28 pages

Rand’s Next Stand: Declassifying Foreign Government Ties to 9/11

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At a crowded Capitol Hill press conference today, Kentucky senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul (R) introduced legislation urging the president to declassify 28 pages on foreign government links to the 9/11 hijackers.

“We cannot let page after page of blanked-out documents be obscured behind a veil,” said Paul  “We cannot let this lack of transparency erode trust and make us feel less secure.”

Senator Rand Paul
Senator Rand Paul

Paul’s introduction of Senate Bill 1471—similar to House Resolution 14—represents a major milestone in the growth and visibility of the nonpartisan 28 pages movement.

Furthering his pattern of collaborating across the aisle on national security and other issues, Paul has already garnered the cosponsorship of Democrats Ron Wyden (OR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY). Paul and Wyden famously teamed up last week to block the extension of PATRIOT Act provisions that enabled the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone data.

Saying he was not alone in calling for the pages to be released, Paul noted that other advocates include “former heads of the CIA and the Republican and Democrat heads of the 9/11 commission” as well as bipartisan members of the House who are working to advance H.Res.14, which likewise urges the release of the 28 pages.

In an interesting twist, Paul announced his intention to next week offer the language of the bill as an amendment to the defense authorization bill. A similar maneuver was twice attempted in 2003 by then-Senator Byron Dorgan. Interestingly in note of last week’s high-profile clash over NSA surveillance, Dorgan’s effort was stymied on procedural objections initiated by Mitch McConnell.

At the press conference, Paul was joined by three congressmen who are leading the 28 pages effort in the House of Representatives—Walter Jones (R, NC), Stephen Lynch (D, MA) and Thomas Massie (R, KY)—and former Democratic Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the intelligence inquiry that produced the 28 pages. 9/11 family members also spoke, including Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism.

Graham: Release Will Prompt Reconsideration of Saudi Relationship

Of the speakers, former Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the inquiry that produced the 28 pages as part of a much larger report, spoke most pointedly about the 28 pages and what they reveal: “The 28 pages…go to the question of who financed 9/11 and they point a strong finger at Saudi Arabia.”

According to Graham, the release of the 28 pages will have broad ramifications. “The 28 pages are very important, and will…inform the American people and, in so doing, cause the American government to reconsider the nature of our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

Graham said the 28 pages are “emblematic of a pattern of withholding information, unnecessarily and to the detriment of the American people.”

Former Senator Bob Graham
Former Senator Bob Graham

Graham offered a highly visual example of that pattern of withholding, describing a request made to the Treasury Department for information it had on a Saudi-based foundation suspected of funneling money to al Qaeda. The Department of Justice responded by distributing a report summarizing what it knew about the foundation.

Holding a think bundle of paper aloft, Graham said, “Let me just show you what the report said.” He thumbed through perhaps a hundred pages—all of them entirely blacked out.

Congressman Jones, who has spearheaded the 28 pages movement in the House of Representatives, said, “One of my biggest disappointments on the House side is that we have gotten very few members from the areas that were impacted by 9/11 to join us in our House Resolution 14, which simply calls on the President of the United States to keep his word to the 9/11 families and declassify this information.”

Lynch: Secrecy of 28 Pages “a Disgrace”

Congressman Lynch said, “It is appalling, it is a disgrace to a country that prides itself on transparency and truth and justice that these 28 pages of this bipartisan, bicameral congressional inquiry remains classified after 14 years from those terrorist attacks. It is not just a mere deletion of a few words here and there as is typical in these reports …this is a full-fledged black-out of information.”

Lynch rebutted the notion that national security is served by keeping the 28 pages under wraps. To the contrary, he said, “I firmly believe the information contained in these 28 pages will better inform our national security protocol and inform our anti-terrorism policy going forward.”

Lynch also said he shared Jones’ frustration with the low support of the 28 pages resolution in the House and the difficulty in persuading members to read the 28 pages for themselves.

Massie: Legislators “Pretending to be Informed” on Terror

Congressman Massie said the 28 pages represented a bipartisan issue. “Unfortunately, it is bipartisan in two regards. You have Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate who are leading the charge to release these pages, but you have two presidents, either of which could have released them: A Republican president who is the reason that they are secret, and a Democratic president who keeps them secret,” said Massie.

Massie noted that legislators are, on a daily basis, considering what steps to take at home and abroad to prevent another 9/11. All the while, he said, “some of the best intelligence we have is in these 28 pages and most of our colleagues in the House have not read them, yet they’re pretending to be informed on these issues and having a discussion on how to prevent the next 9/11, yet turning a blind eye to the 28 pages.”

According to The Hill’s Julian Hattem, only 25 House members requested permission from the House intelligence committee to read the 28 pages over the 24 months that ended on December 31. Seventeen have done so in the first five months of 2015.

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Video: Press Conference Introducing Senate 28 Pages Resolution on June 2, 2015

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Senator Rand Paul
Senator Rand Paul

As 28Pages.org was first to report last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has introduced a Senate bill urging the president to declassify 28 pages on foreign government ties to the 9/11 hijackers. He will be joined in leading this effort by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden.

Senate Bill 1471 was introduced at a Capitol Hill press conference where Senator Paul was joined by Congressmen Walter Jones, Stephen Lynch and Thomas Massie as well as former Senator Bob Graham and several 9/11 family members, including Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism.

Press conference video courtesy of LaRouchePAC. 28Pages.org is not affiliated with LaRouchePAC but is grateful to that organization for its ongoing, professional video coverage of many events relating to this issue. 

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MAJOR DEVELOPMENT: Rand Paul, Ron Wyden to Introduce 28 Pages Bill in Senate

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Senator Rand Paul
Senator Rand Paul

By Brian McGlinchey

The growing, nonpartisan drive to declassify a 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers is about to take an enormous step forward with the introduction of a Senate bill urging the president to release the material to the public.

Dramatically compounding the issue’s visibility, the bill is being introduced by high-profile Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul of Kentucky.

A spokesperson for Senator Paul told 28Pages.org that Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden will cosponsor the bill, which will serve as the upper chamber’s counterpart to House Resolution 14. Wyden is a member of the Senate intelligence committee.

Paul will unveil the Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Victims Act at a Capitol Hill press conference on Tuesday, June 2 at 10:00 am, joined by Representatives Walter Jones (R, NC), Stephen Lynch (D, MA), Thomas Massie (R, KY) and former Democratic Senator Bob Graham.

Senator Ron Wyden
Senator Ron Wyden

Jones, Lynch and Massie introduced H.Res.14 and have been championing the issue—and seeking like-minded senators to lead the cause in the upper chamber—since December 2013.

Aided by Graham, who co-chaired the joint congressional 9/11 inquiry that wrote the 28 pages as one chapter in a far larger report, their success in securing the leadership of Paul and Wyden represents a critical milestone for the 28 pages movement.

As Paul and Wyden seek cosponsors for the bill, there are 11 senators whose support should—on principle, if not politics—be automatic:  Patrick Leahy (VT), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Harry Reid (NV), Barbara Boxer (CA), Patty Murray (WA), Dick Durbin (IL), Jack Reed (RI), Chuck Schumer (NY), Bill Nelson (FL), Tom Carper (DE) and Maria Cantwell (WA).  What do these 11 Democrats have in common? Months after the December 2002 release of the congressional intelligence report that holds the 28 pages, each of them signed a 2003 letter to President George W. Bush protesting his decision to redact the 28 pages and urging him to release them. In part, that letter read:

Unfortunately, because all but two pages of the entire section have been deemed too secret for public disclosure, the American people remain in the dark about other countries that may have facilitated the terrorist attacks. It has been widely reported in the press that the foreign sources referred to in this portion of the Joint Inquiry analysis reside primarily in Saudi Arabia. The decision to classify this information sends the wrong message to the American people about our nation’s anti-terror effort and makes it seem as if there will be no penalty for foreign abettors of the hijackers…Protecting the Saudi regime by eliminating any public penalty for the support given to terrorists from within its borders would be a mistake.

Among those 11 natural candidates to join the Paul-Wyden bill, one stands out: Schumer led the 2003 letter-writing effort. At the time, he said, “The bottom line is that keeping this material classified only strengthens the theory that some in the U.S. government are hellbent on covering up for the Saudis. If we’re going to take terrorism down, that kind of behavior has got to be nipped in the bud and shedding some light on these 28 pages would start that process.”

The 28 Pages and the Ongoing Scourge of  Terrorism

Calling the bill the “Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Victims Act” is an important acknowledgement that 9/11 family members deserve to know the full circumstances of their loved ones’ murders—and to access information that could be useful in lawsuits they’ve filed against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Then again—given the broad impact of 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror,” 9/11 transparency is truly owed to every American citizen and to people all around the world. Former Senator Graham and House leaders of the 28 pages movement who’ve read the 28 pages argue that their release is vital to the ongoing struggle with terrorism.

According to Graham, “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.” He has also said the U.S. government’s shielding of Saudi Arabia’s role in funding extremism helped pave the way for the rise of ISIS. The House’s Lynch made a similar point in a 2014 story written by the Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender:

(Lynch) believes the information has direct bearing on the new war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and other militant Sunni Muslim groups that are believed to be drawing some of their funding from the same Arab states that America considers key allies. The revelations are central to understanding “the web of intrigue here and the treacherous nature of the parties we are dealing with — the terrorists and their supporters,” Lynch said in an interview.

Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie, in a memorable 2014 press conference, described the experience of reading the 28 pages as “shocking” and said “I had to stop every couple of pages and…try to rearrange my understanding of history…It challenges you to rethink everything.” (Watch it here.)

9/11 family members say President Obama, on two different occasions, gave assurances that he would release the 28 pages. Last September, responding to a report on the 28 pages by CNN’s Jake Tapper, the White House’s National Security spokesperson said, “Earlier this summer the White House requested that (the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) review the 28 pages from the joint inquiry for declassification. ODNI is currently coordinating the required interagency review and it is ongoing.”

It takes the average adult about 28 minutes to read 28 pages, but more than 8 months after the White House statement—and almost 14 years since the September 11 attacks—the pages remain under close guard in the basement of the United States Capitol. Brian McGlinchey is the founder and director of 28Pages.org

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Seymour Hersh, Osama bin Laden and 28 Secret Pages on 9/11

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Earlier this month, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh challenged nearly every essential aspect of the United States government’s account of how it tracked, killed and disposed of Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden

Key threads in Hersh’s account, if true, suggest enduring ties between Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda, and paint alleged White House lies about bin Laden’s demise as yet another part of a multifaceted U.S. effort to keep Saudi Arabia’s terror ties under wraps—an effort that, according to former Senator Bob Graham, depends heavily on the continued classification of a 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers.

A Challenge to the White House Story

In case you blinked and missed the media’s fleeting examination of Hersh’s 10,000-word piece for the London Review of Books, here are some of the most noteworthy claims Hersh attributes to confidential sources:

  • Bin Laden wasn’t hiding from Pakistani authorities—he’d been captured by them and secured at the Abbottabad compound under house arrest.
  • Bin Laden’s location in Abbottabad wasn’t uncovered by the CIA’s savvy tracking of an al Qaeda courier or aided by the torture of captives—it was handed to the CIA by a Pakistani informer keen on securing a $25 million reward.
  • The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia financed bin Laden’s Abbottabad accommodations.
  • The raid to kill bin Laden was conducted with the acquiescence of the Pakistani army and intelligence service.
  • Pakistani guards had been instructed to flee the compound upon hearing the sound of approaching helicopters—and an unarmed bin Laden was simply exterminated by Navy SEALs who entered the structure unopposed.
  • Bin Laden wasn’t buried at sea; his body was thrown from a helicopter flying over the Hindu Kush mountains.
  • To hide Pakistan’s role, the original arrangement called for the U.S. government to wait about a week after bin Laden’s murder and then announce he’d been killed in a drone strike. The crash of a helicopter used in the raid prompted the Obama administration to hastily craft a different set of lies for public digestion.

Delving Deeper into the Alleged Saudi Connection

For those seeking the declassification of a 28-page passage on foreign government ties to the 9/11 hijackers, the claim that Saudi support of bin Laden lasted years after 9/11 is of particular interest, as it complements an assertion by Senator Graham that the 28 pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier” of the September 11 attacks.

Consider this passage from Hersh’s piece:

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired (senior U.S. intelligence) official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it.

Seymour Hersh (Photo: Institute for Policy Studies)
Seymour Hersh (Photo: Institute for Policy Studies)

Hersh’s intelligence source also pointedly counters the White House’s assertion that Seal Team Six aimed to take bin Laden alive: “It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.” According to Hersh, Pakistan had made bin Laden’s death a condition for its easing the path for the Seal team’s assault.

However, given the U.S. intelligence community’s claims about its prowess in extracting valuable intelligence from captives—and the government’s portrayal of bin Laden as having continued to play a vital role in al Qaeda well after 9/11—one would expect the White House to place an extraordinarily high priority on capturing him alive. Holding extraordinary leverage over the Pakistanis, such a demand should have been dismissed out of hand.

It’s speculative, but did the U.S. government have its own reasons for silencing bin Laden—perhaps to shield Saudi Arabia’s ties to the al Qaeda leader? Earlier this year, it was revealed that “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui testified—in lawsuits filed against Saudi Arabia by 9/11 family members, victims and insurers—that the Saudi royal family had financed al Qaeda. Did the American government want to prevent bin Laden from emerging as a far more credible star witness against the Saudis?

If so, such a “dead men tell no tales” rationale for bin Laden’s execution would be consistent with a striking statement Senator Graham made earlier this year:

“While the 28 pages are maybe the most important and the most prominent, they are by no means the only example of where information that is important to understanding the full extent of 9/11 have also been withheld from the American people.

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.”

Controversy Over the Hersh Story

Hersh’s story immediately came under fire from the White House and others inside and outside of government. Some of the criticism focused on the fact that Hersh’s sources are confidential—an avenue of attack that seems rather blunt given the widespread use of confidential sources in national security reporting and the Obama administration’s record-breaking prosecutions of whistleblowers.

On the other hand, other writers support many of the most important claims in the Hersh piece. For example, just days after the 2011 raid, Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, wrote about the Pakistani informer, Pakistan’s house arrest of Bin Laden and the Saudi maintenance payments.

Responding to Hersh’s work, veteran Pakistan and Afghanistan reporter Carlotta Gall wrote a piece in The New York Times in which she said “the story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid,” and added, “two years later…I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset.”

28Pages.org cannot validate Hersh’s reporting. However, given his credentials and other outlets reinforcing key parts of his story, we think his account at least merits consideration by the public and further investigation by other journalists.

Of course, there’s one aspect of 9/11 that’s incontrovertible: There exists a 28-page finding on foreign government links to the 9/11 hijackers that’s being hidden from the American people—28 pages that have been called “shocking” by legislators who’ve read them. And it’s time for those pages to be published for all the world to see.

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Jon Gold Interviews Senator Bob Graham on the 28 Pages and More

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Former Senator Bob Graham
Former Senator Bob Graham

The latest edition of Jon Gold’s “We Were Lied to About 9/11” podcast (embedded below) is an in-depth interview with former Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the joint congressional inquiry into intelligence community activities before and after 9/11. The 28-page finding on foreign government support of the 9/11 hijackers is found in report of that inquiry.

If you’re generally frustrated by interviewers who know little about the dense web of foreign and domestic intrigue that is 9/11, you’ll find Gold a welcome departure from the norm.

Among many other things, Gold and Graham discussed the 28 pages, allegations that the Pakistani intelligence agency transferred money to lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the FBI’s concealment of what it knows about the Sarasota terror cell and Vice President Dick Cheney’s adversarial approach to the 9/11 investigations.

Regarding the 28 pages, Graham said “That chapter refers primarily to the issue of who financed 9/11 and it points a very strong finger of suspicion at Saudi Arabia.” He also noted that the classified chapter “goes to one of the remaining areas of lack of consensus and that is, did the 19 hijackers operate alone or did they have support from some external source? The official position of the United States executive—including the intelligence community, the FBI , the White House—is that they acted alone. It is the position of the leadership of both the congressional inquiry and the 9/11 citizens commission that it was highly implausible that the 19 hijackers, given their lack of linguistic familiarity and the the fact that most of them had never been to the United States before they came for the purpose of 9/11, that they could have carried out such a complex plot over a long period of time, maintaining their anonymity, being able to practice to the point that they carried out the plot with such devastating effect.”

Graham also said that Bush and Obama administrations’ concealment of Saudi ties to the 9/11 hijackers has “adversely affected our national security by giving Saudi Arabia the not unreasonable conclusion that Saudi Arabia is immune to any sanction for its actions and can…continue to support al Qaeda” and provide resources to ISIS, whose formation it helped facilitate. “American national security has been weakened by the failure to let the American people and the world know what Saudi Arabia did around 9/11 and subsequent to 9/11,” Graham added.

Jon Gold
Jon Gold

Gold asked Graham a question of particularly high interest to us at 28Pages.org: Could he confirm the 28 pages document support of the 9/11 hijackers from more than one country? Unfortunately, Graham replied with a flat “no,” which we interpreted—without complete confidence—as a refusal to comment rather than a dismissal of the notion that Saudi Arabia isn’t the only foreign country implicated in the 28 pages.

Though the 28 pages have received significant publicity, Graham said “the 28 pages are by no means the totality of instances in which Saudi Arabia’s actions have been covered up by U.S. officials.” In addition to the FBI’s remarkable lack of transparency regarding its investigation of the Sarasota cell, Graham also highlighted the FBI’s blocking of the congressional inquiry’s request to interview an FBI informant who actually housed two of the hijackers.

“You had the anomalous situation of a paid FBI agent being the landlord of two of the future hijackers. We very much wanted to talk to that man,” said Graham. “We thought he had a peculiar access to the hijackers and to information about the actions of the FBI, but the FBI went to great lengths, including refusing to serve a subpoena, which it alone could serve because at that point the man was in protective custody and they were the only entity who knew of where he was and could provide access to him.”

Appealing directly to Gold’s audience for support for the declassification effort, Graham suggested they participate by writing a letter, sending an email or placing a call to their representatives and senators.

Those are just some highlights—we recommend listening to all of it, and exploring the many other interesting discussions Gold has hosted.  “We Were Lied to About 9/11” is accessible via iTunes and YouTube.

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