Syria Shoots Down Turkish Fighter Jet
- Thread starter SteelBird
- Start date
Where is Bander Bush?
Where is Saudi Prince Bander? lots of speculation on the net at the moment and the stories are climbing ever higher up the credibility tree!
Where is Saudi Prince Bander? lots of speculation on the net at the moment and the stories are climbing ever higher up the credibility tree!
Kurt
Junior Member
This is a nice collection of fotos allegedly showing the Syrian rebels labeled FSA (Free Syrian Army) as if they were a united armed force. One of my favorites is the sniper with a Dragunov shooting from the back of his civilian vehicle(in the caption stating that he did have prior training!) and for some reasons all rebels are capable of arming their pick up trucks with super heavy machine cannons/guns.
Especially the sniper is quite interesting because this situation makes little sense if he is to fight armed opponents.
The author of this German article (likely a translation) is called heb and he claims to know quite a lot about heavy armament that recently made it to the rebels and about their current ammunition shortages reporters notice, unlike the situation in Libya. The writing style is the same as the earlier post about the West helping Syria in her civil war with arms shipments and it underlines the images. It's kind of a propaganda effort to whip up support that failed in Lybia. Being Printed in Spiegel Online (a widely read news source with chronic bad pay, where you post if you can also get money from posting somewhere else or if you want to make yourself a name).
Still no news of Prince Bander "Bush" bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the new Saudi Intelligence Minister, good friend of the Bush family, accredited mastermind of the recent Damascus Volcano assassination attempt and mass rebel action, not to mention generally titled as Al-Qaeda's paymaster in chief.
There is a growing buzz that he has been assassinated himself by a bomb in the Saudi Intelligence HQ Riyadh and that Iran orchestrated it in retaliation for his efforts in Syria.
The story is only being reported on the grey media although more respectable organisations and journalists (Voltaire and Escobar) are now following the story as the Prince fails to make a public appearance to quash the stories.
There does appear to be a media black out on this as even the BBC News Search Engine fails to even recognise his name, in a search return worthy of the Great Firewall!.
More will follow in time as no way can something like this be hushed away.
There is a growing buzz that he has been assassinated himself by a bomb in the Saudi Intelligence HQ Riyadh and that Iran orchestrated it in retaliation for his efforts in Syria.
The story is only being reported on the grey media although more respectable organisations and journalists (Voltaire and Escobar) are now following the story as the Prince fails to make a public appearance to quash the stories.
There does appear to be a media black out on this as even the BBC News Search Engine fails to even recognise his name, in a search return worthy of the Great Firewall!.
More will follow in time as no way can something like this be hushed away.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Interesting, but why would the Saudis hush up such a story if true? A bombing in Saudia Arabia by Iran would be another crime to lay at the feet of Iran and further strengthen the claim that Iran is too dangerous to be allowed nuclear weapons and thus further SA's ambitions of a war to stop Iran.
Purhaps there have been death threats and the prince has gone into hiding to save his own skin but the Saudis are too proud to say so? Or may he is just in poor health as he is not a youngling anymore, and all that expensive living does take its toll on the human body. Personally I feel it more likely that the story would be hushed up or suppressed if he was really ill but that the Saudis would make a massive fuss out of it if he was assassinated.
Purhaps there have been death threats and the prince has gone into hiding to save his own skin but the Saudis are too proud to say so? Or may he is just in poor health as he is not a youngling anymore, and all that expensive living does take its toll on the human body. Personally I feel it more likely that the story would be hushed up or suppressed if he was really ill but that the Saudis would make a massive fuss out of it if he was assassinated.
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Good questions.
It started on July 22nd with reports that a bomb at Intel Ag HQ had killed Prince Bandars Deputy and this appears to have been officially recognised if not widely reported. It all went quiet and suddenly stories started to appear that the Prince had been killed. There is a high degree of inconsistency and the dates vary from July 22nd to July 26th and whether it means one assassination attempt or two is very unclear. Neither is it consistent with regard to the identity of the perpetrators, with some saying Syria, others saying Iran and some accusations all together far more fanciful.
In the absence of fact and given the surprising quiet that you mention, I do wonder about another option:
Saudi Arabia is court intrigue ridden unreformed medieval absolute monarchy, crawling with royals of various descriptions. This creates tensions of both a personal and dynastic nature, completely unrelated to any wider geopolitical consideration. That's not to say there are no geopolitical considerations as various factions seek alliances and influence in different power spheres to advance personal and dynastic ambitions.
I would speculate that Bandar is dead and it is very much an inside job and one may wonder if his strongly pro-western leanings may have been a strong if not necessarily exclusive factor in his slaying?
If this is part of some major internal power play jockeying, you can understand why it has gone quiet.
Pure personal speculation on my part, but you probably appreciate where I am coming from.
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Kurt
Junior Member
Legitimate polygamy is a way to create a lot of legally equal people striving for the same limited top positions. A typical Saudi upper class problem? There are family factions from maternal lines (I'm not sure about any cohesion of paternal lines that are more likely to fight for the same honours) with long held grudges that can erupt into infighting. To some degree, they might need outside support to tip the balance and here the Assad clan of Syria comes into play. They are possibly better organized with less wives and less problems among maternal lines of a bigwig. The prince is not necessarily dead, but unable to direct events any more and his ability or inability might be instrumental for the Syrians because of personal connections. But it might also be similar to Montagu Norman's strange I-stay-in-bed-reaction during the gold standard crisis in 1931 and much speculation for nothing.
Is there already an academic discipline studying that monarchy, must be more exciting than the old Kremlinology?
Is there already an academic discipline studying that monarchy, must be more exciting than the old Kremlinology?
Probably makes reading the tea leaves look like a scientific art!
For a start, you would need a full geniality for everybody in the various families, especially to track the paternal families of the women. If you have multiple sisters all married to senior princes, you create a sub clan across the royal family with a greater loyalty to another patriarch to whom they are all related.
I would also guess that the current Generation of Kings and Crown Princes are all geriatrics themselves with al the potential for chaos that produces. In addition I have no doubt that there are sharp disagreements between pro-western and pro-eastern factions. Bander was clearly pro west sp those wanting him dead may well have leaned the other way to find backers.