On Friday, David told you about how President Obama is considering declassifying a 28-page document that was redacted from the 9/11 Commission Report because it linked funding of the terrorists to the government of Saudi Arabia. Releasing this document would swing the door open to blaming Saudi Arabia for the terror attacks, thus allowing victims and the families of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people to sue the Middle Eastern country.
A bill has been introduced by two U.S. senators that would allow victims of 9/11 and other terror attacks to sue foreign governments and financial partners of terrorism. The proposed bill has been defiantly opposed by Saudi Arabia. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, has threatened that his country will sell off billions in American assets if the bill is passed. While visiting Washington last month, al-Jubeir told lawmakers that Saudi Arabia was willing to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States if the bill is passed.
From the New York Times:
Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
These tense relations between the two countries comes at a time when U.S. media is revealing that the Saudi government may have had more of a role in the 9/11 attacks than what the U.S. government has told us. Last Sunday, 60 Minutes had a segment discussing the aforementioned 28-page declassified documents.
For the last 13 years the documents are locked away under the capital in guarded vaults called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs). Only a handful of people have been given permission to read these sensitive documents. Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is one of those who has seen these 28 pages, and he believes that these documents need to be released, and has been attempting to get the documents released since the day they were classified back in 2003.
Bob Graham can’t give specifics, but he does say that the classified documents outline a network of people that he believes supported the hijackers while they were in the United States, and that substantial support came from the Saudi government, as well as wealthy citizens and charities of the country.
Graham is not alone, former CIA director Porter Goss, also believes that an uncensored version of the documents should be released. As well as Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman and U.S. ambassador to India.
“You’re gonna be surprised by it,” Roemer told 60 Minutes. And, you’re going to be surprised by some of the answers that are sitting there today in the 9/11 Commission report about what happened in San Diego, and what happened in Los Angeles. And what was the Saudi involvement.”
Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey was a member of the 9/11 Commission who has read the 28 pages and believes they should be declassified and thinks the Saudis had a role in the attacks.
“You can’t provide the money for terrorists and then say, ‘I don’t have anything to do with what they’re doing.'”
The New York Post has a report that U.S. knew the Saudis were involved and “deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government.”
From the NYP:
Detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.
Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was “diplomatic immunity.”
Apparently there was a “flurry of pre-9/11 phone calls between one of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego and the Saudi Embassy, and the transfer of some $130,000 from then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar’s family checking account to yet another of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego.”
“The Saudi ambassador funded two of the 9/11 hijackers through a third party,” Former FBI agent John Guandolo said. “He (Bandar) should be treated as a terrorist suspect, as should other members of the Saudi elite class who the U.S. government knows are currently funding the global jihad.”
Bandar and his family are friends with George W. Bush, and even met with the President at the White House on September 13, 2001. However, FBI evacuated dozens of Saudi officials from multiple cities after the attacks, without interrogating them despite that 15 of the 19 al-Qaida hijackers were Saudi citizens. And that the 9/11 architect and financier, Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh. The same place that President Obama will visit on Wednesday in an attempt to smooth things over between the two nations.
[Inquistr]