Two days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, the Bush administration arranged for members of the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family to be flown out of the United States from a horse auction in Kentucky, despite a flight ban for private aircraft. When the first report on the 9/11 attacks was prepared by the congressional intelligence committees in late 2002, 28 pages that delved into possible Saudi ties to Al Qaeda were deemed classified. This week, a former Al Qaeda member testified that he acted as a courier between prominent Saudis and Osama Bin Laden, yet the Obama administration continues to keep the pages secret.
"Let’s put it out there," Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch, who is sponsoring bipartisan legislation to force the release of the documents, told the Times. "I think it is the right thing to do."
FUBAR feels inadequate to describe a world in which a would-be 9/11 hijacker helps a group of 9/11 victims to pry the truth from a government that ignored or hid evidence that their close allies may have had something to do with the attack that spurred two wars and cost trillions of dollars and countless lives.
Zacarias Moussaoui, a defiant former Al Qaeda member who was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 (a federal judge told him at sentencing that he'd "never get a chance to speak again….You will die with a whimper") has agreed to testify on behalf of a group of family members of 9/11 victims suing Saudi Arabia for allegedly funding the attacks.
“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” he said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.”
Mr. Moussaoui said he acted as a courier for Bin Laden, carrying personal messages to prominent Saudi princes and clerics. And he described his training in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
In addition, Mr. Moussaoui said, “We talk about the feasibility of shooting Air Force One.”
Specifically, he said, he had met an official of the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy in Washington when the Saudi official visited Kandahar. “I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him” to “find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” he said.
Moussaoui also testified that billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, and longtime Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, were among the Saudi royals who were on Al Qaeda's list of contributors.
While the Saudi royal family's close ties to America stretch back to King ibn Saud's meeting with FDR in the Suez Canal towards the end of World War II (autocratic stability + oil revenue = Friendship), Prince Bandar has been a close friend of the Bush family for decades—Bandar even went hunting with the elder President Bush after he lost his 1992 reelection campaign (for much more, Craig Unger literally wrote the book on the special relationship between the Bush and Saud families).
As most of the Bin Laden family was content to reap billions from doing business with the West, Osama seethed at American military presence in his country and the "apostate regime" that allowed it to continue. Some rich Saudis may have agreed with him, and may have wanted to hedge their bets against their ally, who was more interested in revenge-fueled realpolitik than getting to the bottom of who and what caused 9/11.
Take it away, Mark Danner:
Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq ''the first Arab democracy,'' as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq—secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil—that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom.
Former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who co-chaired the 2002 report, says it's obvious that we're still paying for the sin of incuriosity: “I believe that the failure to shine a full light on Saudi actions and particularly its involvement in 9/11 has contributed to the Saudi ability to continue to engage in actions that are damaging to the US—and in particular their support for Isis.”
The Saudi government also wants the pages released, because they say the report exonerates members of the royal family.
President Obama personally promised at least two 9/11 family members that the pages would be declassified, including William Doyle, who lost his son Joseph in the World Trade Center.
“He said: ‘Bill, I know about the pages. I promise I am going to get them released,’ ” Doyle told the Times.
Well?
