Bob Graham to Barack Obama: Release the ’28 pages’, your legacy is at stake

[Photo Credit: Associated Press]

Toward the end of a half-hour phone conversation with former Sen. Bob Graham, who has been outspoken about the need to release the “28 pages” that has been redacted and kept classified out of the 9/11 Commission Report, FloridaPolitics.com asked the former Florida Senator how history would regard President Barack Obama, if he opted to complete his term without releasing the material.

Graham was blunt.

If  those pages, which Graham contends has been kept classified for political purposes, remain unreleased until the end of Obama’s time in office, it would be a “stain on his legacy.”

“For eight years,” Graham said, the President can’t “cover up” the info, an obfuscation of the United States’ “true relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

Obama “has a chance if he agrees to open up the vault of hidden information” to redeem his legacy in that regard, Graham said.

“Maybe he was late,” Graham suggested historians might think, “but he wasn’t tone deaf.”

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Graham said he has talked to the person in the White House who is point on this issue, and he expects a decision whether the President will hold or release the information by the second week of June.

“I wish it were sooner,” Graham said, “but at least it’s a firm date.”

To some, this may just be a matter of historical record.

To Senator Graham, it’s a bigger deal.

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To understand why Bob Graham is so intent on getting this information out to the American people, one must look back to when he chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. Even in the months after 9/11, Graham thought the American people deserved the whole truth.

However, the George W. Bush administration was not inclined to provide it.

As a result, Graham said, the “Bush administration’s historical role is now in concrete.”

President Obama’s is not quite ossified yet. But if he chooses to “stumble along until January 20, 2017,” Graham believes the maneuver will be for naught.

“Eventually, all of this information is going to come out anyway. It’s just a question of when,” Graham said.

His belief is that it will probably happen, at the latest, “shortly after” the next President is in office, as Republicans and Democrats agree that the truth must come out.

“Virtually all Presidential candidates support the release of the 28 pages,” and that release “may end up being a point of bipartisan agreement.”

When that material comes out, Graham believes that there will be a reassessment of the Saudi-American relationship, which will involve a “re-evaluation of policy” and the “level of engagement.”

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For Graham, such is long overdue.

“I have felt that government,” said Graham, has not been “open with the people” about some of the most important aspects of what should be known.

As he told FloridaPolitics.com and other outlets earlier in April, he finds the idea that those “19 hijackers acted on their own,” with no help, to be absurd.

He also sees the 28 pages as a “preface to a full book,” as a “symbol … not even the most important classified information” that could deepen the historical understanding.

There are, as Graham has said, thousands of pages that provide fuller context regarding the “question of who carried out 9/11.”

And in those pages, and the discussion that would follow, would be the necessary facts to understand our unique relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is billed as an ally in the press, yet which clearly has a central role in aiding and abetting the Jihadi terrorists America has been at war with for a decade and a half.

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One of the topics FloridaPolitics.com discussed with Graham earlier this month: the proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians in Yemen.

Graham believes that the Saudis are complicit in offenses that some would call war crimes, and that those acts are being committed with armaments funded by the American taxpayers.

“Very horrible human rights violations,” said Graham, are going on, including bombing hospitals with American aircraft and ammunition.

“We are co-conspirators in what’s going on,” Graham added.

There is a movement in Congress currently to stop the United States from supplying the Saudis with military equipment, pending confirmation that use conforms with America’s standards. And Graham supports that.

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As is often the case when countries assume aggressive military postures, Saudi Arabia faces potential internal threats to domestic tranquility.

The Saudis, said Graham, are “very concerned with an Iranian-type civil insurrection led by a young, restive population,” the same elements that evidence points to having had a role in 9/11.

To that end, there is what we would call a welfare state set up, including “massive new public housing” complexes to “keep the people quiet.”

Payoffs are not enough, however.

To quell insurrectionist impulses, the Saudis have a “mentoring system” to regulate its youth, said Graham, which among other things, determines if certain people are “plotting against the interest of the kingdom.”

In some cases, said Graham, those mentors aided and abetted 9/11 hijackers.

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What was clear in our conversation: the Saudi dynamic won’t persist forever. Or, perhaps, even very much longer. With that in mind, a question for Graham was what the endgame for the United States would be if there were a Saudi equivalent to the Arab Spring.

“That would depend on several unknowable factors,” Graham said.

If Saudi Arabia emerged, like Tunisia, with a democratic government, that would be a positive.

However, it could go wrong: a possibility would be an outcome like Libya, “almost a failed state,” riddled with internal violence and instability.

Graham is optimistic, sort of.

“It would probably be more like Tunisia than Libya because the world has so much more at stake,” Graham said.

Specifically at stake: “Saudi oil.”

As well, Graham posits that there “would be a decline in Saudi support of terror,” as the kingdom has been a principal support of financing and of ideological indoctrination.

Saudi Arabia’s mosques and madrassas, as most know, are training grounds for “intolerance and Jihad.”

“In a post-Kingdom Saudi Arabia,” Graham said, “less support would be provided to terrorists.”

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Thus, the paradox. And a question: is our policy toward Saudi Arabia at cross-purposes with itself?

“We are in denial that this is going on,” said Graham. “If it comes out that Saudi Arabia is a primary financier of the 9/11 attacks, it will radically change American opinion about Saudi Arabia.”

This dialogue has been deferred 15 years. One way or another, the radio silence from the executive branch will come to an end though.

“We’re going to keep pushing until we get to where we need to be,” said Graham.