Chief Saudi spy fired before attack: 25-year official failed to deliver bin Laden to U.S.
Saudi Arabia's King Fahd fired his intelligence chief for suspected ties to alleged Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, just days before hijacked U.S. airliners were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Only about two weeks before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ab'd Al-Mun'im Murad, a columnist in Al-Akhbar, a daily newspaper sponsored by the Egyptian government, wrote: "The conflict that we call the Arab-Israeli conflict is, in truth an Arab conflict with Western, and particularly American, colonialism. The U.S. treats [the Arabs] as it treated the slaves inside the American continent. To this end, [the U.S.] is helped by the smaller enemy, and I mean Israel."
Nor was this unusually candid acknowledgment the end of it. "The issue," declared the same writer in another piece, "no longer concerns the Israeli-Arab conflict. The real issue is the Arab-American conflict--Arabs must understand that the U.S. is not 'the American friend'--and its task, past, present, and future, is [to impose] hegemony on the world, primarily on the Middle East and the Arab world."
Then, in a third piece, also published in late August, Mr. Murad gave us an inkling of the reciprocal "task" he had in mind to be performed on America: "The Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor, must be destroyed because of . . . the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism. . . . The age of the American collapse has begun."