Dudakov