Bronze memorial to Sept. 11 firefighters.
The news published Tuesday that convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui testified last October that members of the Saudi government and royalty were involved in funding what he called the Bin Laden Group—and others call Al Qaeda—has sparked a renewal of calls for declassifying 28 pages of the report of the Sept. 11 commission.
In the words of
The New York Times reporter Carl Hulse, those 28 pages "by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism."
President Obama could declassify those pages tomorrow if he wished. And he should do so. No good national security reason exists to continue keeping this material under wraps. Indeed, the opposite can be argued. The resistance to releasing it seems, in fact, to be a matter of maintaining ties to the Saudis, totalitarian extremists dubbed "moderates" because of their alliance with the United States, as well as their oil riches, not because of their actual worldview.
Moussaoui's testimony is scarcely the first time high-level Saudis have been accused of being funders of Al Qaeda. In a Monday statement, the Saudis rejected the latest allegations, noting that the Sept. 11 commission exculpated them:
“Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent,” the statement said. “His words have no credibility.”
Since 2006, Moussaoui has been serving a sentence of life without parole in the supermax prison at Florence, Colorado, after being convicted for conspiring with Al Qaeda to commit acts of terror. Upon sentencing, the judge in the case
said: "You came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper. You will never get a chance to speak again and that's an appropriate ending." It turns out he has gotten another chance.
The October testimony came as a result of a long-running lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Specifically, Moussaoui claimed that he had spoken in Afghanistan with a member of the Islamic Affairs Department at the Saudi embassy in Washington about a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile. He testified that he was involved in a trial run of a bomb for use on the U.S. embassy in London, a type of weapon that was actually used in attacks on the U.S. embassy in Kenya and Tanzania.
As you can read below the fold, that's not all.
He said in the prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group. Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.
“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.
Maybe it's all lies. But some prominent Americans not given to wild accusations believe otherwise. For instance, there's former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida. He was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) that led the Sept. 11 inquiry. Ever since the inquiry's report was released more than a dozen years ago, he has sought to have Part 4 relating to possible Saudi involvement
declassified:
“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,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.
Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, who along with Graham and others, have filed affidavits in the survivors' lawsuit, said it was “fundamentally inaccurate and misleading” to argue that the 9/11 Commission exonerated the Saudi government.
Marcy Wheeler, who has spent more than a decade prying out damaging information about U.S. national security, surveillance and related matters under the moniker emptywheel, writes:
Who knows whether we’ll let Moussoui change the narrative on Saudi support for 9/11. Especially given the underlying risk: Moussaoui’s testimony dates all this financial (and logistical) support to the period just after the Embassy bombings, but it suggests these figures supported bin Laden both before and after. That would back the claims of a number of former CIA types who argue Riyadh Station Chief John Brennan prevented the CIA from investigating these ties in the lead-up to the attack on our Embassies.
That is, Moussaoui’s testimony carries risks not just for key Saudi elites. But also for the CIA Director.
While there is support among both Republicans and Democrats for releasing the 28 pages, there are also barricades. One of those is the new chairman of the SSCI, Sen. Richard Burr, who replaced Dianne Feinstein. It's his opinion that there should be no public hearings regarding CIA doings and it seems unlikely he'd take a stance on the classified section of the Sept. 11 report any different than he has for the 6,700-page torture report, which is to gather up all copies sent to executive departments and forever keep the public from seeing what's in them.
Nearly 3,000 Americans and foreign nationals from dozens of countries were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. Thousands more have suffered from health effects related to the attack and clean-up. Wars were initiated and hundreds of thousands of Americans, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis killed and trillions of tax dollars spent as a result of the attacks. Knowing as many details of the attacks that spurred the misbegotten response of our leaders is essential for the nation's well-being.
Even the Saudi government favors releasing the 28 pages of the report, believing that the allegations purportedly there can be refuted.
That leaves zero reason to keep them classified. The president should clear the air by letting rank-and-file Americans see what's been kept secret from them all these years.