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9/9/14, "The Twenty-Eight Pages," The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright
"On the bottom floor of the United States Capitol’s new underground
visitors’ center, there is a secure room where the House Intelligence
Committee maintains highly classified files. One of those files is
titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive
National Security Matters.” It is twenty-eight pages long. In 2002, the
Administration of George W. Bush excised those pages from the report of
the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. President Bush
said then that publication of that section of the report would damage
American intelligence operations, revealing “sources and methods that
would make it harder for us to win the war on terror.”
“There’s
nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican
congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages,
contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with
the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the
document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct
evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and
entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. “Those twenty-eight pages tell
a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report,” Lynch
maintains. Another congressman who has read the document said that the
evidence of Saudi government support for the 9/11 hijacking is “very
disturbing,” and that “the real question is whether it was sanctioned at
the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were
followed through.” Now, in a rare example of bipartisanship, Jones and
Lynch have co-sponsored a resolution requesting that the Obama
Administration declassify the pages.
The
Saudis have also publicly demanded that the material be released.
“Twenty-eight blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our
country and our people,” Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi
Ambassador to the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, has
declared. “Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions
in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”
The effort to
declassify the document comes at a time when a lawsuit, brought ten
years ago on behalf of the victims of the attacks and their families,
along with the insurers who paid out claims, is advancing through the
American court system. The suit targets Saudi charities, banks, and
individuals. In 2005, the government of Saudi Arabia was dismissed from
the suit on the ground of sovereign immunity, but in July the U.S.
Supreme Court reinstated the Kingdom as a defendant. The plaintiffs
believe that the withheld twenty-eight pages will support their
allegation that the 9/11 hijackers received direct assistance from Saudi
government officials in the United States. According to representatives
of the families of 9/11 victims, President Obama has twice promised to
release the material but so far has failed to do so. “The redaction of
the twenty-eight pages has become a coverup by two Presidents, and
coverup implies complicity,” Sharon Premoli, who is co-chair of 9/11
Families United for Justice Against Terrorism, said. “The families and
survivors have the right to know the whole truth about the brutal murder
of three thousand loved ones and the injuries of thousands more.”
Those
advocating declassification present a powerful and oftentimes emotional
argument, but others offer compelling reasons that the document should
remain buried under the Capitol. Immediately after the Joint
Congressional Inquiry finished its report, in late 2002, the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—better known as
the 9/11 Commission—began its work, under the leadership of Thomas Kean,
the former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a former
congressman from Indiana. The questions raised by the twenty-eight pages
were an important part of the commission’s agenda; indeed, its
director, Philip Zelikow, hired staffers who had worked for the Joint
Inquiry on that very section to follow up on the material. According to
Zelikow, what they found does not substantiate the arguments made by the
Joint Inquiry and by the 9/11 families in the lawsuit against the
Saudis. He characterized the twenty-eight pages as “an agglomeration of
preliminary, unvetted reports” concerning Saudi involvement. “They were
wild accusations that needed to be checked out,” he said.
Zelikow
and his staff were ultimately unable to prove any official Saudi
complicity in the attacks. A former staff member of the 9/11 Commission
who is intimately familiar with the material in the twenty-eight pages
recommends against their declassification, warning that the release of
inflammatory and speculative information could “ramp up passions” and
damage U.S.-Saudi relations.
Stephen Lynch agrees that the
twenty-eight pages were buried in order to preserve the U.S.
relationship with Saudi Arabia. “Part of the reason it was classified
was the fact that it would create a visceral response,” he told me.
“There would be a backlash.” But, thirteen years later, is that still a
reason to keep the document a secret?
The theory behind the lawsuit against the Saudis goes back to the
1991 Gulf War. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia was a
shattering event in the country’s history, calling into question the
ancient bargain between the royal family and the Wahhabi clerics, whose
blessing allows the Saud family to rule. In 1992, a group of the
country’s most prominent religious leaders issued the Memorandum of
Advice, which implicitly threatened a clerical coup. The royal family,
shaken by the threat to its rule, accommodated most of the clerics’
demands, giving them more control over Saudi society. One of their
directives called for the creation of a Ministry of Islamic Affairs,
which would be given offices in Saudi embassies and consulates. As the
journalist Philip Shenon writes,
citing John Lehman, the former Secretary of the Navy and a 9/11
commissioner, “it was well-known in intelligence circles that the
Islamic affairs office functioned as the Saudis’ ‘fifth column’ in
support of Muslim extremists.”
The story told in those
twenty-eight pages picks up with the arrival of two young Saudis, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, in Los Angeles in January, 2000. They
were the first wave of the 9/11 hijackers. Neither spoke English well,
so their mission—to learn how to pilot a Boeing jetliner—seemed crazily
improbable, especially if they had no assistance.
Two weeks after
Hazmi and Mihdhar got to L.A., a benefactor suddenly appeared. Omar
al-Bayoumi, a forty-two-year-old Saudi national, was an employee of the
Saudi aviation-services company Dallah Avco. Although he drew a salary,
he apparently never did any actual work for the company during the seven
years he spent in America. Bayoumi was in frequent contact with the
Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the consulate in Los
Angeles; he was widely considered in the Arab expat community to be a
Saudi spy, though the Saudi government has denied that he was.
Bayoumi
and a friend drove from San Diego, where they lived, to L.A. Bayoumi
then went to the Saudi consulate, where he spent about an hour meeting
with an official in the Ministry of Islamic Affairs named Fahad
al-Thumairy, whom he considered to be his spiritual adviser. (In 2002,
Thumairy was stripped of his diplomatic visa and deported, because of
suspected ties to terrorists.) Afterward, Bayoumi and his friend drove
to a halal restaurant in Culver City. Bayoumi later told investigators
that, while eating there, he happened to overhear two men—Hazmi and
Mihdhar—speaking Arabic with Gulf accents. He struck up a conversation
with them and soon invited them to move to San Diego. He set them up in
the same apartment complex where he lived. Because the
hijackers-in-training did not have a checking account, Bayoumi paid
their security deposit and first month’s rent (for which they
immediately reimbursed him). He also introduced them to members of the
Arab community, possibly including the imam of a local mosque, Anwar
al-Awlaki—later to become the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda
in the Arabian Peninsula.
Another
Saudi who was in San Diego at the time, Osama Basnan, also befriended
Hazmi and Mihdhar. As it happened, Basnan’s wife was receiving
charitable gifts from Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa. The
payments—as much as seventy-three thousand dollars over a period of
three years—were supposed to fund the treatment of a medical condition
that Basnan’s wife suffered from. According to pleadings in the lawsuit
against the Saudis, some of that money went to support the hijackers in
San Diego. The F.B.I. has not found any evidence that the money got into
the hands of the hijackers, however, and the 9/11 Commission found no
links to the royal family.
“We assert that purported ‘charities,’
established by the government of the Kingdom to propagate radical
Wahhabi ideology throughout the world, served as the primary sources of
funding and logistical support for Al Qaeda for more than a decade
leading up to the 9/11 attacks,” Sean Carter, one of the lead attorneys
in the lawsuit, told me. “Not coincidentally, these so-called charities
were themselves regulated by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which from
its formation, in 1993, assumed primary responsibility for the
Kingdom’s efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam.”
Thomas Kean remembers
finally having the opportunity to read those twenty-eight pages after
he became chairman of the 9/11 Commission—“so secret that I had to get
all of my security clearances and go into the bowels of Congress with
someone looking over my shoulder.” He also remembers thinking at the
time that most of what he was reading should never have been kept
secret. But the focus on the twenty-eight pages obscures the fact that
many important documents are still classified—“a ton of stuff,” Kean
told me, including, for instance, the 9/11 Commission’s interviews with
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. “I don’t know of a single
thing in our report that should not be public after ten years,” Kean
said.
September 11th may be a part of history now, but some of
the events that led to that horrible day remain veiled by the political
considerations of the present. The intelligence community doesn’t want
to light up its failures once again, and no doubt the Obama
Administration doesn’t want to introduce additional strains on its
relationship with the Saudis. In the meantime, the forces that led to
catastrophe before are gathering strength once again. Thomas Massie, a
Republican congressman from Kentucky and a sponsor of the House
resolution to declassify the material, told me that the experience of
reading those twenty-eight pages caused him to rethink how to handle the
rise of ISIS. It has made him much more cautious about a
military response. “We have to be careful, when we run the calculations
of action, what the repercussions will be,” he said.
“In some
ways, it’s more dangerous today,” Timothy Roemer, who was a member of
both the Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission, observed. “A more
complex series of threats are coming together than even before 9/11,
involving ISIS, Al Qaeda, and cyber-terrorist
capabilities. The more the American people know about what happened
thirteen years ago, the more we can have a credible, open debate” about
our security needs. Releasing the twenty-eight pages, he said, might be a
step forward. “Hopefully, after some initial shock and awe, it would
make our process work better. Our government has an obligation to do
this.”" via Lucianne
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