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Posted: 17 Jun 2016 08:53 AM PDT
Populism is a difficult thing to track. It’s emotional and nebulous, a free floating anxiety that rises and falls with public mood. That may be why markets have been so unsure about what to make of Brexit, the possibility that the U.K. will, on June 23rd, vote to leave the E.U. The political implications alone are huge—the European Union, created after World War II, has been the most benevolent experiment in globalization ever conducted in history. Brexit would mark a huge change in that project, and while it might not lead to some kind domino effect in Europe, creating a new Westphalia—a return to sovereign nations checking and balancing each other—it would certainly represent a huge new divide, not only in Europe but in transatlantic relations. It would have major geopolitical impacts for the entire world—think shifts in NATO, trade, immigration, capital flows and more. Read More: Why Jo Cox’s Shooting Is So Shocking for Britain Markets have been skittish as they try to anticipate popular sentiment. On Thursday they were down not only on disappointing U.S. economic data, but on poll numbers indicating that a slim majority of Britons now favor leaving. But today, after the awful murder of a pro-unity British parliamentarian, markets are up, though bond yields remain low, showing investors are not only hedging their bets but remain worried about longer term global growth. My sense is that markets now believe that the political situation in the U.K. has become so extreme that the British public may be jolted into a more economically realistic, pro-unity stance. After all, in the U.S., Donald Trump’s tone deaf, self promoting comments after the Orlando shootings have hurt him in the polls. The same scenario may now play out in the U.K. That would be a good thing for Britain and the global economy, since there’s little doubt that leaving the E.U. would be a net economic loss for the U.K. Even the cautious IMF has predicted Brexit would result in “a negative and substantial hit” for the U.K. economy and “permanently lower incomes,” as well as depressed growth for many years. Read More: Husband of Murdered British MP Jo Cox Issues Heartbreaking Statement Prediction markets these days put the chances of major populist political upheavals—Brexit, a Trump victory, a far-right win in Germany that destabilizes Chancellor Angela Merkel—as low, around 25% each. But that implies a 58% chance that at least one of those events could happen. What’s more, as a recent Gavekal Research note put it, “this assumes the events are not connected.” Economic conditions in Britain, the U.S. and Germany are similar. All are more or less back to full employment, but wages and income inequality remain a problem. House prices and household finances are above pre-crisis levels, yet economic anxiety is widespread. In this environment, immigrants have become scapegoats. Read More: The Murder of a Pro-E.U. MP Is One More Sign of a Darkening Europe Given all this, the June 23 Brexit vote could be a canary in the coal mine for the global economy and global politics. If the Brexit camp loses, the relatively sanguine take of the markets today may be proven correct. If the U.K. pulls out of Europe, it could indicate that economic and political populism runs much deeper than the experts so far have thought—which wouldn’t be surprising given that studies show there has never been a bigger trust divide between economic elites and the mass population of most countries. There will be ripple effects. I’ll be looking more deeply at what those could be in next week’s posts. |
Saturday, June 18, 2016
What Anxiety Over Brexit Tells Us About the Markets - TIME
Saudi man related to 9/11 mystery since 2004 - New York Times
WASHINGTON — Inside an opulent palace in Riyadh late one evening in February 2004, two American investigators interrogated a man they believed might hold answers to one of the lingering mysteries of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: What role, if any, did officials in Saudi Arabia’s government play in the plot?
The man under questioning, Fahad al-Thumairy, had been a Saudi consular official based in Los Angeles and the imam of a mosque visited by two of the hijackers. The investigators, staff members of the national 9/11 commission who had waited all day at the United States Embassy before being summoned to the late-night interview, believed that tying him to the plot could be a step toward proving Saudi government complicity in the attacks.
They were unsuccessful. In two interviewslasting four hours, Mr. Thumairy, a father of two then in his early 30s, denied any ties to the hijackers or their known associates. Presented with phone records that seemed to contradict his answers, he gave no ground, saying the records were wrong or people were trying to smear him. The investigators wrote a report to their bosses saying they believed Mr. Thumairy was probably lying, though no government investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has ever found conclusive evidence that Mr. Thumairy — or any other Saudi official — assisted in the plot.
But nearly 15 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the question of a Saudi connection has arisen again amid new calls for the release of a long-classified section of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that discusses a possible Saudi role in the terrorist plot — the so-called 28 pages, whose secrecy has made them almost mythical.
American officials who have read the 28 pages say that, of all the investigative leads in that section of the report, the unanswered questions about Mr. Thumairy and the two hijackers remain the most intriguing. If there was any Saudi government role whatsoever, some still believe, it most likely would have gone through Mr. Thumairy.
The fact that years of investigation found no hard proof of official Saudi involvement has led some, notably the Saudi government, to argue that it is now the stuff of wild conjecture and conspiracy theory. The material in the 28 pages has been thoroughly investigated, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said during a news conference here on Friday, and “those investigations have revealed that these allegations are not correct.”
“There is no there there,” he said.
John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said during a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television network that while he supported the release of the 28 pages, “people shouldn’t take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks.” American investigations into 9/11, he said, concluded that the attacks were the work of “Al Qaeda, of Bin Laden” and “others of that ilk.”
But to some, all the circumstantial evidence provides a glimpse of a truth that has yet to be unearthed.
“It’s one of those cases where there are an awful lot of very troubling coincidences,” said Richard L. Lambert, who oversaw the investigation into the hijackers’ contacts as the assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Diego office in the year after the attacks.
At the F.B.I., the Sept. 11 plot officially remains an open case. While there is broad agreement on how it unfolded, there are aspects of the investigation that remain unresolved. And the mystery begins with the arrival at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000, of two Saudi men who more than year and a half later would be among the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Apart from their proven devotion to the jihadist cause, the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, seemed unlikely choices for a pair of terrorists who would have to survive, and plot for months, in the United States. Neither spoke English or had experience navigating American life.
That circumstance would make it all the more critical for the F.B.I., after the attacks, to find out whether the two hijackers received help after reaching Los Angeles. But after an exhaustive canvass of hotels, investigators were unable to find any definitive evidence of where and how Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar spent their first two weeks in the United States. By some accounts, however, they worshiped at the King Fahad Mosque in the Culver City area, where Mr. Thumairy was an imam, and they may have stayed in a nearby apartment rented by the mosque.
An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” The review broadly upheld the conclusions of the 9/11 commission on Saudi involvement, and the F.B.I. has still not been able to fill other gaps in the timeline of those initial two weeks in January 2000.
When the two hijackers reappeared in early February, they were eating at a restaurant, Mediterranean Gourmet, near the mosque. There, they encountered Omar al-Bayoumi, a fellow Saudi who was on the Saudi government payroll through the country’s civil aviation authority, possibly with an assignment to keep an eye out for Saudi dissidents in California.
Mr. Bayoumi later told the F.B.I. that the meeting was happenstance — that he overheard Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar, noticed their Gulf accents and struck up a conversation. But the bureau believed that Mr. Bayoumi had met with Mr. Thumairy at the mosque just before he met the hijackers in the restaurant, and investigators wondered whether Mr. Thumairy had arranged the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Thumairy was part of a network of representatives of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which finances mosque-building, trains clerics and proselytizes the conservative and intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. During his interview in Riyadh in 2004, Mr. Thumairy spoke fondly of his six years in Los Angeles, praising the warm weather and friendly people. His job at the consulate and the nearby mosque, he said, was to answer religious questions.
But investigators wrote that Mr. Thumairy appeared to be “deceptive” when questioned about his contacts, notably with Mr. Bayoumi. He denied knowing Mr. Bayoumi, despite telephone records that showed 21 calls between them over two years.
Photo
Khalid al-Mihdhar at Dulles International Airport near Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Mihdhar is one of two 9/11 hijackers who American investigators say may have been aided by a Saudi official.
Credit
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Inside an opulent palace in Riyadh late one evening in February 2004, two American investigators interrogated a man they believed might hold answers to one of the lingering mysteries of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: What role, if any, did officials in Saudi Arabia’s government play in the plot?
The man under questioning, Fahad al-Thumairy, had been a Saudi consular official based in Los Angeles and the imam of a mosque visited by two of the hijackers. The investigators, staff members of the national 9/11 commission who had waited all day at the United States Embassy before being summoned to the late-night interview, believed that tying him to the plot could be a step toward proving Saudi government complicity in the attacks.
They were unsuccessful. In two interviewslasting four hours, Mr. Thumairy, a father of two then in his early 30s, denied any ties to the hijackers or their known associates. Presented with phone records that seemed to contradict his answers, he gave no ground, saying the records were wrong or people were trying to smear him. The investigators wrote a report to their bosses saying they believed Mr. Thumairy was probably lying, though no government investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has ever found conclusive evidence that Mr. Thumairy — or any other Saudi official — assisted in the plot.
But nearly 15 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the question of a Saudi connection has arisen again amid new calls for the release of a long-classified section of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that discusses a possible Saudi role in the terrorist plot — the so-called 28 pages, whose secrecy has made them almost mythical.
American officials who have read the 28 pages say that, of all the investigative leads in that section of the report, the unanswered questions about Mr. Thumairy and the two hijackers remain the most intriguing. If there was any Saudi government role whatsoever, some still believe, it most likely would have gone through Mr. Thumairy.
Photo
Nawaf al-Hazmi, one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Credit
FBI
The fact that years of investigation found no hard proof of official Saudi involvement has led some, notably the Saudi government, to argue that it is now the stuff of wild conjecture and conspiracy theory. The material in the 28 pages has been thoroughly investigated, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said during a news conference here on Friday, and “those investigations have revealed that these allegations are not correct.”
“There is no there there,” he said.
John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said during a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television network that while he supported the release of the 28 pages, “people shouldn’t take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks.” American investigations into 9/11, he said, concluded that the attacks were the work of “Al Qaeda, of Bin Laden” and “others of that ilk.”
But to some, all the circumstantial evidence provides a glimpse of a truth that has yet to be unearthed.
“It’s one of those cases where there are an awful lot of very troubling coincidences,” said Richard L. Lambert, who oversaw the investigation into the hijackers’ contacts as the assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Diego office in the year after the attacks.
At the F.B.I., the Sept. 11 plot officially remains an open case. While there is broad agreement on how it unfolded, there are aspects of the investigation that remain unresolved. And the mystery begins with the arrival at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000, of two Saudi men who more than year and a half later would be among the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Apart from their proven devotion to the jihadist cause, the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, seemed unlikely choices for a
That circumstance would make it all the more critical for the F.B.I., after the attacks, to find out whether the two hijackers received help after reaching Los Angeles. But after an exhaustive canvass of hotels, investigators were unable to find any definitive evidence of where and how Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar spent their first two weeks in the United States. By some accounts, however, they worshiped at the King Fahad Mosque in the Culver City area, where Mr. Thumairy was an imam, and they may have stayed in a nearby apartment rented by the mosque.
An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” The review broadly upheld the conclusions of the 9/11 commission on Saudi involvement, and the F.B.I. has still not been able to fill other gaps in the timeline of those initial two weeks in January 2000.
When the two hijackers reappeared in early February, they were eating at a restaurant, Mediterranean Gourmet, near the mosque. There, they encountered Omar al-Bayoumi, a fellow Saudi who was on the Saudi government payroll through the country’s civil aviation authority, possibly with an assignment to keep an eye out for Saudi dissidents in California.
Mr. Bayoumi later told the F.B.I. that the meeting was happenstance — that he overheard Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar, noticed their Gulf accents and struck up a conversation. But the bureau believed that Mr. Bayoumi had met with Mr. Thumairy at the mosque just before he met the hijackers in the restaurant, and investigators wondered whether Mr. Thumairy had arranged the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Thumairy was part of a network of representatives of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which finances mosque-building, trains clerics and proselytizes the conservative and intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. During his interview in Riyadh in 2004, Mr. Thumairy spoke fondly of his six years in Los Angeles, praising the warm weather and friendly people. His job at the consulate and the nearby mosque, he said, was to answer religious questions.
But investigators wrote that Mr. Thumairy appeared to be “deceptive” when questioned about his contacts, notably with Mr. Bayoumi. He denied knowing Mr. Bayoumi, despite telephone records that showed 21 calls between them over two years.
Photo
“There is no there there,” Adel al Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, said Friday in Washington about allegations that the 9/11 hijackers received help from Saudi officials.
Credit
Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Whether out of charitable instincts or at someone’s direction, Mr. Bayoumi, then 42, helped the two future hijackers settle in San Diego, in the apartment building where he himself lived. He co-signed the lease and paid the security deposit and first month’s rent, though they reimbursed him
Mr. Lambert, the former F.B.I. official in San Diego, said he was skeptical that the assistance was given by chance. With the 9/11 plot riding on the hijackers’ ability to manage daily life, he said, Qaeda leaders would most likely have made arrangements to get them help.
“I have to believe something was planned for the care and nurturing of these guys after they arrived,” he said. “They weren’t too sophisticated, and they didn’t speak English. They needed help getting settled and making preparations.”
There were other tantalizing suggestions of a possible network of supporters. Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar began worshiping at a San Diego mosque where the imam was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric who years later would became an infamous online recruiter for Al Qaeda. A Yemeni student named Mohdar Abdullah drove them around, helped them open bank accounts and connected them with flight schools. Two Saudi naval officers living in San Diego had telephone contact with Mr. Hazmi.
But it was the Thumairy-Bayoumi connection that some investigators found to be the most suspicious.
The first independent panel investigating the attacks, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, compiled a list of leads into the California part of the plot that it turned over to the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and eventually became part of the 28 pages withheld from the public version of the report. That section has remained classified even though the Saudi government has long called for its release. Mr. Jubeir, the Saudi minister, reiterated that call on Friday because, he said, his government could not “respond to blank pages.”
The questions about his government’s possible role are coming from several sources. The Senate unanimously passed a bill last month that would make it easier to sue the Saudi government for any role in the terrorist attacks, and the House might take up the bill next week. A lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia on behalf of the families of those killed in the attacks continues its slow progress through the courts.
The man under questioning, Fahad al-Thumairy, had been a Saudi consular official based in Los Angeles and the imam of a mosque visited by two of the hijackers. The investigators, staff members of the national 9/11 commission who had waited all day at the United States Embassy before being summoned to the late-night interview, believed that tying him to the plot could be a step toward proving Saudi government complicity in the attacks.
They were unsuccessful. In two interviewslasting four hours, Mr. Thumairy, a father of two then in his early 30s, denied any ties to the hijackers or their known associates. Presented with phone records that seemed to contradict his answers, he gave no ground, saying the records were wrong or people were trying to smear him. The investigators wrote a report to their bosses saying they believed Mr. Thumairy was probably lying, though no government investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has ever found conclusive evidence that Mr. Thumairy — or any other Saudi official — assisted in the plot.
But nearly 15 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the question of a Saudi connection has arisen again amid new calls for the release of a long-classified section of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that discusses a possible Saudi role in the terrorist plot — the so-called 28 pages, whose secrecy has made them almost mythical.
American officials who have read the 28 pages say that, of all the investigative leads in that section of the report, the unanswered questions about Mr. Thumairy and the two hijackers remain the most intriguing. If there was any Saudi government role whatsoever, some still believe, it most likely would have gone through Mr. Thumairy.
The fact that years of investigation found no hard proof of official Saudi involvement has led some, notably the Saudi government, to argue that it is now the stuff of wild conjecture and conspiracy theory. The material in the 28 pages has been thoroughly investigated, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said during a news conference here on Friday, and “those investigations have revealed that these allegations are not correct.”
“There is no there there,” he said.
John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said during a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television network that while he supported the release of the 28 pages, “people shouldn’t take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks.” American investigations into 9/11, he said, concluded that the attacks were the work of “Al Qaeda, of Bin Laden” and “others of that ilk.”
But to some, all the circumstantial evidence provides a glimpse of a truth that has yet to be unearthed.
“It’s one of those cases where there are an awful lot of very troubling coincidences,” said Richard L. Lambert, who oversaw the investigation into the hijackers’ contacts as the assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Diego office in the year after the attacks.
At the F.B.I., the Sept. 11 plot officially remains an open case. While there is broad agreement on how it unfolded, there are aspects of the investigation that remain unresolved. And the mystery begins with the arrival at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000, of two Saudi men who more than year and a half later would be among the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Apart from their proven devotion to the jihadist cause, the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, seemed unlikely choices for a pair of terrorists who would have to survive, and plot for months, in the United States. Neither spoke English or had experience navigating American life.
That circumstance would make it all the more critical for the F.B.I., after the attacks, to find out whether the two hijackers received help after reaching Los Angeles. But after an exhaustive canvass of hotels, investigators were unable to find any definitive evidence of where and how Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar spent their first two weeks in the United States. By some accounts, however, they worshiped at the King Fahad Mosque in the Culver City area, where Mr. Thumairy was an imam, and they may have stayed in a nearby apartment rented by the mosque.
An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” The review broadly upheld the conclusions of the 9/11 commission on Saudi involvement, and the F.B.I. has still not been able to fill other gaps in the timeline of those initial two weeks in January 2000.
When the two hijackers reappeared in early February, they were eating at a restaurant, Mediterranean Gourmet, near the mosque. There, they encountered Omar al-Bayoumi, a fellow Saudi who was on the Saudi government payroll through the country’s civil aviation authority, possibly with an assignment to keep an eye out for Saudi dissidents in California.
Mr. Bayoumi later told the F.B.I. that the meeting was happenstance — that he overheard Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar, noticed their Gulf accents and struck up a conversation. But the bureau believed that Mr. Bayoumi had met with Mr. Thumairy at the mosque just before he met the hijackers in the restaurant, and investigators wondered whether Mr. Thumairy had arranged the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Thumairy was part of a network of representatives of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which finances mosque-building, trains clerics and proselytizes the conservative and intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. During his interview in Riyadh in 2004, Mr. Thumairy spoke fondly of his six years in Los Angeles, praising the warm weather and friendly people. His job at the consulate and the nearby mosque, he said, was to answer religious questions.
But investigators wrote that Mr. Thumairy appeared to be “deceptive” when questioned about his contacts, notably with Mr. Bayoumi. He denied knowing Mr. Bayoumi, despite telephone records that showed 21 calls between them over two years.
Photo
Khalid al-Mihdhar at Dulles International Airport near Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Mihdhar is one of two 9/11 hijackers who American investigators say may have been aided by a Saudi official.
Credit
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Inside an opulent palace in Riyadh late one evening in February 2004, two American investigators interrogated a man they believed might hold answers to one of the lingering mysteries of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: What role, if any, did officials in Saudi Arabia’s government play in the plot?
The man under questioning, Fahad al-Thumairy, had been a Saudi consular official based in Los Angeles and the imam of a mosque visited by two of the hijackers. The investigators, staff members of the national 9/11 commission who had waited all day at the United States Embassy before being summoned to the late-night interview, believed that tying him to the plot could be a step toward proving Saudi government complicity in the attacks.
They were unsuccessful. In two interviewslasting four hours, Mr. Thumairy, a father of two then in his early 30s, denied any ties to the hijackers or their known associates. Presented with phone records that seemed to contradict his answers, he gave no ground, saying the records were wrong or people were trying to smear him. The investigators wrote a report to their bosses saying they believed Mr. Thumairy was probably lying, though no government investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has ever found conclusive evidence that Mr. Thumairy — or any other Saudi official — assisted in the plot.
But nearly 15 years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the question of a Saudi connection has arisen again amid new calls for the release of a long-classified section of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that discusses a possible Saudi role in the terrorist plot — the so-called 28 pages, whose secrecy has made them almost mythical.
American officials who have read the 28 pages say that, of all the investigative leads in that section of the report, the unanswered questions about Mr. Thumairy and the two hijackers remain the most intriguing. If there was any Saudi government role whatsoever, some still believe, it most likely would have gone through Mr. Thumairy.
Photo
Nawaf al-Hazmi, one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Credit
FBI
The fact that years of investigation found no hard proof of official Saudi involvement has led some, notably the Saudi government, to argue that it is now the stuff of wild conjecture and conspiracy theory. The material in the 28 pages has been thoroughly investigated, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said during a news conference here on Friday, and “those investigations have revealed that these allegations are not correct.”
“There is no there there,” he said.
John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said during a recent interview with the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television network that while he supported the release of the 28 pages, “people shouldn’t take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks.” American investigations into 9/11, he said, concluded that the attacks were the work of “Al Qaeda, of Bin Laden” and “others of that ilk.”
But to some, all the circumstantial evidence provides a glimpse of a truth that has yet to be unearthed.
“It’s one of those cases where there are an awful lot of very troubling coincidences,” said Richard L. Lambert, who oversaw the investigation into the hijackers’ contacts as the assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Diego office in the year after the attacks.
At the F.B.I., the Sept. 11 plot officially remains an open case. While there is broad agreement on how it unfolded, there are aspects of the investigation that remain unresolved. And the mystery begins with the arrival at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000, of two Saudi men who more than year and a half later would be among the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Apart from their proven devotion to the jihadist cause, the men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, seemed unlikely choices for a
That circumstance would make it all the more critical for the F.B.I., after the attacks, to find out whether the two hijackers received help after reaching Los Angeles. But after an exhaustive canvass of hotels, investigators were unable to find any definitive evidence of where and how Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar spent their first two weeks in the United States. By some accounts, however, they worshiped at the King Fahad Mosque in the Culver City area, where Mr. Thumairy was an imam, and they may have stayed in a nearby apartment rented by the mosque.
An F.B.I. document from 2012, cited last year by an independent review panel, concluded that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” The review broadly upheld the conclusions of the 9/11 commission on Saudi involvement, and the F.B.I. has still not been able to fill other gaps in the timeline of those initial two weeks in January 2000.
When the two hijackers reappeared in early February, they were eating at a restaurant, Mediterranean Gourmet, near the mosque. There, they encountered Omar al-Bayoumi, a fellow Saudi who was on the Saudi government payroll through the country’s civil aviation authority, possibly with an assignment to keep an eye out for Saudi dissidents in California.
Mr. Bayoumi later told the F.B.I. that the meeting was happenstance — that he overheard Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar, noticed their Gulf accents and struck up a conversation. But the bureau believed that Mr. Bayoumi had met with Mr. Thumairy at the mosque just before he met the hijackers in the restaurant, and investigators wondered whether Mr. Thumairy had arranged the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Thumairy was part of a network of representatives of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which finances mosque-building, trains clerics and proselytizes the conservative and intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. During his interview in Riyadh in 2004, Mr. Thumairy spoke fondly of his six years in Los Angeles, praising the warm weather and friendly people. His job at the consulate and the nearby mosque, he said, was to answer religious questions.
But investigators wrote that Mr. Thumairy appeared to be “deceptive” when questioned about his contacts, notably with Mr. Bayoumi. He denied knowing Mr. Bayoumi, despite telephone records that showed 21 calls between them over two years.
Photo
“There is no there there,” Adel al Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, said Friday in Washington about allegations that the 9/11 hijackers received help from Saudi officials.
Credit
Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Whether out of charitable instincts or at someone’s direction, Mr. Bayoumi, then 42, helped the two future hijackers settle in San Diego, in the apartment building where he himself lived. He co-signed the lease and paid the security deposit and first month’s rent, though they reimbursed him
Mr. Lambert, the former F.B.I. official in San Diego, said he was skeptical that the assistance was given by chance. With the 9/11 plot riding on the hijackers’ ability to manage daily life, he said, Qaeda leaders would most likely have made arrangements to get them help.
“I have to believe something was planned for the care and nurturing of these guys after they arrived,” he said. “They weren’t too sophisticated, and they didn’t speak English. They needed help getting settled and making preparations.”
There were other tantalizing suggestions of a possible network of supporters. Mr. Hazmi and Mr. Mihdhar began worshiping at a San Diego mosque where the imam was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric who years later would became an infamous online recruiter for Al Qaeda. A Yemeni student named Mohdar Abdullah drove them around, helped them open bank accounts and connected them with flight schools. Two Saudi naval officers living in San Diego had telephone contact with Mr. Hazmi.
But it was the Thumairy-Bayoumi connection that some investigators found to be the most suspicious.
The first independent panel investigating the attacks, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, compiled a list of leads into the California part of the plot that it turned over to the F.B.I. and C.I.A. and eventually became part of the 28 pages withheld from the public version of the report. That section has remained classified even though the Saudi government has long called for its release. Mr. Jubeir, the Saudi minister, reiterated that call on Friday because, he said, his government could not “respond to blank pages.”
The questions about his government’s possible role are coming from several sources. The Senate unanimously passed a bill last month that would make it easier to sue the Saudi government for any role in the terrorist attacks, and the House might take up the bill next week. A lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia on behalf of the families of those killed in the attacks continues its slow progress through the courts.
How will EU treat UK if Brexit becomes reality - Economist
What if?
The aftermath of a vote to leave the European Union will depend on unpredictable responses in all sorts of places. It is unlikely to be pretty
BEFORE the campaigning for Britain’s referendum on the European Union hit its stride, some people quaintly imagined that it might settle things once and for all, lancing the boil of an argument that has been festering for the best part of a generation. Fat chance. A victory for Remain would leave Britain divided, the losers embittered and political life coarsened (see article). A victory for Leave, which is what the latest opinion polls predict, would see economic turmoil and political strife as the winning side learned that, for all it might have talked of taking back control, it remained at the mercy of economic forces and the members of the union it had spurned.
David Cameron says that if Britain votes to leave he will immediately invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which sets out the rules for negotiating a member state’s departure. That would give the two sides two years to finalise a deal—a timetable that can be extended only with the consent of all concerned. If no agreement were reached Britain would have to fall back on trading with the EU under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, which would imply tariffs and no special deal for financial services.
Mr Cameron also says he will stay on as prime minister and represent Britain in those negotiations; some in the Leave camp, such as Michael Gove, the justice secretary, say that they, too, would like him to stay. But it is hard to imagine that the victorious Leavers would really be happy seeing the leader of the Remain campaign negotiating Britain’s new deal with the EU. The odds are that the Tories would be looking for a new leader within days.
All or nothing at all
What sort of deal might that new leader try to get? Some want no deal at all. A group called Economists for Brexit (EFB) suggests simply abolishing all import tariffs. The ensuing rise in trade, it says, would boost GDP by 4%. Yet this prediction relies on small changes in trade costs having implausibly large effects on how much trade goes on, say researchers at the London School of Economics. Besides, the EFB assumptions are politically implausible.
At the other end of the range of options is a deal in which Britain, while leaving the EU in accord with the will of its people, remains part of the EU’s single market. This is the arrangement Norway has, by dint of the European Economic Area; Switzerland, though not a member of the EEA, has something similar. In Norway’s case the deal means accepting the free movement of labour and observing almost all EU regulations while having no say in writing them. And it contributes heavily to the EU budget for this privilege.
The Leave campaign’s strongest cards are the public’s distaste for immigration, its desire for self-determination and its dislike of sending money to Brussels (see article). This suggests that the Norwegian option would be unacceptable to the pro-Leave majority of the Tory rank and file, who will get the final say in the choice of the next party leader. The prospective leader who wins their support is likely to have to promise blocks on the free movement of labour. That probably means getting nothing more than a bespoke free-trade deal for some sectors at best, with WTO rules the fallback option.
Once that leader becomes prime minister, though, he or she will have to deal with the will of Parliament. Fewer than 150 Conservative MPs and only a handful from Labour are openly backing Leave; even if some others are playing a waiting game, that suggests a large majority for Remain among the 650 members of the House of Commons. Those MPs might well prefer a Norwegian option to WTO rules. If push came to shove—and the campaign has shown a marked tendency for pushing and shoving—a Tory leader committed to a right-out-of-the-single-market version of Brexit might not be able to win a vote of confidence. An autumn general election could then follow.
Whether MPs go that far will depend in part on how dire the economic response to a Leave vote turns out to be; the worse things look, the more important it will seem to try and stay in the single market. Estimates of Britain’s economic growth this year have already dropped to 2%, barely above what is expected of the euro-zone (though were Brexit to come about, the euro-zone’s growth would be hit, too). Investors have been selling sterling assets at the fastest rate since the financial crisis of 2007-08; the pound has dropped by 7.5% over the past 12 months. This is part of a broader move into safer assets (see article), but it also reflects Brexit fears.
The National Institute for Social and Economic Research (NIESR), a think-tank, predicts a 2.9% fall in GDP in the short run and worse in the long run, brought about by factors like lower trade and falling foreign direct investment. The knock-on effects would hit productivity and wages; a further fall in sterling would push up prices. Tighter controls on migration would make things worse.
Wonks are poor forecasters, say Brexiteers. Indeed, the Leave camp claims that recent data suggest Brexit might help the economy. In April exports rose to their highest level for three years in nominal terms. A Brexit-induced slump in sterling, the argument goes, would boost the economy further. This is not necessarily true. Foreign orders do not respond instantly to depreciation—which also raises the cost of imported inputs. The hit to confidence and credit from Brexit would hurt exporters more than a weak pound would help. In 2008-09, when sterling slumped, exports barely responded.
On June 14th George Osborne, the chancellor, said that in light of these likely effects a Leave vote would necessitate an emergency budget to raise taxes and cut spending. Mr Osborne’s announcement feels more like an attempt to frighten voters—or perhaps a scorched-earth strategy—than a politically plausible plan. But at some point a deficit swollen by Brexit would have to be dealt with.
The severity of the prompt economic fallout may determine what sort of deal Britain tries to get. But the results of any negotiations will depend on how generous its EU partners would be. The terms of any new trade deal would have to be agreed on unanimously, which could make the complexity of the negotiations overwhelming. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, says it might easily take seven years. And the three biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy, while all wanting Britain to remain, are not willing to let it leave unscathed.
France is the foremost scold. Although its president, François Hollande, has kept quiet during the referendum campaign, for fear of provoking greater pro-Brexit feeling, he made his views clear at a Franco-British summit in Amiens in March. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said, but a Brexit vote would have “consequences”.
The kindness of soon-to-be strangers
French politicians see playing hardball in the negotiations rather as Voltaire saw the execution of Admiral Byng following his loss of Minorca; the sort of thing that has to be done “pour encourager les autres”. The worse Britain does on its own, the more it will encourage others to stick with the EU. This includes the others at home; France’s populist National Front is promising voters their own referendum. In 2005 the French voted down the draft EU constitution, shocking their political leaders. Today they are second only to Greece in their Euroscepticism. A new Pew poll finds that 61% of French voters have an unfavourable view of the EU; the British figure is just 48%.
The French government is also working on ideas to breathe life into the European project that will focus on defence and security co-operation. There is irritation in Paris that the government has put European initiatives on hold for many months to avoid upsetting British voters. “This can’t go on for ever,” says one minister. France wants to present these ideas to the European Council at the end of June and hopes for Germany’s support. Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, sat in on a French cabinet meeting on June 15th; Mrs Merkel was due to watch the Germany-Poland football match with Mr Hollande at the Stade de France the next day.
Like the French, German politicians are cautious in discussing Brexit for fear that foreign warnings could boost the Leave campaign. But the country is keen for Britain to stay. Germany wants the EU to move in a broadly Anglo-Saxon direction (see article). It would like it to concentrate on cutting bureaucracy, returning powers to governments (while limiting state intervention) and co-operating more in foreign policy rather than pushing deeper integration. “In Berlin everyone’s keeping fingers crossed,” says David McAllister, a German member of the European Parliament who has a Scottish father. If Brexit wins, he says, he will cry for days.
Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has warned that Britain cannot expect favourable treatment after an exit vote. “In is in. Out is out,” he says. But many expect Germany, which has a big trade surplus with Britain and would not want to damage its own exporters, to take a softer line than France. “Germany will play the good cop, and France will play the bad cop,” says Yves Bertoncini, director of the Jacques Delors Institute. But this does not mean Germany will truly be on Britain’s side, any more than good cops really side with crooks. The National Front and Frexit frighten Germany, too.
Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, has played down Brexit, saying that it would be a disaster for the British, but not a huge drama for Italy and the EU. But Italy would definitely like Britain to stay. For one thing Mr Renzi often finds himself on the same side as Britain in the council; he would feel more isolated without it. There is also scarcely a middle-class family in Italy’s big cities that does not have a child working or studying in Britain.
And, as in France, there is a fear that Brexit would encourage Euroscepticism at home, both in the xenophobic Northern League and the populist Five Star Movement. Given the sick state of Italy’s economy, which has barely grown since it joined the euro, they might easily be convinced to leave.
Would Mr Renzi’s government join others in taking a tough line? “We are not particularly tough. It is not in our DNA,” says Marta Dassu at the Aspen Institute, who is also a former junior foreign minister. “But I think we would wish to align our positions with those of France and Germany. We would want to stay in the core.”
If Brexit means that this core fears for its continued cohesion, or is unable to persuade all the other members of the EU to accept a new trading arrangement, the chances of Britain getting a good deal from its former partners will be slim indeed.