I am so tired of living in a country where everything is withheld from us for our own good — especially since it’s so often to protect the powerful. Just sayin’!
On the bottom floor of the United States Capitol’s new underground visitors’ center, there is a secure room where the House Intelligence Committee maintains highly classified files. One of those files is titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.” It is twenty-eight pages long. In 2002, the Administration of George W. Bush excised those pages from the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. President Bush said then that publication of that section of the report would damage American intelligence operations, revealing “sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the war on terror.”
“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. “Those twenty-eight pages tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report,” Lynch maintains. Another congressman who has read the document said that the evidence of Saudi government support for the 9/11 hijacking is “very disturbing,” and that “the real question is whether it was sanctioned at the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were followed through.” Now, in a rare example of bipartisanship, Jones and Lynch have co-sponsored a resolution requesting that the Obama Administration declassify the pages.
The Saudis have also publicly demanded that the material be released. “Twenty-eight blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people,” Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, has declared. “Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”
H/t Patrick Rooney.
The guy on the right in this photo is Saudi Prince Bandar. He was the head of Saudi intelligence for many years until he was fired on April 15, 2014. Prince Bandar at the request of John McCain funded ISIS to fight against Assad. But let’s step into the way-back machine. After Reagan became the president in 1981 he sent US Marines into the middle of the civil war in Lebanon. Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 Marines. The leader of Hezbollah at that time was Mohammad Fadlallah. After the Marine deaths Bill Casey the head of the CIA wanted to assassinate Fadlallah to degrade and destroy Hezbollah. But assassinations are against US law. So he flew to Saudi Arabia and hired Prince Bandar to “take care of this matter.” Bandar hired a British SAS counter-terrorism officer who hired a couple of Lebanese assassins to get the job done. These idiots set off a car bomb in 1985 in the middle of Beirut which killed 60 people but didn’t kill Fadlallah. The point is that the USA has been making enemies for a long, long time in the Middle East and our friends are murderous brutes.
At least the Saudi response was the correct one. “Bring out the evidence, let’s see it.” Easy to say after a decade and a half to cover one’s tracks. Be that as it may, it’s more than clear that 10’s of thousands (100’s of thousands?) of lives and trillions of dollars have been flushed down a rat hole for a bald faced lie. All to bankrupt the country and firmly place the 1% neo-royalists firmly in control. A coup in other words. Some fuckers should hang.