by Russ Baker

December 19, 2013

from WhoWhatWhy Website

 

 

 

 

 

 

President Obama is apparently thinking about his presidential library. So now might be a good time to ponder whether anyone will want to visit it.

 

If he cared about revivifying his brief reputation as a good-guy outsider ready to shine light on the hidden recesses of our governing apparatus (remember his election-night victory speech that brought tears and rare hope to America?), Obama could certainly start at this late date by taking a stand for transparency.

 

Here's how:

Two Congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican, are asking Obama to declassify the congressional report on 9/11, which the Bush administration heavily redacted.

 

The two members of the House of Representatives have read the blacked-out portions, including 28 totally blank pages that deal largely with Saudi government ties to the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

 

This is apparently major connect-the-dots stuff - much more significant than what one may remember from Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911, about Saudi royals and other Saudis studying and living in the US, who were allowed to go home without being interviewed in the aftermath of the attacks.

 

This is about actual financial and logistical support of terrorism against the United States - by its ally, the Saudi government.

As a Hoover Institution media scholar wrote in the New York Post (normally no bastion of deep investigative inquiry):

 

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi government officials - not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom - helped the hijackers both financially and logistically.

 

The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

 

 

 

 

Congressmen "absolutely shocked"

 

The two outspoken Representatives, Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) would be violating federal law if they offered any specifics about what they know, or even named any countries mentioned - but did say they were  "absolutely shocked" by revelations of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

 

Now, they want a resolution requesting Obama declassify the entire document.

 

If the media were to do its job and create the kind of wall-to-wall coverage it bestows upon, say, inter-spousal murder trials, Obama might feel he had to release the full 9/11 report. He'd have to concede there is a public right to know, or at least explain in detail why he doesn't think so.

 

Either way, there would be major fireworks.

 

But we're not betting on either the president or the media doing the right thing.

 

 

 

 

Mainstream Media - out to lunch, so far

 

How much publicity is this enormously significant story getting? Very, very little...

 

A search of the Nexis-Lexis database turned up just 13 articles or transcripts.

• One was a very short, cautious piece from the Boston Globe.

   

• One was a transcript of TV commentator Lou Dobbs on Fox News.

   

• All of the others were specialty or ideological publications or blogs - Investor's Business Daily, the Blaze, Prairie Pundit, Right Wing News, etc. (CNN's Piers Morgan did interview Rep. Lynch).

   

• Nothing showed up from,

  • the New York Times

  • Washington Post

  • Politico

  • MSNBC,

  or the broadcast networks...

That's a remarkable oversight, given that the media did cover similar concerns expressed by former senators Bob Kerrey and Bob Graham almost two years ago.

 

In an affidavit for a lawsuit by the families of 9/11 victims, Graham, head of the joint 2002 congressional 9/11 inquiry, said,

"I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11^th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia."

Kerrey, who served on the non-congressional 9/11 Commission, said in his own affidavit,

"Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11^th attacks has never been fully pursued."

But two House members, one a Democrat, one a Republican, explicitly calling for the President to make the full report available?

 

That's certainly news...

 

 

 

 

What Will Obama Do?

 

If President Obama does declassify the records, that would be surprising, if not outright shocking.

 

Although he has belatedly (and under heavy pressure from his base) begun to shift more toward at least the rhetoric of openness, Obama failed to stand up for release of still-classified documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination (a half century after that tragedy), and he has presided over myriad actions that take us further than ever from transparency.

 

Meanwhile, the media has all but abdicated its responsibility to hold the administration's feet to the fire on these and related matters.

 

At WhoWhatWhy, we understand how hard it is to get this kind of material into the hands of the American people.

 

Our groundbreaking reporting on ties between prominent and powerful Saudis and the men said to have been on the planes attacking on September 11 (via a house in Sarasota, Florida) was almost entirely ignored by the establishment media, including many so-called "alternative" and "progressive" outlets, though it has nonetheless spread widely thanks to the Internet and social media.

 

Even the above-mentioned New York Post only now has acknowledged our reporting on the Saudi-Sarasota connection, without mentioning our name or linking to us.

 

No matter. The significance is that others have come forward to ask tough questions about the daunting reach and self-protective reflexes of our government's ever-expanding "secret sector."

 

With a related meta-issue - NSA surveillance - odd bedfellows like "leftie" Glenn Greenwald and "rightie" Larry Klayman (with a Bush appointed judge ruling in his favor) are going at the surveillance state simultaneously, mightily aided by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

 

Whatever one thinks of the 9/11 story - and one needn't buy the more extreme theories to be open to examining new, documented facts - there's clearly more to that trauma than we have been allowed to know; and we suspect there are many more establishment figures with a hunger for the truth.

 

And once more "respectable" Washington insiders like House (and Senate) members start saying shocking things - well, that's a man-bites-dog story few news organizations can turn down.

 

As for the executive branch, representatives of the State Department, Department of Justice and FBI have repeatedly denied knowing anything about the Saudi angle.

 

If those documents are ever declassified, the denials themselves - and those issuing those denials - should also be news.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside The Saudi 9/11 Cover-up
by Paul Sperry
December 15, 2013

from NYPost Website

 

 

 

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress' investigative report on 9/11 dealing with "specific sources of foreign support" for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn't just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are "absolutely shocked" at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can't reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law.

 

So they've proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report,

"Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001."

Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi government officials - not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom - helped the hijackers both financially and logistically.

 

The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.
 

 

 

Modal Trigger

The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States.

 

In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast:

 

• LOS ANGELES:

  Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers - Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi - as they arrived at LAX in 2000.

   

  One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.)
  
   

• SAN DIEGO:

  Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA.

   

  They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.)
  
   

• WASHINGTON:

  Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers.

   

  Though the Bandars claim the checks were "welfare" for Bassnan's supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers' hands.
  
  Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy - so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client.
  
  The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar.

"Our investigations contributed to the ambassador's departure," an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for "personal reasons."
 

• FALLS CHURCH, VA.:

  In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again - this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy.

   

  Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon.
  
  Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I've obtained show he also served as the ­official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites.
  
  Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11.
  
  As I first reported in my book, "Infiltration," quoting from classified US documents, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a "Saudi representative."

   

  A federal warrant for Awlaki's arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
  
   

• HERNDON, VA.:

  On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon.

   

  Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers' hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he "feigned a seizure," one agent recalled. (Hussayen's name doesn't appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.)
  
   

• SARASOTA, FLA.:

  9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.

   

  FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned.

   

  Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched.

 

Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can't get a single, even heavily redacted, page released.

 

He says it's a "cover-up."

Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks.

Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 - just hours after he met with the president.

 

The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks.

Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a "coverup beyond belief."

 

Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages.

Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history.

Granted, it's not easy to do. It took a month-long letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material.

But it's critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn't water under the bridge. The information is still relevant... today.

 

Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11.

As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report,

"State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more ­lethal attacks within the United States."

Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations.

 

If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today.

Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them.