Sept. 2014 article
The 28 redacted pages are about "the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis,” said Republican Congressman Walter Jones.
Sept. 9, 2014, "The Twenty-Eight Pages," The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright
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| Aug. 27, 2002, Bush and Saudi Prince in Crawford, Tx |
"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 excited 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."...
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 colum 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.”"
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Image caption: "President George W. Bush meets with
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, on
August 27, 2002, at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Credit Photograph by Eric Drapper/The White House via Getty"
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