Bill Nelson calls Saudi government 'duplicitous'

Bill Nelson says he hasn’t read the 28 redacted pages of a Senate report on 9/11 that his former colleague Bob Graham wants to be released, but says he doesn’t need to read them to know that the Saudi Arabian government and their Middle Eastern brethren are “quite duplicitous” when it comes to how they deal with extremist elements in their own countries.

“They will say one thing in private, which they desperately want us to do this or that against the bad guys, but because of their politics and their position in the Middle East among their Arab colleagues, they’re afraid to say those things,” Nelson said on Friday when asked if he s supports Graham’s advocacy to have that portion of a 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee report released to the American people.

Graham chaired that committee at the time, and recently appeared at a news conference on Capitol Hill, alleging that those pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the 9/11 hijackers.

Nelson says that it’s quite common when dealing with foreign governments and their constituencies to play a “two-faced game,” but says it’s particularly egregious when it comes to the Saudis.

“Because allowed back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the incubation and hatching of these radical terrorists groups that were often started in Saudi Arabia, and/or funded by Saudi money. It may not be government money, but it was Saudi citizen money, and as a result, they’re rueing the day now, because Saudi Arabia is one of the prime targets of the terrorists all over the world wherever there is a Saudi interest.”

U.S. Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) have said they can’t disclose what’s in the redacted 28 pages of the 800-page report without violating federal law. So last month they announced a resolution calling on President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

As Kathy Steele of the Tampa Tribune reported on October 5, 2001,  the son of a Saudi Arabian prince who was the nation’s defense minister at the time and the son of a Saudi army commander flew from Tampa’s Raytheon Airport Services to Kentucky, lifting off the tarmac “at a time when every private plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Nelson spoke to reporters just after President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron held a joint conference in Washington on Friday, where Cameron warned of a global “Islamist extremist terrorist threat,” something that French President Francois Hollande and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel have also mentioned in the past week since the Charlie Hebdo killings.

But the Obama administration has called the Paris attacks “terrorism,” not “Islamic terrorism.”

Senator Nelson agrees.

“It’s radical terrorism,” he replied when asked how he would label the threat felt by the West. “I don’t know anything else to call it. It’s radical terrorism. Now, are these guys representatives of Islam? No. That’s not what the Koran teaches, to go out and kill innocent people. So maybe that’s the distinction there, maybe.”