through which 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers received their Visas.
Michael Springman, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, was the former head of the Jeddah visa bureau, and says he "was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence....
"What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets. The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?"
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=104&row=1Perhaps not coincidentally, Jeddah is the bin Laden family home, Osama's birthplace, and al Qaeda's Saudi base before Osama's exile.
Springman again: "The State Department did not run the Consulate in Jeddah. The CIA did. Of the roughly 20 Washington-dispatched staff there, I know for a certainty that only three people (including myself) had no ties, either professional or familial, to any of the U.S. intelligence services."
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/02/521.shtmlA CBC radio interview with Springman, from January 19, 2002, can be heard here:
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/dispatches/audio/020116_springman.rm. He says his decisions to deny visas to unqualified applicants were frequently overturned for "national security reasons," and that those who died on September 11 "may have been sacrificed in order to further wider US geopolitical objectives."
In the interview, he claims he was told the CIA was working with bin Laden through the Jeddah office as a channel to send al Qaeda recruits to the United States for training as terrorists. He bluntly asserts that this partnership didn't end with the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, and continued as late as September 11, 2001. Springman raised hell, and lost his job. Why would the CIA be helping bin Laden send terrorists into the US after the Soviet defeat? Springman: "It's only a few thousand dead, and what's that against the greater gain for the United States in the Middle East?"
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