Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
In a four part series on RAI with Paul Jay, Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) explains why he persists in making the case that facts directly connect the Saudi government with 9/11 conspirators.
Full Transcript can be read here
Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham says greater awareness of Saudi Arabia as “essentially a co-conspirator in 9/11…would change the way in which, particularly in the current milieu of events in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is being viewed” by the U.S. public.
Saudi Arabia, an historic ally of the U.S., had put significant pressure on the Obama administration in recent months to militarily intervene in Syria, and had also attempted to derail recent U.S.-Iran rapprochement.
Senator Graham co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that investigated intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. The inquiry’s final report included a 28-page chapter describing the Saudi connection to 9/11, but it was completely redacted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I was stunned that the intelligence community would feel that it was a threat to national security for the American people to know who had made 9/11 financially possible,” said Senator Graham. “And I am sad to report that today, some 12 years after we submitted our report, that those 28 pages continue to be withheld from the public.”
The investigation into 9/11 intelligence failures and the subsequent cover-up of Saudi involvement by the Bush administration led Senator Graham to question his life-long reverence of presidential authority.
“I grew up with the idea that the president was almost a divine figure, that he was the literally the father of the country and always acted in a way that was beneficial to the mass of people in America,” said Graham. “You may have disagreements with the current occupant of the office, but the presidency itself was a beknighted position deserving of your respect and worthy of your confidence.”
“So when I got involved particularly at the national level in the U.S. Senate and saw some of the things that were happening-which were not theoretical; they were things that I was dealing with on a very day-to-day hands-on basis that were contrary to that view of what was the presidency-it was a very disillusioning experience. And maybe some of the comments that I make in the book Intelligence Matters reflect that path to disillusionment,” said Graham.
Full transcript can be read here
Full transcript can be read here
Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, believes that the Saudi government “had a high and what has thus far turned out to be credible expectation that their role” in 9/11 “would not be exposed” by the U.S. government.
“Everything that the federal government has done since 9/11 has had as one of its outcomes, if not its objectives-and I believe it was both outcome and objective-that the Saudis’ role has been covered,” says Graham.
Senator Graham had talked to the other co-chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the two chairs of the citizen’s 9/11 commission about the possibility of the 19 hijackers acting independently.
“All three of them used almost the same word-implausible-that it is implausible that that could have been the case. Yet that has now become the conventional wisdom to the aggressive exclusion of other alternatives,” says Graham.
Graham says it is also possible that the Saudis gave financial support for Osama bin Laden’s operations in order to stop him from launching a campaign of civil unrest within Saudi Arabia as retaliation for allowing U.S. troops to occupy a part of the country during the first Gulf War.
The Saudis’ “confidence in the fact the United States would not react, or that the United States would not go to the extremes that in fact it has to cover up their involvement, were sufficient to outweigh the reality that bin Laden had the capability and the will to topple the monarchy,” says Senator Graham.
Full transcript can be read here
Former Senator Graham says that a new inquiry into 9/11 should be launched to ask whether the 19 hijackers acted alone, the extent of Saudi involvement in the attacks, and why the US concealed evidence of a support network for the hijackers.
The Bush administration also failed to seriously respond to a Presidential Daily Brief from August 6, 2001 that contained a section titled “bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”
“It was a fairly stark and specific call,” says Former Senator Bob Graham. “The president, from all evidence, basically ignored that warning and no steps were taken to try to dig deeper or to disrupt the plot.”
Graham served as the co-chair of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. A 28-page chapter in the final report detailing Saudi involvement in the financing, support, and execution of the attacks on the World Trade Center was redacted by the FBI.
The FBI also withheld information about the support networks for several of the 9/11 hijackers located through the United States, says Graham.
When asked about whether a deliberate culture had been created by the Bush administration to suppress information about possible terrorist attacks, Graham admitted that “virtually all of the agencies of the federal government were moving in the same direction, from a customs agent at an airport in Orlando who was chastised when he denied entry into the United States to a Saudi, to the president of the United States authorizing large numbers of Saudis to leave the country.”
“You don’t have everybody moving in the same direction without there being a head coach somewhere who was giving them instructions as to where he wants them to move,” said Graham.