Updated to reflect two more cosponsors added after story first published
In the wake of major headlines about the censored 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers and claims by “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui of Saudi Arabia’s direct support of al Qaeda, the House resolution urging the president to declassify the 28 pages gained seven cosponsors in just three days this week.
Congressman Peter Welch
With this week’s haul, House Resolution 14 now has 13 cosponsors. Peter Welch, a Democrat and Vermont’s sole representative in the House, is joining the 28 pages movement for the first time along with Bill Posey (R, FL-8). The other five had been cosponsors of the identically-worded resolution in the previous Congress. They are Mark Sanford (R, SC-1), Collin Peterson (D, MN-7), Lloyd Doggett (D, TX-35), John “Jimmy” Duncan (D, TN-2) and Ted Yoho (R, FL-3)
Congressman Mike Capuano
Last week, Mike Capuano (D, MA-1) also became a 28 pages cosponsor for the first time, telling The Boston Globe that “so many questions have been raised over the years about the contents of the 28 pages and what they reveal about the September 11th terrorist attacks. I think the public has a right to that information and in the interest of transparency, they should be declassified.”
Congressman Bill Posey
Meanwhile, Congressman Walter Jones—who introduced H.Res.14—told The Hill’s Molly Hooper that Michael Burgess (R, TX-26) recently secured permission from the House intelligence committee to read the 28 pages and will do so when Congress returns from its break.
Jones summed up the overall strategy: “What we are trying to do is put the pressure on the White House by building the number of cosponsors in the House.” He also said he’s still working to identify a champion in the upper chamber to join him in the campaign to release the 28 pages. “I have reached out to several senators. I am hoping to talk to Senator Rand Paul today to put in the same resolution in the Senate,” said Jones.
The movement to declassify the 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers depends on individual actions by concerned citizens. While we emphasize calls and letters to Congress and the White House, another powerful tool is a letter to the editor of a newspaper or magazine.
Today’s Austin American-Statesman features a letter that focuses on Congressman Lamar Smith:
Release Classified 9/11 Finding
If you were elected to Congress and your peers urged you to read a classified 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers because it was critical to understanding sources of terrorism, would you do it? Not if you’re Rep. Lamar Smith.
After months of sidestepping my questions posed via letters, emails and phone calls, the congressman’s staff finally acknowledged that Smith hasn’t done the homework that peers in both parties have urged him to do. Bottom line: Lamar Smith—a member of the House Homeland Security Committee—votes with an incomplete understanding of the terror threat.
After reading this material, Rep. Thomas Massie said: “I had to stop every two or three pages and rearrange my perception of history.” Every American should be able to read those 28 pages. Every member of Congress should support House Resolution 14, which urges our president to release them.
Public Political Pressure…and Praise
Rep. Lamar Smith
It’s been more than a year since Congressmen Walter Jones, Stephen Lynch and Thomas Massie began urging members to read the 28 pages. Letters like these provide a means of public accountability, alert other legislators to a potential vulnerability of their own and enlighten both readers and the newspaper’s staff about the issue.
Your letter doesn’t have to focus on your representative’s failure to read the 28 pages—something that staffs will take a long time to admit. Instead, you could simply express concern that they haven’t joined the list of cosponsors of House Resolution 14, which urges the president to declassify the 28 pages and give Americans information they need and deserve.
If your legislator is already on board, use a letter to the editor to praise them publicly while encouraging others to follow their leadership on the issue—the way districts are drawn, a given newspaper’s reach often spans multiple districts.
A More General Approach
As another alternative, you can take a broader approach to the issue. Here’s an example of a letter—published in the Northwest Herald in Woodstock, Illinois—that pressures Congress in general and the president specifically:
The day terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in France, Congressmen Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch – with former Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham and Terry Strada, co-chair of the 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism – held a news conference to announce the introduction of House Resolution 14, which calls on the president to declassify 28 pages of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11.
This news conference is the latest attempt to bring the truth to the public about who is financing terrorism.
Follow the money is a common phrase used when trying to disclose how things happen.
On two occasions, in the presence of 9/11 victims’ families, President Barack Obama has said he would declassify the 28 pages, but has so far refused.
There should be massive pressure placed upon the House to sign the resolution and pressure on the Senate to sponsor a corresponding resolution. These actions might give Obama a backbone to do the right thing.
As long as this cover-up continues, all counterterrorism plans are for naught.
NICHOLAS C. KOCKLER, WOODSTOCK
Tips for Your Letter to the Editor
Keep it focused on just this topic
Keep it brief—no more than 150 words
Have a pal proofread it
Check the paper’s guidance for length and how to submit it; most have online forms
Increase your odds of success: Try more than one newspaper or magazine
If your letter is published, share it in a comment on our Facebook page, and spread it around using Facebook, Twitter and other social media
For inspiration on key points to hit, use the letters above and skim through this page and this one
28Pages.orgdirector Brian McGlinchey is the guest on the latest episode of We Were Lied to About 9/11, a podcast hosted by Jon Gold, a self-described advocate for 9/11 justice who has built a reputation for his encyclopedic knowledge of the event and its aftermath.
Gold’s interview series scrutinizes 9/11 from a variety of angles with guests that have included investigative journalist Philip Shenon—author of the authoritative book, The Commission—NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley. McGlinchey and Gold’s discussion provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the classified 28-page finding on foreign government links to 9/11 and the drive to declassify it.
It’s been a week of heightened attention to links between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers, first with the news that so-called “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui has testified that members of the Saudi royal family were major patrons of al Qaeda, and now with a front-page story from New York Times chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse that discusses the classified, 28-page finding on foreign government links to the 9/11 hijackers found in the report of a joint congressional intelligence inquiry.
9/11 Executive Director Philip Zelikow
Read the piece here. As for our thoughts on the story, we’d like to focus on one specific aspect: The attempt by 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow to position the commission as having throughly investigated and then dismissed the Saudi Arabia leads uncovered by the congressional inquiry that preceded it. Writes Hulse:
Others familiar with that section of the report say that while it might implicate Saudi Arabia, the suspicions, investigatory leads and other findings it contains did not withstand deeper scrutiny. Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the national commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks after the congressional panels, said the commission followed up on the allegations, using some of the same personnel who wrote them initially, but reached a different conclusion.
Many close followers of the 28 pages story and the 9/11 Commission’s work will take particular issue with this quote from Zelikow:
“Those involved in the preparation of the famous 28 pages joined the staff of the 9/11 Commission and participated in the follow-up investigation of all the leads that had been developed earlier,” he said Wednesday. “In doing so, they were aided by a larger team with more members, more powers and for the first time actually conducted interviews of relevant people both in this country and in Saudi Arabia.”
Chances are, Zelikow neglected to tell Hulse that he fired a member of the 9/11 Commission staff, Dana Lesemann, for going around him to acquire a copy of those very 28 pages—pages she needed to perform her assigned task of investigating potential ties to Saudi Arabia.
According to The Commission, Philip Shenon’s exhaustive account of the 9/11 investigation, Zelikow had, for weeks, neglected Lesemann’s request for a copy of the 28 pages. “Philip, how are we supposed to do our work if you won’t provide us with basic research material?” reportedly asked an agitated Lesemann, prompting Zelikow to storm off in silence. Fed up, she took matters into her own hands. When Zelikow discovered it, he fired her.
That’s not the only aspect of Lesemann’s experience that undercuts Zelikow’s portrayal of the commission’s work as exceedingly thorough. Before the firing over the 28 pages, Zelikow and Lesemann clashed over the breadth of the investigation. Again according to Shenon, Lesemann had presented Zelikow with a list of 20 government officials she wanted to interview to pursue the Saudi links. She was furious when Zelikow, several days later replied that she could interview only 10—a numerical limitation that Lesemann felt “arbitrary”, “crazy” and damaging to the work of the commission at its critical outset.
Beyond what Shenon portrays as a pervasive pattern of Zelikow restricting investigators and excessively limiting access to and sharing of information, there are other reasons to question Zelikow’s assertions on this topic, starting with the fact that, to the extent the 28 pages put the commission’s final product in doubt, he may have an interest in prolonging their censorship.
And then there are Zelikow’s conflicts of interest in his role, including:
His previous friendship with Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, with whom he’d even authored a book.
His position on the Bush administration’s transition team.
His frequent contacts with Bush political advisor Karl Rove—while the investigation was underway—which lend credence to characterizations that he failed to be an impartial and, when necessary, adversarial investigator.
That last point is critical, given widespread reports that the Bush White House routinely impeded the commission’s investigation of possible Saudi ties to 9/11. The Commission describes 9/11 Commission member and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman’s frustration with the Bush administration’s relentless shielding of Saudi Arabia:
Lehman was struck by the determination of the Bush White House to try to hide any evidence of the relationship between the Saudis and al Qaeda. “They were refusing to declassify anything having to do with Saudi Arabia,” Lehman said. “Anything having to do with the Saudis, for some reason, it had this very special sensitivity.” He raised the Saudi issue repeatedly with Andy Card. “I used to go over over to see Andy, and I met with Rumsfeld three or four times, mainly to say, ‘What are you guys doing? This stonewalling is so counterproductive.”
Zelikow portrays the commission’s work on the Saudi threads as more thorough than that of the joint congressional intelligence inquiry behind the 28 pages, but—even if that’s in some ways true—the question remains: Was it thorough enough?
9/11 Commission chairman Tom Keane doesn’t seem to think so. Said Keane, “(Vice chairman Lee Hamilton and I) think the commission was in many ways set up to fail because we had not enough money…we didn’t have enough time.” Indeed, charged with unraveling and studying the vast and extraordinarily complex tapestry that is 9/11, the commission was initially given a budget of just $3 million—later increased to a still-paltry $15 million—and issued its final report just over 18 months after the very first organizational meeting.
Keane and Hamilton aren’t the only ones who, unlike Zelikow, acknowledge that the 9/11 Commission report is far from the last word on potential Saudi government complicity in 9/11. Commission member and former Senator Bob Kerrey, in a sworn statement recently submitted in litigation by 9/11 family members and victims against Saudi Arabia, said the commission report does not exonerate the kingdom. Wrote Kerrey:
“To the contrary, significant questions remain unanswered concerning the possible involvement of Saudi government institutions and actors in the financing and sponsorship of al Qaeda, and evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued.“
One of the distinguishing hallmarks of the drive to declassify the 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers is the absence of vocal opposition. That’s not to say there are no opponents—only that they are working quietly and effectively behind closed doors.
It’s likely that among the most powerful of those unseen opponents of 9/11 transparency are two strange bedfellows:
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—which has fueled the growth of terror
The U.S. intelligence community—which is charged with thwarting terror
Saudia Arabia’s Broad Influence on U.S. Policy
Saudi Arabia has claimed it wants the 28 pages released, but the kingdom is surely bluffing. At a January 7 press conference promoting the reintroduction of a House resolution urging the president to declassify the 28 pages, former Senator Bob Graham was pointed in describing how Saudi Arabia figures in the censored chapter of the report of a joint Congressional intelligence inquiry into 9/11: “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11 and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.”
Like many other countries, Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in building influence within American shores, and that influence may be a big reason why Barack Obama hasn’t reversed George W. Bush’s extraordinary redaction of 28 consecutive pages of a Congressional intelligence report, and why most of our federal legislators haven’t even bothered reading those pages despite the strong urging of peers who have.
Former Senator Norm Coleman: Once a Saudi Critic, Now on Kingdom’s Payroll
One relatively new pillar in Saudi Arabia’s influence infrastructure illustrates its strength. In September, The Nation’s Lee Fang—in a piece outlining the remarkable depth and breadth of the Saudi web of influence—revealed that Saudi Arabia had made an eyebrow-raising addition to its army of lobbyists: Norm Coleman, former United States senator and current chair of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a prominent Republican super PAC.
The hire breaks new ground, writes Fang, as Coleman “appears to be the first leader of a significant Super PAC to simultaneously lobby for a foreign government.” The move also reveals cringe-inducing hypocrisy: In 2005, Coleman signed a letter condemning Saudi Arabia for fostering Islamic extremism around the world, and today he serves on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.
While noteworthy, Coleman is just one star in a broad constellation of Saudi Arabian influence on American policymakers. As The New York Times reported in a September expose, another major avenue of foreign government influence is the funding of American think tanks:
“The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.”
The pressure on scholars isn’t always indirect: Some “donations” are accompanied by an explicit quid pro quo understanding that the think tank will advance the interest of its foreign state benefactor.
According to a Times infographic, Saudi Arabia has given money to many of the think tanks that journalists and policymakers turn to for analysis, including The Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, the Middle East Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Does the work product of these think tanks reflect their Saudi sponsorship? Consider the rather Saudi-friendly insights the CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman recently offered decision-makers on the transition of power following the death of King Abdullah. In it, Cordesman heralds Abdullah as “one of (Saudi Arabia’s) most competent and impressive kings” and “a strong ally.” While he touches briefly on extremism, strikingly absent from Cordesman’s examination of Saudi Arabia’s role as a “close partner” in U.S. counterterrorism efforts is any mention of the country’s well-documented financial support of Islamic extremism and terror. To the contrary, Cordesman declares that Saudi Arabia “has been critical to preserving some degree of regional stability…during the rise of Islamic extremism.”
Considering Saudi Arabia’s think tank sponsorship, it’s no wonder that 28Pages.org is only aware of one occasion where one of these influential entities has allowed an analyst to use its platform to promote the release of the 28 pages: Last month at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Rubin urged their release and implored journalists to make the 28 pages a 2016 campaign issue.
Intelligence Community’s “Pervasive Pattern” of Covering Saudi Role
Saudi Arabia’s reasons for wanting the 28 pages kept secret are clear, but what about America’s intelligence community? Actually, its motives are likely identical: Shielding itself from public humiliation and the consequences that would accompany it.
Former Senator Bob Graham
The intelligence community would have us believe that publishing the 28 pages would somehow pose a threat to national security, a notion that’s been pointedly rebutted by many who’ve read them, including former Senate intelligence committee chairman Graham.
At the January 7 press conference, Graham said, “Much of what passes for classification for national security reasons is really classified because it would disclose incompetence. And since the people who are classifying are also often the subject of the materials, they have an institutional interest in avoiding exposure of their incompetence.”
The intelligence community’s failure in the years and months leading up to 9/11 isn’t exactly secret, but the 28 pages may shed powerfully unflattering new light on it. Remember, they’re found in the report of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence CommunityActivities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Secrecy about American intelligence agencies’ performance before and after the 9/11 attacks stretches far beyond the 28 pages. Perhaps the most prominent example of that broad veil relates to a 9/11 hijacker cell in Sarasota: Graham says the FBI failed to disclose its knowledge of that cell to the joint congressional intelligence inquiry he co-chaired.
When the cell later came to the attention of investigative journalist Dan Christensen at FloridaBulldog.org, the FBI first denied that it found any connection between 9/11 hijackers and a wealthy Saudi family that suddenly fled the country two weeks before September 11, and then denied it had any documentation of its investigation. Now we know the FBI indeed found direct links between that family and the hijackers, and a federal judge is studying more than 80,000pages of FBI documents relating to the Sarasota investigation for potential release in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Relating the FBI’s Sarasota secrecy to the 28 pages, Graham said, “This is not a narrow issue of withholding information at one place, in one time. This is a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of the federal government which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”
Former Counterterror Czar Richard Clarke
The CIA may want the 28 pages kept secret, too. Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s counter-terrorism czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations, says the CIA never told him that two known Al Qaeda operatives were living in southern California under their own names. Considering the San Diego cell figures prominently in the joint inquiry report, the 28 pages may shed light on the CIA’s motives for its history-altering failure to inform Clarke or the FBI or elaborate on what disaster-averting information the CIA had and didn’t share.
Like the CIA, the NSA also knew about the San Diego-based hijackers well before September 11. Keeping the 28 pages under wraps may serve the agency in its fight to preserve the post-9/11 mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden: If the 28 pages amplify the fact that the government had all the information it needed to thwart the 9/11 attacks without those controversial programs, the NSA’s arguments would be further weakened.
A Deadly Bargain
Amid all this discussion of the actions and inactions that enabled the terrible loss of life on 9/11, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that lives continue to hang in the balance—and the fact that former Senator Graham and current Congressmen Walter Jones, Stephen Lynch and Thomas Massie have all said that declassifying the 28 pages is imperative to understanding and countering the ongoing terror threat.
Said Graham at the 28 pages press conference that came just hours after the terror attack on the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo: “There is no threat to national security in disclosure (of the 28 pages). I’m going to make the case today that there’s a threat to national security by non–disclosure, and we saw another chapter of that today in Paris.”
According to Graham, shielding Saudi Arabia from scrutiny of its role in 9/11 has emboldened the kingdom to continue its sponsorship of extremism and, in the process, enabled the rise of ISIS. If so, the continued censorship of the 28 pages has cost more lives around the world than were lost on September 11, 2001—and with growing U.S. involvement in the fight against ISIS, American lives could become increasingly imperiled.
Americans may not be surprised that a faraway monarchy would be willing to gamble the lives of innocents in a bid for continued power, but they should be deeply troubled that the U.S. intelligence community would—wittingly or not—make the same deadly bargain. By shielding themselves from the oversight that’s vital to our system of government, our national security agencies also shield Saudi Arabia from accountability. In so doing, they endanger the very lives they’re charged with saving.
Brian McGlinchey is the founder and director of 28Pages.org.
28Pages.org 