Martin DyckmanIt has been more than 13 years since the infamous September 11 that cost 2,977 American lives and led to wars that have killed nearly 7,000 more. Yet the full story of the terrorist assault and who might have been behind it remains one of our own government’s state secrets.
Our own government’s!
It’s well known, of course, that the crimes were planned and executed by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, and that 15 of the 19 airplane hijackers were other Saudi nationals who trained in the United States to fly big jets without landing them.
What we don’t know — though we can guess — is the complicity of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Did the Kingdom relieve itself of a potential internal terrorist problem by exporting it to us?
That’s the presumed subject of 28 pages that the White House censored from the 800-page report of a joint select congressional committee co-chaired by Florida’s U.S. Sen. Bob Graham before the rest of it was released in 2003.
Ever since, Graham — who was the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman then and is now retired — has done everything but shout from rooftops to get those 28 pages declassified. He knows what’s in them, but he can only hint at the contents.
A fair hunch, based on what the published parts say and what he and others have implied, is that the Saudi government facilitated and supported the “students” as they prepared to launch the deadliest foreign attack ever sustained on American soil. Ignorance of their motives would be the excuse.
The cover-up originated with President George W. Bush, but President Obama owns it now. He’s been as recalcitrant as Bush about releasing the findings that belong to us all as citizens and taxpayers.
Graham held a news conference in Washington this week with U.S. Reps. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, and Stephen Lynch, D-New York, to publicize their legislation, House Resolution 14, which calls yet again for the release of the 28 pages.
The event drew only modest coverage in the press. It wasn’t in my newspaper and probably wasn’t in yours. The news media has become “almost aggressively disinterested,” Graham complained. “That confounds me.”
The news media often grow weary of stories that don’t seem to be going anywhere, but you’d think that the red meat of this one — a possible conspiratorial scandal and cover-up at the highest levels of government — ought to keep it alive.
The support network for the hijackers consisted largely of Saudis living legitimately here. What Graham wants the world to know is whether it was arranged and financed by the Saudi government, and if so why.
And why is our government so determined to keep it secret? For fear of embarrassing an intolerant, repressive, unelected government that is supposedly an ally? Or is there some secret agreement not to humiliate Bush, who was notably friendly with the Saudi royal family?
Bin Laden’s enmity toward the United States is said to date from the first Gulf War, when he objected on religious grounds to having foreign troops in the land of Mecca and Medina.
He claimed to have 30,000 fighters at his command after having helped to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan. Graham’s theory is that he offered to have them chase the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, but King Fahd, sensing how that might backfire, turned him down.
To appease bin Laden and get him out of the country, so the theory goes, Fahd eventually conceded to subsidize his “students” in the United States.
“I don’t think the King necessarily knew the purpose for which those people were in the U.S.,” Graham says.
But if he didn’t, he was amazingly incurious. Bin Laden had already instigated lethal attacks on two of our embassies, the World Trade Center, and the destroyer USS Cole. What could he be up to in the United States other than no good?
“My thesis is,” says Graham, “that the Saudis know what they did and they know that we know what they did. They seem to think they’ve been given immunity.”
Graham argues that this older history is inseparable from last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. The roots of both are in the extremely fundamentalist branch of Islam practiced by the royal family within the Kingdom and spread by them abroad.
“Their behavior,” says Graham, “is to support one extremist cause after another.”
Declassifying those 28 pages is about more than setting the record straight. It could also help the families of 9/11 victims pierce the sovereign immunity that Saudi Arabia claims in U.S. courts. Reversing itself, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided in December 2013 to let a lawsuit proceed. Our president should be with his people in that cause rather than with the Saudis.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, N.C. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
