An Insider’s Look at the Dulles 9/11 Video

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Kevin Ryan

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/05/insiders-look-dulles-911-video.html 

The strongest evidence linking the alleged hijackers to 9/11 was a video said to be from the closed circuit TV (CCTV) system at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC. The video was not made available until the day before the 9/11 Commission Report was released, in 2004, and it helped to pave the way for widespread acceptance of the official account. Since the other evidence against the accused hijackers was dubious and suspiciously convenient for the FBI, which provided it, the Dulles video should be examined closely.
Doing so has led some independent 9/11 investigators to conclude that the Dulles video contains “no information to link its images to AA 77.” Reasons include that:

1. None of the Dulles airport staff remembered seeing the alleged hijackers at the airport
2. Dulles had over 300 cameras but no footage was released except for portions of this one video (and no video was available from the other airports)
3. The alleged Dulles video contains no date, time stamp, or camera identification
4. The video was shot at a rate of 30 frames per second (fps), which the investigators said is not typical of CCTV videos
5. The video appears to be an edited composite of shots taken from different angles

Additionally, it has been noticed that the airport screeners in the Dulles video did not perform their duties according to airport requirements. An attorney representing 9/11 victims’ families stated that security agents in the video screened the suspects in ways that were not like those required in Dulles training videos.
Could the video be fraudulent?
Dulles airport security manager Ed Nelson said that the FBI confiscated the actual video from the CCTV system “some time after 10:00 a.m.” on 9/11. Nelson wondered how the FBI “knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints.” Two days later it was reported that FBI agents had “examined footage from dozens of cameras at the three airports where the terrorists boarded the aircraft.” However, the official account claimed that no such footage existed except for the one video later released as the Dulles CCTV evidence.
Recently, I had an online discussion with a man who managed maintenance of the Dulles CCTV system until mid-2000. His comments shed some light on questions of whether the video is genuine. This was the second of two former employees of Stratesec who made comments on my blog early this year. Stratesec was the security company that had contracts for several of the facilities impacted on 9/11 including Dulles Airport, the WTC, and United Airlines.
Like the first former Stratesec employee who contacted me, Andrew Olson, the Dulles video manager (calling himself only “David C”) is now working on contracts for the U.S. Department of Defense. David C’s comments on my blog were made from an IP address belonging to the U.S. DOD Network Information Center in Washington, DC, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Apparently, David C went from a job at Stratesec to working for a “dot com start-up…just two blocks from the WTC” to working at the DIA where he makes comments defending Stratesec.
That these two former Stratesec employees now serve as military suppliers reflects the fact that Stratesec’s leaders also went on to profit from the crimes of 9/11. For example, the company’s chief operating office Barry McDaniel started a police-state supply business with a close colleague of Dick Cheney. And Stratesec’s chief executive, Wirt D. Walker, went on to run businesses with people who have close ties to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
David C worked for Stratesec from 1995 to 2000, in the role of Senior Field Engineer Technician for most of that time. He was responsible for operations of security systems, access control systems, badging systems, and CCTV systems installation and management at Dulles airport. He has provided images of documents that support these claims. It’s important to note that David C was not operating these systems at the time of 9/11. Management of the Dulles CCTV system had changed from Stratesec to ADT a year before the attacks.
The cameras used in the Dulles CCTV system came from Verint Video Solutions. Coincidentally, Verint cameras were also used at the Pentagon, the WTC and, later, in the London subway system at the time of the July 2007 bombing. It was Verint employee David Brent who reported that he had viewed all the video from over 300 cameras that had recorded the events at Dulles on 9/11.
When David C was asked about the evidence suggesting the Dulles 9/11 video might be altered or fraudulent, he responded with extensive comments, many of which were not specific enough to be useful. With regard to the five reasons listed above, the most important of David C’s answers relate to reasons 3 and 4.

3. Why was there no timestamp on the video? David C’s answer: Dulles used a state-of-the-art Loronix video software system. The system recorded date and time information, which could not be altered. But the video could be exported without the timestamp showing. This was done in some cases where the timestamp obscured some of what was taking place.

4. How could the video be shot at 30 fps when typical security video is at 1 to 4 fps? David C’s answer: The state-of-the-art Loronix recording software allowed for “real time” (30 fps) video to be recorded and stored for up to two weeks.

The use of Loronix video software at Dulles was confirmed in a 1998 paper (pdf) from the University of Southampton. The paper states that, with the Loronix system, “Each video clip is fingerprinted through a mathematical algorithm during the video capture process. The fingerprint becomes part of the clip and is used by the playback software to verify the video has not been altered.” Therefore, although the date and time stamp are not necessarily present, the Dulles video file can be confirmed to be genuine and unaltered if one has access to the Loronix software program in which to view it. The video can be downloaded here although it is not in the original format.
It’s interesting that the video did not appear as publicly available evidence until 2004, more than a year after the Dulles system was upgraded in a way that allowed the video files to be accessed remotely. Until the video fingerprint is confirmed independently, the question of whether the video genuinely represents activities filmed on 9/11 at Dulles will remain unanswered.
Additionally, it’s odd that David C knew about the Loronix software but said he had never heard of Verint, the company that manufactured the cameras and owned the Loronix product. He also stated “I think we may have had only two cameras at the security checkpoints [at Dulles]” and yet could not explain how the evidentiary video appeared to be made of shots from different angles. Perhaps follow-up questions will reveal more of the truth.
If the video is a fake, how could that have been done? There are a number of considerations in answering this question.
The video was leaked to the press (at a politically timed moment) in 2004 by the law firm Motley Rice, represented at the time by terrorism propagandist Jean-Charles Brisard. How the firm came by the video was never reported. However, it is known that the FBI confiscated the original video and had shown it to a 9/11 family member who said “the terrorists’ faces had been digitally disguised.” Why would the FBI take the time to digitally disguise the faces of dead suspects? Moreover, if the Bureau could do that what other modifications could be done?
The FBI made at least one “training film” at Dulles. The Bureau had strong ties to Stratesec as well, in that the company’s president from 1998 to 1999 was Charles Archer, the FBI’s former Assistant Director In Charge of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Stratesec’s directors had also previously owned a movie production company called Prism Entertainment.
How about Verint? In 2002, the year before remote access to Dulles video files became a possibility and two years before the video was released, the company named Howard Safir as a director. Safir is a former New York City Police and Fire Commissioner who was appointed to those roles by his close friend (and 9/11 suspect) Rudy Giuliani. Did Safir have any role in release of the Dulles video?
In any case, because the Dulles 9/11 video is the strongest evidence implicating the alleged hijackers, investigating its validity remains important. As shown above, questions that remain unanswered about the video can still be resolved with an objective approach that is open to dialogue and open to possibilities.
Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.

Senate Passes Bill That Would Expose Saudi Arabia's Role In Sept. 11: Obama Veto Imminent

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/17/2016 13:36 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-17/obama-veto-imminent-after-senate-passes-bill-would-expose-saudi-arabias-role-sept-11
After a month-long scare campaign waged by Saudi Arabia, and in no small part the Obama administration, which went so far as to threaten it would dump its US Treasurys (which the NYT previously had quantified as $750 billion however which the Treasury just yesterday disclosed for the first time in 41 years as only $117 billion suggesting the Saudis would likely also have to sell US stocks and any other US-denominated assets), if the US were to pass a bill that would hold it legally liable for the Sept 11 attacks, it will be up to Obama to veto the bill because moments ago the Senate unanimously passed said bill, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.
The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.
As reported a month ago, the Obama administration has urgently lobbied against the bill, and the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes it might begin liquidating its USD reserves. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and administration officials while in Washington in March.
Many economists are skeptical that the Saudis would deliver on such a warning, saying that the sell-off would be hard to execute and would do more harm to the kingdom’s economy than to America’s.
As the NYT reports, questions about the role Saudi officials might have played in the terror plot have lingered for more than a decade, and families of the Sept. 11 victims have used various lawsuits to try to hold members of the Saudi royal family and charities liable for what they allege is financial support for terrorism. But these moves have been mostly blocked, in part because of a 1976 law that gives foreign nations some immunity from suits in American courts.
But the Senate bill carves out an exception to the law if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens inside the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.
The administration has warned that any weakening of the sovereign immunity law could put American troops, civilians and corporations at legal risk if other nations decide to retaliate with their own legislation. Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said last month that President Obama would veto the bill if it reached his desk in its current form.
Earnest repeated the same warning moments ago, which means that if the House endorses the Senate bill, Obama will be put in the unpleasant spot of having to veto a bill which to many Americans is a critical milestone in figuring out if Saudi Arabia was indeed behind the September 11 bombings, and further lead to questions why Obama is defending a Wahhabist regime which has been repeatedly implicated in the biggest terrorist attack on US soil, and flagrantly rejecting to follow the will of the US electorate.

The FBI Tried To Suppress 80,000 Documents On Saudi Ties To 9/11

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/17/2016 09:04 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-17/fbi-tried-suppress-80000-documents-saudi-ties-911

Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,
The classified 28-pages of the 9/11 report have made global headlines lately as a handful of lawmakers battle to release them to the public. Those pages are believed by activists and members of Congress — who have seen them — to expose the role of Saudi Arabia, including government officials, in the terrorist attacks.
But according to a new report based on years of investigative journalism, it turns out there are far more than 28 classified pages on Saudi Arabia and 9/11 — there are 80,000 kept secret by the FBI. And though not all 80,000 are expected to concern the Saudi family — and the FBI insists their investigation of the documents came up empty-handed — journalists, at least one lawmaker, and heavily-redacted documents suggest otherwise.
As the Daily Beast reported, the discovery of the 80,000 pages came when Irish investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan were contacted by an unnamed counterterrorism official in 2011. The reporters were preparing to publish a book on the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks and were told  by the source that a Saudi family who had been living in Sarasota, Florida, prior to the attacks had connections to the attackers. Specifically, they were linked to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian terrorist widely recognized as the ringleader of the attacks.
The unnamed official’s tip conflicted squarely with the FBI’s prior conclusions on that family. Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii, his wife Anoud, and their three small children lived in an upscale Sarasota community, along with Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, a financier and interior designer, who owned the home, and Ghazzawai’s American-born wife. The FBI had received multiple calls from the family’s neighbors expressing concerns over erratic behavior. Two weeks before 9/11, they left the house in a huge hurry, leaving dirty diapers and toys strewn about, a fully stocked refrigerator, and three cars in the driveway.
Though the FBI opened an investigation in April 2002, it still insists it never found any significant connection between the family and Atta. The agency acknowledged they had suspected a connection, but “not until after the Tampa field office opened an investigation that claimed to find ‘numerous connections’ between the family and the 9/11 hijackers,” the Daily Beast explained. The 80,000 classified pages in question stemmed from that investigation.
The FBI says “the bureau’s own agents did initially suspect the family was linked to some of the hijackers.” But “on further scrutiny, those connections proved unfounded, officials now say.”
But Summers and Swan contacted Dan Christensen, a veteran Florida reporter, and together they published an exposé on these connections in Sarasota in September 2011. As they reported, following the 9/11 attacks:

“[L]aw enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights — including leader Mohamed Atta — in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

They were also never revealed to lawmakers. The 2011 story caught the attention of Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who has since led the campaign to release the 28 pages on the Saudi connection, which are said to contain information showing Saudi government officials were involved in orchestrating the attack.
At the time, he said the journalists had “open[ed] the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11.” Graham attempted to view some of the documents, and told the Daily Beast (for a forthcoming article) they did show a connection between the family and three hijackers. He was soon after confronted by then-deputy director of the FBI, Sean Joyce. According to Graham, he said, “Basically everything about 9/11 was known and I was wasting my time and I should get a life.”
Christensen filed a Freedom of Information Act request in the hopes of either confirming or refuting their original reporting. Thomas Julin, his lawyer, said the FBI initially denied having any records. When Graham said he was willing to testify he had seen some, the Department of Justice conveniently admitted to having 35 relevant pages. They released them, but they were heavily redacted. In spite of the overt censorship guarding that information, they reportedly still made clear the FBI had suspicions about the family — and that they had found several connections between them and the hijackers. The pages also include the FBI’s dismissals of those suspicions.
U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch, who presided over the Freedom of Information case, was unconvinced and demanded the FBI conduct another search of its records. This time,“the FBI found some additional responsive documents which it produced,” Juline told the Daily Beast. “But it also found 80,266 pages of material in the Tampa Field Office of the FBI which had been marked with the file number for the FBI’s PENTTBOM investigation.”
PENTTBOM was the FBI term for its investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Though the New York Post had previously reported on these 80,000 pages, the DoJ’s small release of documents clarified suspicions. Zloch ordered the FBI to hand over all the documents in May 2014 — and he is still going through them to determine which pages can be released. He has given no indication of when he will be finished.
The Daily Beast explained “Zloch’s task is made all the more painstaking by the strict security rules governing review of classified documents, even for a sitting judge. The files are kept in a secure facility, and he can only remove a portion at a time.”
It remains unclear how many of the 80,000 pages pertain directly to the Tampa FBI field office’s investigation of the family in Sarasota — and their ties to the attackers. Though Christensen says he’s ready to be proven wrong, he believes “those files will reveal the underlying reasons for the FBI’s early suspicions.”
As the Daily Beast laid out:

“The FBI, for instance, says that phone records searches showed no links to the house and the hijackers. Christensen’s confidential source says the opposite is true. If the FBI is right, Christensen asks, then why not just release the information and put the dispute to rest?”

The FBI has attempted to discredit the pages, claiming the agent who filed the first reports on the family and their potential connection to the hijackers was “not a good writer and should not be taken as the last word,” according to Graham. However, that agent was promoted shortly after 9/11, casting doubt on assertions they were incompetent.
In a similar evasion of accountability, President Obama vowed to block a legislative effort to release the 28 pages amid pressure from the Saudi Arabian government, which threatened to remove $750 billion in American assets should the legislation pass. The president cited concerns that allowing families of 9/11 victims to sue a foreign government could, in turn, open the United States government up to prosecution, itself. The White House has since indicated it intends to release part of the 28 pages.
Though Julin says the 28 pages likely aren’t linked to the Sarasota Saudi family, he hopes their eventual release “might help Judge Zloch see the wider significance of the events in Sarasota and persuade him that some or all of the records have not been properly classified.”
Last week, a former member of the 9/11 commission said he believes six Saudi officials supported the 9/11 hijackers. John F. Lehman said Wednesday, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”
The FBI’s trove of documents also requires further examination. Julin dismissed suspicions Judge Zloch is intentionally lagging in his investigation of the 80,000 pages. “I believe this is not a stalling tactic at all,” he said. “The judge is doing what he has to comply” with the stringent rules surrounding the release of the classified documents. “But I would urge him to speed it up,” he said.

Disturbing Claim – FBI Interrogated Former Senator for Wanting “28 Pages” Declassified

Posted on May 9, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/05/disturbing-claim-fbi-interrogated-former-senator-wanting-28-pages-declassified.html 

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
While extremely disturbing, I can’t say the following is particularly surprising.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is criticizing the Obama administration as having tried to strong-arm a former senator who is pushing to declassify 28 pages of the 9/11 report dealing with Saudi Arabia.
He recounted how Rep. Gwen Graham (D-Fla.) and her father, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.), were detained by the FBI in 2011 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. The message from the agents, according to the Grahams, was to quit pushing for declassification of the 28 pages.The FBI “took a former senator, a former governor, grabbed him in an airport, hustled him into a room with armed force to try to intimidate him into taking different positions on issues of public policy and important national policy, and the fact that he wasn’t intimidated because he was calm doesn’t show that they weren’t trying to intimidate him,” Sherman said in an interview with The Hill’s Molly K. Hooper.

This actually makes perfect sense. As I highlighted in last year’s post, The New York Post Reports – FBI is Covering Up Saudi Links to 9/11 Attack:

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis’ “urgent” pre-9/11 exit suggests “someone may have tipped them off” about the coming attacks.

Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush.
“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 said, adding, “I am speaking of the kingdom,” or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.
Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks — which, if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government.

This is Your Government: Protecting the criminals from the people.

9/11 Commission Did Not Exonerate Saudis

Posted on April 29, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/911-commission-not-exonerate-saudis.html 

By Kristen Breitweiser, one of the four 9/11 widows – known as the “Jersey Girls” – instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks. Follow Kristen Breitweiser on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kdbreitweiser.

Americans are not used to reading investigative pieces of journalism. We like to tweet and text in small bites. But here’s the thing. Sometimes, the most important things can’t be explained in 15 bites or less. Sometimes, it takes more space and time. And so I ask everyone who is reading this blog to please read it in its entirety — especially the bold parts. And, if you care about our country, if you care about peace, and keeping American lives safe from terrorists, pay attention to what is being said here — and never forget it.

The time has come to clarify some inaccuracies and misleading statements being made in the media regarding the 28 pages, the 9/11 attacks, the investigation of the 9/11 attacks, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). In doing so, perhaps the American public will come to understand the importance of passing JASTA (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act) and releasing the 28 pages in their entirety.

The 9/11 Commission’s mandate was to not replicate, but rather to expand upon the investigation of the JICI. The JICI was the Joint Intelligence Committee’s Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, headed by Senator Bob Graham and Congressman Porter Goss. The JICI is where the 28 pages originated. Furthermore, the JICI made a finding of fact and final recommendation that further investigation into the role of KSA and the 9/11 attacks needed to be done, immediately. Therefore, the 9/11 Commission should have carried out this further investigation of the KSA and 9/11. But, they did not. It is only the 9/11 families and intrepid journalists who have continued to investigate the Saudi role for the past twelve years.

As reported and documented in The New York Time’s national security correspondent Philip Shenon’s book, “The Commission,” Staff Director of the 9/11 Commission, Phil Zelikow, actively worked against any thorough investigation into the KSA and its role in the 9/11 attacks.
So, when two JICI staffers were brought over to the 9/11 Commission to continue their work on the links between the KSA and the 9/11 attacks, they were blocked by Zelikow. Zelikow fired one investigator when she tried to access the 28 pages as part of her further investigation and work for the commission. And, the second staffer (who was the person responsible for writing the 28 pages in the first place when he worked on the JICI) was actively thwarted from his investigation by Zelikow, as well. In fact, once the 9/11 Commission report was in its final draft form, Zelikow “re-wrote” the entire section that dealt with the Saudis—leaving out vital, highly pertinent, and extremely damning information.
Thus, when a person says the 9/11 Commission, “found no evidence linking the Saudis,” be wary of the cute context of the words. The 9/11 commission “found no evidence” because they were either never allowed to look for any evidence or whatever evidence they did find was conveniently written out of the final report, compliments of Phil Zelikow.
Why would Zelikow block his own investigation? No one knows for sure, but for starters, Zelikow was taking regular phone calls from Karl Rove whose job at the time was to ramp up the drumbeat for the war in Iraq—not a war with Saudi Arabia.

In addition, Zelikow was part of the Bush transition team and good friends with Condoleeza Rice. In fact, it was Zelikow’s job to brief the incoming Bush Administration about national security issues. It’s safe to say that the “sleeper cells” living inside the U.S., and the other facets of the Saudi nexus of help for the 9/11 hijackers was not something Zelikow was eager to delve into while on the Bush transition team or as Staff Director of the 9/11 Commission.
Had the information regarding the Saudis and 9/11 been properly and fully investigated by the 9/11 Commission, and had that investigation continued thereafter, the facts surrounding the FBI and CIA and their collective failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, would have certainly come to further light. Let’s not forget the Director of the FBI’s unacceptable “handling” and “covering up” of several Saudi accomplices before and after the 9/11 attacks by permitting them to leave the country, evade arrest, and prosecution.
Suffice it to say, both the JICI and the 9/11 Commission clearly document that prior to the 9/11 attacks, the KSA was not as helpful as it could be with regard to providing access to al Qaeda prisoners, stopping the flow of money to UBL, and/or sharing information with regard to UBL.

But most importantly, both the JICI and the 9/11 Commission provide plenty of statements, facts, and findings that show KSA aided, abetted and had roots and connections to the 9/11 hijackers. In short, there’s likely a very good reason that the name “Saudi Arabia” appears more often in both reports than names like Iran, Syria, and Iraq.
The JICI Finding #15 states, “Regarding Saudi Arabia, the Committee heard testimony from U.S. government personnel that Saudi officials had been uncooperative and often did not act on information implicating Saudi nationals. According to a U.S. government official, it was clear from about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden…a number of U.S. government officials complained to the Joint Inquiry about a lack of Saudi cooperation in terrorism investigations both before and after the September 11th attacks.“
The JICI Finding #20 states, “Through its investigation, the Joint Inquiry developed information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the U.S. The Joint Inquiry’s review confirmed that the Intelligence Community also has information, much of which has yet to be independently verified, concerning these potential sources of support. In their testimony, neither CIA nor FBI officials were able to address definitively the extent of such support for the hijackers globally or within the U.S. or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature…This gap in U.S. intelligence coverage is unacceptable, given the magnitude and immediacy of the potential risk to U.S. national security. The Intelligence Community needs to address this area of concern as aggressively and quickly as possible.
The JICI’s Final Recommendation # 19, “The Intelligence Community and particularly the FBI and the CIA should aggressively address the possibility that foreign governments are providing support to or are involved in terrorist activity targeting the U.S. and U.S. interests. State sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more lethal attacks within the U.S. This issue must be addressed from a national standpoint and should not be limited in focus by the geographical and factual boundaries of individual cases. The FBI and CIA should aggressively and thoroughly pursue related matters developed through this Joint Inquiry that have been referred to them for further investigation by these Committees.
Commission Staff Statement #5, “Diplomacy” states, “the Saudis were reluctant or unable to provide much help.“ The Staff Statement concludes, “before 9/11 the Saudi and U.S. governments did not achieve full sharing of important intelligence information or develop an adequate joint effort to track and disrupt the finances of the al Qaeda organization.”
Commission Staff Statement #8, “National Policy Coordination” states, “in June 1999, National Security Adviser Berger and Clarke summarized for President Clinton what had been accomplished against bin Laden. An active program to disrupt al Qaeda cells around the world was underway and recording some success. The efforts to track bin Laden’s finances with help from Saudi Arabia had not yet been successful.”

Bush Administration National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice’s testimony before the commission states, “Under [Bush’s] leadership, the U.S. and our allies are disrupting terrorist operations, cutting off their funding and hunting down terrorists one by one. Their world is getting smaller. The terrorists have lost a home base and training camps in Afghanistan. The governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia now pursue them with energy and force.”
Upon questioning by 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman, Condoleeza Rice was asked, “Were you aware of the activities of the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs here in the United States during the transition? And Rice replied, “I believe that only after September 11th did the full extent of what was going on with the Ministry of Religious Affairs become evident.”
Lehman continued, “Were you aware of the extensive activities of the Saudi government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here in the United States?“ Rice replied, “I believe we’ve learned a great deal more about this and addressed it with the Saudi government since 9/11.”
Staff Statement #9, “Law Enforcement, Counterterrorism, and Intelligence Collection in the United States Prior to 9/11” in its “Terrorist Financing” section states, “Prior to September 11, these FBI offices had been able to gain a basic understanding of some of the largest and most problematic terrorist financing conspiracies that have since been identified. The agents understood that there was a network of extremist organizations operating within the U.S. supporting a global Islamic jihad movement. They did not know the degree to which these extremist groups were associated with al Qaeda…The FBI operated a web of informants, conducted electronic surveillance, and had opened investigations in a number of field offices. Numerous field offices including New York, San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit had significant intelligence investigations into groups that appeared to be raising money for Islamic extremist groups. Many of these groups appeared to the FBI to have some connection to either al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.”
The 9/11 Commission’s Final Report states, “When Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fund-raising efforts drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals…Al Qaeda appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors…particularly in Saudi Arabia. Some surely knew the ultimate destination of their donations. It does not appear that any government other than the Taliban financially supported al Qaeda before 9/11, although some governments may have contained al Qaeda sympathizers who turned a blind eye to al Qaeda’s fundraising activities. Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government individually funded the organization. This conclusion does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda found fertile fund-raising ground in Saudi Arabia, where extreme religious views are common and charitable giving was both essential to the culture and subject to very limited oversight. To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks.“ (170-172)
Of particular note is footnote #86 from Chapter 6, “From Threat to Threat” that states, “CIA analytic reports, “Usama Bin Ladin: Some Saudi Financial Ties Probably Intact,” OTI IR 99-005CX, Jan 11, 1999, “How Bin Ladin Commands a Global Terrorist Network,” CTC 99-40003, Jan 27, 1999, “Islamic Terrorists: Using Nongovernmental Organizations Extensively,” CTC 99-40007, April 9, 1999.
Also of note, footnote #29 from Chapter 7, “The Attack Looms,” that details a description of the two San Diego hijackers Hazmi and al Mihdhar stating, “He recalled Hazmi and al Mihdar arriving at the mosque on their own and describing themselves as clerks employed by the Saudi Arabian government. The two said they needed help finding a school where they could study English which neither spoke well enough. The mosque administrator suspected that Mihdar might have been an intelligence agent of the Saudi government… We have no evidence contradicting the administrator’s account.
From these statements, it can be seen that there was clearly a “network of extremist organizations operating within the U.S. supporting a global Islamic Jihad movement.” In addition, it seems crystal clear that at least one foreign government was supporting these networks of extremist organizations. As stated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups is Saudi Arabia. Clinton stated, “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups.”
It’s my opinion that the 28 pages will clarify the network of Saudis that supported the 9/11 hijackers. This network will likely have links to the Saudi Islamic Affair Ministry—“well known in intelligence circles to be the Saudi’s fifth column in support of Muslim extremists.” In addition, clarification of the roles and connections to the 9/11 hijackers of several people will also likely happen with the release of the 28 pages. These people include: Fahad al Thumairy, Omar al Bayoumi, Osama Bassnan, Anwar Awlaki, and Eyad al Rababah. Go ahead and google them. The damning facts are plain to see.
More notably, the 28 pages will likely reveal that the FBI and CIA had open investigations with several of the aforementioned people both before and after the 9/11 attacks. This fact, alone, will prove to be uncomfortable since it will be difficult to explain why the 9/11 attacks were not prevented.

Furthermore, it will be difficult to understand why certain facts involving the aforementioned individuals were conveniently ignored and not fully investigated after the 9/11 attacks by the FBI, CIA, and the 9/11 Commission.
So, please do me a favor: when you hear someone shrieking about all the dangerous reciprocal lawsuits being created as a result of the 9/11 families wanting to hold funders of mass murder accountable, look carefully into those good people’s involvement with the Saudis or less than successful intelligence policies.

And when you hear about certain Senators who outright or secretly oppose legislation that would ensure nations like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are held accountable for their funding of mass terrorism attacks, check to see what their involvement with the KSA has been for the past fifteen years.

Finally, when you notice a person speaking out against ordinary citizens’ undeniable right to hold mass murderers accountable, look ever so closely and carefully because most likely there’s a reason they’re worried – and it’s got nothing to do with this nation’s well-being.
President Obama tells us we will have to wait another 60 days for the release of the 28 pages. I certainly hope that the President recognizes that anything less than the release of the full 28 pages will be seen as further proof of this government’s cover up of Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks.

The clock is ticking …and the 9/11 families, along with the rest of America, are paying close attention.

(9/11 widows Patty Casazza, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg, and Lorie Van Auken also sign their names to this blog)

Why Obama's Campaign to Shield Saudi Arabia From Scrutiny Erodes Human Rights Around the World

The president is aggressively lobbying against 9/11 families seeking to sue the Saudi government.

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet

April 20, 2016

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/why-obamas-campaign-shield-saudi-arabia-scrutiny-erodes-human-rights-around-world

King Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia bids farewell to President Barack Obama at Erga Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 27, 2015.
Photo Credit: Pete Souza/Public Domain

When President Barack Obama was preparing for his third presidential visit to Saudi Arabia last year, he made it clear that the close U.S. ally’s human rights abuses would not be up for discussion. “Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability," he told CNN in January 2015 in anticipation of his first face-to-face with then-newly minted King Salman.
During the year that has lapsed between his third and now fourth presidential visit to Riyadh (currently taking place), Obama has done more than simply withhold criticism from the kingdom. He has politically and militarily backed Saudi Arabia’s murderous war on Yemen, which has been waged for over a year with U.S.-manufactured arms. He has stood by as the government carried out a rash of politically motivated executions, including the killing of prominent dissident and protest leader Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr.
Throughout Obama’s presidency, Saudi Arabia has remained a top importer of U.S.-manufactured weapons, including the tanks the government used to invade Bahrain in 2011 and help violently repress its pro-democracy movements. On its own soil, the kingdom has maintained an oppressive system of male legal guardianship, under which women can’t obtain higher education or even a passport without approval from a father, husband or son. It’s an understatement to point out that the president has strayed far from his 2002 call to “make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people.”
“The Obama administration has supported and created the worst human rights conditions in Gulf countries ever,” Ali Al-Ahmed,the director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, told AlterNet.
But now, the special relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is giving rise to bizarre developments in domestic politics, as the president aggressively lobbies to shield the kingdom from legal charges over its potential role in the 9/11 attacks, including by campaigning against bereaved U.S. families.
Suspicions stem from George W. Bush’s decision to seal a 28-page section of the 2002 congressional 9/11 inquiry that dealt with the potential role of Saudi officials. While members of Congress are prohibited from revealing the contents of the section, some have spoken on and off the record about its potential implication of Saudi government officials and associates. Former Senator Bob Graham declared as recently as February, "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.”
Families who lost loved ones to the attacks have waged a years-long legal battle to sue Saudi Arabia, as well as banks and charities, for their alleged support. But they have been obstructed by laws that limit that ability of U.S. courts to sue some foreign sovereigns.
A proposed Senate bill known as the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act would overrule these limitations if passed by Congress and the president, clearing the way for families to seek accountability. The legislation “is intended to make clear that the immunity given to foreign nations under the law should not apply in cases where nations are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill Americans on United States soil,” wrote Mark Mazzetti in a New York Times cover story published Saturday.
In response to the proposed bill, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir traveled to Washington last month, "telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts,” Mazzetti reports.
While it is not clear if Saudi Arabia will follow through on the threat, the Obama administration is aggressively lobbying against the legislation and is even threatening to veto the bill if it lands on the president’s desk. “Given the long list of concerns I have expressed ... it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the president would sign the bill as it's currently drafted,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday. “It could put the United States and our taxpayers and our service members and our diplomats at significant risk if other countries were to adopt a similar law,” he argued, adding: “The whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake.”
Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told AlterNet that the reason Obama is lobbying against the bill “probably has less to do with protecting Saudi Arabia than fearing there could be reciprocity and worrying that other countries will bring charges, given that the U.S. has violated the Geneva Conventions and laws of war around the world.”
In fact, people impacted by U.S. war and occupation around the world have protested and spoken out against American immunity for war crimes, including in Afghanistan where such protections are included in a long-term, interventionist "security" deal. Whether or not the Obama administration is opposing the bill to protect itself or placate its ally, the campaign aims to restrict the powers of ordinary people to seek redress for state violence.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to resist efforts to force the release of the 28 pages. When Press Secretary John Kirby was asked Tuesday by an unnamed reporter about the missing 28 pages, he snapped back that “for us to sit here, this many years later, and try to debate it I think is just a fool’s errand.”
These comments come despite the fact that the Saudi government has reportedly come out in support of the release.
Talat Hamdani, a member of the advocacy organization 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, told AlterNet, “Those pages need to be revealed. As a mother who lost my son to the September 11th attacks, I want the perpetrators to be accountable. In order to have justice, we need to have hard facts.”
Noting that she is not speaking on behalf of her organization, Hamdani added that she does support Obama's decision to oppose the Just Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Her position diverges sharply from that of Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the 9/11 attacks. “It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” Kleinberg told Mazzetti.
In fact, U.S. opposition to full scrutiny of the Saudi role in financing terror is relevant not only to U.S. citizens but also to people across the Middle East impacted by violence and displacement. This reality was privately acknowledged by Hillary Clinton in a 2009 cable exposed by WikiLeaks, in which she stated: "Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Continued senior-level USG engagement is needed to build on initial efforts and encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide.”
According to Bennis, “There is a lot of uncertainty about whether it’s been the king or crowned prince or other royal family members or government-backed institutions, but it is clear that someone is giving money to ISIS."
The Obama administration will not even release information about the kingdom’s potential role in an attack on U.S. soil, let alone bloodshed in Iraq and Syria, even amid signs that blind support for Saudi Arabia is growing increasingly politically unviable. Earlier this year, grassroots activists, dissidents and human rights campaigners gathered in Washington D.C. to raise concern about the special relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And a bipartisan team of senators announced last week they are introducing legislation to "set new conditions for U.S. military support to Saudi Arabia."
“I believe the whole world today is starting to recognize the problem of human rights violations in Saudi Arabia,” Mohammed Nimr al-Nimr, the son of the executed Saudi dissident, told AlterNet. But, he added that Obama’s visit shows “agreement and support to all human rights violations in Saudi Arabia.”
Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet.

Sue Saudi for 9/11 and U.S. for all its wars

Posted on April 19, 2016 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/sue-saudi-911-u-s-wars.html 

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry say that allowing family members of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its complicity in that crime would set a terrible precedent that would open the United States up to lawsuits from abroad.
Wonderful! Let the lawsuits rain down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!
Suing Saudis over 9/11 will only set a precedent if it succeeds, which is to say if there is evidence of Saudi complicity. We know that there is, according to former Senator Bob Graham and others who have read 28 pages censored from a U.S. Senate report. Pressure is building in Congress both to reveal those 28 pages and to allow lawsuits. And yet another Senate bill gaining support would block further U.S. arming of Saudi Arabia.
The precedent of allowing international victims to sue those complicit in murder would not place you, dear reader, or I at risk of any lawsuits. It would, however, put numerous top U.S. officials and former officials at risk of suits from many corners of the globe, including from the seven nations that President Obama has bragged about bombing: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. It’s not as if any of these wars is legal under Kellogg-Briand or the U.N. Charter.

Combined with the possible precedent of allowing victims of U.S. domestic gun violence to sue gun manufacturers, the possibility could emerge for countless parents, children, and siblings of U.S. killings in countless countries to begin suing Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.
Even just the precedent of allowing suits against Saudi Arabia could have far-reaching consequences before expanding it to other countries. Imagine if Yemenis could sue Saudis for the current slaughter from the air? If they could, then what about Boeing? And what about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who allowed Boeing to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia after Boeing gave her family foundation $900,000 and Saudi Arabia gave over $10 million?
In her last ditch effort at the presidency, Clinton has joined Senator Bernie Sanders in claiming that she supports allowing 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia — something she is highly unlikely to take any other steps to advance.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell off $750 billion worth of U.S. properties. (No word on whether Hillary Clinton is listed among those properties.) I say let the sales commence! Let the U.S. government take three-quarter’s of one-year’s military spending, buy those properties, and give them to the public or use them to compensate the people of Yemen. Or freeze those assets now without buying them, and give them to the U.S. and Yemeni people.
Of course, Obama and Kerry may be raising the notion of a precedent for suing the U.S. mostly as cover for the fact that they are showing greater loyalty to the Saudi royalty than to 9/11 victims. The U.S. public needs only the slightest excuse to avoid recognizing where its rulers true loyalties lie. Italy has convicted CIA agents of kidnapping to torture, and never sought their extradition. Pakistani courts have already ruled against U.S. drone murders, and the U.S. has failed to so much as yawn in response. The U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court, and claims a unique status outside the rule of law — a rogue status for which it would urge sanctions on any other nation claiming something similar while possessing too much oil or not enough U.S. weaponry.
Still, precedents can be set politically and legally, even against the will of one of the parties involved. For U.S. foreign policy to be compelled to treat 9/11 as the crime that it was, a crime committed by certain individuals, could mean a few important things: (1) a serious investigation of 9/11, (2) rejection of the idea that 9/11 was part of a war launched by the entire world, or the Muslim portion of the world, and in which the United States is entitled to seek revenge thousands of times over and without limits in time or space, (3) greater understanding that U.S. terrorism, just like 9/11 but on a larger scale, is criminal activity for which particular individuals can be held accountable.
What could answer the deepest needs of the 9/11 victims and family members could also answer many needs of U.S. victims in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, etc., and that is a truth and reconciliation commission. Getting to that will be accomplished by precedents and changes in thinking in our culture, not by any particular legal development. Such a procedure would be a success if afterwards the U.S. and Saudi and other governments began paying reparations in the form of humanitarian aid, costing them far less than they are now putting into wars, but doing a world of good for people rather than the criminal harm being done right now and for years past.

Obama Arrives In Saudi Arabia To "Reassure" His Close Ally That Nothing Has Changed

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/20/2016 08:42 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-20/obama-arrives-saudi-arabia-reassure-his-close-ally-nothing-has-changed
While Congress is scrambling to sweep the recently introduced Bipartisan bill that would allow US families to sue Saudi Arabia for Sept 11, Barack Obama has just landed in Saudi Arabia to reassure his close ally that all is under control.

President Obama with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef,
center, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in May 2015
As the WSJ reports, Obama arrived today in the Saudi kingdom for a brief trip "meant to provide reassurances to Gulf allies and to bolster his own foreign-policy legacy."

With just nine months left in office, Mr. Obama is aiming to steady what have become rocky relationships in the region and to tackle issues ranging from the fight against Islamic State to addressing Iranian aggression, along with easing tensions between Tehran and Saudi Arabia. But in Riyadh, the president will find frustrated allies who already have begun to look ahead to the next administration.

Obama plans to spend about 28 hours in the Saudi capital, holding talks with King Salman Wednesday afternoon and attending a Thursday summit hosted by leaders of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. This trip, perhaps the last to Riyadh during Mr. Obama’s presidency, serves as a bookend for an administration that once sought a “new beginning” for the U.S. and the Islamic world, but now is confronting the prospect of a tense conclusion to this chapter.
Of course, the main reason for the simmering Saudi tensions has been the thawing of US relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia's self-proclaimed biggest regional threat.
Meanwhile, from the NYT, here are some pointers on what Obama should not do during his visit: sell even more weapons to the belligerent kingdom in exchange for goodwill that only lasts as long as the status quo is not threatened.

When President Obama visits Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with representatives from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, he should avoid doing what he did at Camp David last May, the last time he met with them: promise more arms sales. Since Mr. Obama hosted that meeting, the United States has offered over $33 billion in weaponry to its Persian Gulf allies, with the bulk of it going to Saudi Arabia. The results have been deadly.

The Saudi-American arms deals are a continuation of a booming business that has developed between Washington and Riyadh during the Obama years. In the first six years of the Obama administration, the United States entered into agreements to transfer nearly $50 billion in weaponry to Saudi Arabia, with tens of billions of dollars of additional offers in the pipeline.

The Pentagon claims that these arms transfers to Saudi Arabia “improve the security of an important partner which has been and continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.” Recent Saudi actions suggest otherwise.

The Obama administration says that it has urged restraint from the Saudis, but that doesn’t appear to have worked. Human Rights Watch has reported that two Saudi strikes on a market in the Yemeni village of Mastaba in mid-March killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. This was just one in a series of Saudi strikes on marketplaces, hospitals and other civilian targets, attacks that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said may constitute war crimes.

Alas, Obama is in a bind: threaten to expose Saudi involvement in Sept 11, or dare to suggest that the US military-industrial supply chain into Saudi Arabia is slowing, and the response is already clear: a threat to dump hundreds of billions in US securities. Which is why Obama has zero leverage and will fold to any Saudi demand presented during his meetings today.

Obama: We Can’t Let Truth Come Out About Saudi Involvement In 9/11, Or Else America’s Terrorism Will Be Revealed

Posted on April 18, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog

Obama told CBS News today that we can’t allow bipartisan legislation subjecting the Saudis to potential liability for terrorism … or else other countries could retaliate against the US (starting at 0:40):

See video HERE:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/obama-cant-let-truth-come-saudi-involvement-911-else-americas-terrorism-will-revealed.html

Similarly, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said today:

“The whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake,” Earnest told reporters Monday. “It could put the United States, and our taxpayers, and our service members and our diplomats at significant risk, if other countries were to adopt a similar law.”

As Cal Thomas points out at the Washington Times:

The intent of the Senate bill is to clarify the immunity normally given to foreign governments. It says such immunity should not apply when nations are found culpable of committing terrorist attacks that kill Americans on U.S. soil.

Why would the U.S. be worried about retaliation by other countries … being held accountable for terrorism?
Well, the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom – noted:

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

And – while Saudi Arabia is certainly a huge sponsor of terrorism worldwide – experts from the right and the left agree that the U.S. is actually the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism. And see this.

Postscript:  Of course, it would be nice if everyone – including both the Saudis and Americans – moved past this and stopped committing terror.
But it doesn’t seem like either country is willing to commit to that …

28 Pages

Former Sen. Bob Graham and others urge the Obama administration to declassify redacted pages of a report that holds 9/11 secrets

• 2016 Apr 10
• Correspondent Steve Kroft
• http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/04/11/60-minutes-lawmakers-say-redacted-pages-of-911-report-shows-saudi-official-met-hijackers-in-la/ 

The following script is from "28 Pages" which aired on April 10, 2016. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Howard Rosenberg and Julie Holstein, producers.
In 10 days, President Obama will visit Saudi Arabia at a time of deep mistrust between the two allies, and lingering doubts about the Saudi commitment to fighting violent Islamic extremism.
It also comes at a time when the White House and intelligence officials are reviewing whether to declassify one of the country's most sensitive documents -- known as the "28 pages." They have to do with 9/11 and the possible existence of a Saudi support network for the hijackers while they were in the U.S.

For 13 years, the 28 pages have been locked away in a secret vault. Only a small group of people have ever seen them. Tonight, you will hear from some of the people who have read them and believe, along with the families of 9/11 victims that they should be declassified.
Bob Graham: I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn't have a high school education-- could've carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States.

60 Minutes Overtime

How to report on a top-secret document

Steve Kroft: And you believe that the 28 pages are crucial to this? Understand...
Bob Graham: I think they are a key part.
Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham has been trying to get the 28 pages released since the day they were classified back in 2003, when he played a major role in the first government investigation into 9/11.
Bob Graham: I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report.
At the time, Graham was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chair of the bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks. The Joint Inquiry reviewed a half a million documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and produced an 838 page report -- minus the final chapter which was blanked out -- excised by the Bush administration for reasons of national security.

"I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report."

Bob Graham won't discuss the classified information in the 28 pages, he will say only that they outline a network of people that he believes supported the hijackers while they were in the U.S.
Steve Kroft: You believe that support came from Saudi Arabia?
Bob Graham: Substantially.
Steve Kroft: And when we say, "The Saudis," you mean the government, the--
Bob Graham: I mean--
Steve Kroft: --rich people in the country? Charities--
Bob Graham: All of the above.
Graham and others believe the Saudi role has been soft-pedaled to protect a delicate relationship with a complicated kingdom where the rulers, royalty, riches and religion are all deeply intertwined in its institutions.

Bob Graham

CBS News

Porter Goss, who was Graham's Republican co-chairman on the House side of the Joint Inquiry, and later director of the CIA, also felt strongly that an uncensored version of the 28 pages should be included in the final report. The two men made their case to the FBI and its then-director Robert Mueller in a face-to-face meeting.
Porter Goss: And they pushed back very hard on the 28 pages and they said, "No, that cannot be unclassified at this time."
Steve Kroft: Did you happen to ask the FBI director why it was classified?
Porter Goss: We did, in a general way, and the answer was because, "We said so and it needs to be classified."
Goss says he knew of no reason then and knows of no reason now why the pages need to be classified. They are locked away under the capital in guarded vaults called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs in government jargon. This is as close as we could get with our cameras -- a highly restricted area where members of Congress with the proper clearances can read the documents under close supervision. No note-taking allowed.
Tim Roemer: It's all gotta go up here, Steve.
Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman and U.S. ambassador to India, has read the 28 pages multiple times. First as a member of the Joint Inquiry and later as a member of the blue-ribbon 9/11 Commission which picked up where Congress' investigation left off.
Steve Kroft: How hard is it to actually read these 28 pages?
Tim Roemer: Very hard. These are tough documents to get your eyes on.
Roemer and others who have actually read the 28 pages, describe them as a working draft similar to a grand jury or police report that includes provocative evidence -- some verified, and some not. They lay out the possibility of official Saudi assistance for two of the hijackers who settled in Southern California. That information from the 28-pages was turned over to the 9/11 Commission for further investigation. Some of the questions raised were answered in the commission's final report. Others were not.
Steve Kroft: Is there information in the 28 pages that, if they were declassified, would surprise people?
Tim Roemer: Sure, you're gonna be surprised by it. And, you're going to be surprised by some of the answers that are sitting there today in the 9/11 Commission report about what happened in San Diego, and what happened in Los Angeles. And what was the Saudi involvement.
Much of that surprising information is buried in footnotes and appendices of the 9/11 report -- part of the official public record, but most of it unknown to the general public. These are some, but not all of the facts:
In January of 2000, the first of the hijackers landed in Los Angeles after attending an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The two Saudi nationals, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived with extremely limited language skills and no experience with Western culture. Yet, through an incredible series of circumstances, they managed to get everything they needed, from housing to flight lessons.
Tim Roemer: L.A., San Diego, that's really you know, the hornet's nest. That's really the one that I continue to think about almost on a daily basis.
During their first days in L.A., witnesses place the two future hijackers at the King Fahd mosque in the company of Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate known to hold extremist views. Later, 9/11 investigators would find him deceptive and suspicious and in 2003, he would be denied reentry to the United States for having suspected ties to terrorist activity.
Tim Roemer: This is a very interesting person in the whole 9/11 episode of who might've helped whom-- in Los Angeles and San Diego, with two terrorists who didn't know their way around.
Phone records show that Thumairy was also in regular contact with this man: Omar al-Bayoumi, a mysterious Saudi who became the hijackers biggest benefactor. He was a ghost employee with a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor outside Los Angeles while drawing a paycheck from the Saudi government.
Steve Kroft: You believe Bayoumi was a Saudi agent?
Bob Graham: Yes, and--
Steve Kroft: What makes you believe that?
Bob Graham: --well, for one thing, he'd been listed even before 9/11 in FBI files as being a Saudi agent.
On the morning of February 1, 2000, Bayoumi went to the office of the Saudi consulate where Thumairy worked. He then proceeded to have lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant on Venice Boulevard where he later claimed he just happened to make the acquaintance of the two future hijackers.
Tim Roemer: Hazmi and Mihdhar magically run into Bayoumi in a restaurant that Bayoumi claims is a coincidence and in one of the biggest cities in the United States.
Steve Kroft: And he decides to befriend them.
Tim Roemer: He decides to not only befriend them but then to help them move to San Diego and get residence.
In San Diego, Bayoumi found them a place to live in his own apartment complex, advanced them the security deposit and cosigned the lease. He even threw them a party and introduced them to other Muslims who would help the hijackers obtain government IDs and enroll in English classes and flight schools. There's no evidence that Bayoumi or Thumairy knew what the future hijackers were up to, and it is possible that they were just trying to help fellow Muslims.
The very day Bayoumi welcomed the hijackers to San Diego, there were four calls between his cell phone and the imam at a San Diego mosque, Anwar al-Awlaki, a name that should sound familiar.
The American-born Awlaki would be infamous a decade later as al Qaeda's chief propagandist and top operative in Yemen until he was taken out by a CIA drone. But in January 2001, a year after becoming the hijackers' spiritual adviser, he left San Diego for Falls Church, Virginia. Months later Hazmi, Mihdhar and three more hijackers would join him there.
Tim Roemer: Those are a lot of coincidences, and that's a lot of smoke. Is that enough to make you squirm and uncomfortable, and dig harder-- and declassify these 28 pages? Absolutely.
Perhaps, no one is more interested in reading the 28 pages than attorneys Jim Kreindler and Sean Carter who represent family members of the 9/11 victims in their lawsuit against the kingdom. Alleging that its' institutions provided money to al Qaeda knowing that it was waging war against the United States.
Jim Kreindler: What we're doing in court is developing the story that has to come out. But it's been difficult for us because for many years, we weren't getting the kind of openness and cooperation that we think our government owes to the American people, particularly the families of people who were murdered.
The U.S. government has even backed the Saudi position in court--that it can't be sued because it enjoys sovereign immunity. The 9/11 Commission report says that Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding through its' wealthy citizens and charities with significant government sponsorship. But the sentence that got the most attention when the report came out is this:
"We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization."
Attorney Sean carter says it's the most carefully crafted line in the 9/11 Commission report and the most misunderstood.
Sean Carter: When they say they found no evidence that senior Saudi officials individually funded al Qaeda, they conspicuously leave open the potential that they found evidence that people who were officials that they did not regard as senior officials had done so. That is the essence of the families' lawsuit. That elements of the government and lower level officials sympathetic to bin Laden's cause helped al Qaeda carry out the attacks and help sustain the al Qaeda network.
Yet, for more than a decade, the kingdom has maintained that that one sentence exonerated it of any responsibility for 9/11 r­­egardless of what might be in the 28 pages.
Bob Kerrey: It's not an exoneration. What we said--we did not, with this report, exonerate the Saudis.
Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey is another of the 10-member 9/11 Commission who has read the 28 pages and believes they should be declassified. He filed an affidavit in support of the 9/11 families' lawsuit.
Bob Kerrey: You can't provide the money for terrorists and then say, "I don't have anything to do with what they're doing."
Steve Kroft: Do you believe that all of the leads that were developed in the 28 pages were answered in the 9/11 report? All the questions?
Bob Kerrey: No. No. In general, the 9/11 Commission did not get every single detail of the conspiracy. We didn't. We didn't have the time, we didn't have the resources. We certainly didn't pursue the entire line of inquiry in regard to Saudi Arabia.
Steve Kroft: Do you think all of these things in San Diego can be explained as coincidence?
John Lehman: I don't believe in coincidences.
John Lehman, who was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, says that he and the others make up a solid majority of former 9/11 commissioners who think the 28 pages should be made public.
John Lehman: We're not a bunch of rubes that rode into Washington for this commission. I mean, we, you know, we've seen fire and we've seen rain and the politics of national security. We all have dealt for our careers in highly classified and compartmentalized in every aspect of security. We know when something shouldn't be declassified. An the, this, those 28 pages in no way fall into that category.
Lehman has no doubt that some high Saudi officials knew that assistance was being provided to al Qaeda, but he doesn't think it was ever official policy. He also doesn't think that it absolves the Saudis of responsibility.
John Lehman: It was no accident that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. They all went to Saudi schools. They learned from the time they were first able to go to school of this intolerant brand of Islam.
Lehman is talking about Wahhabism, the ultra conservative, puritanical form of Islam that is rooted here and permeates every facet of society. There is no separation of church and state. After, oil, Wahhabism is one of the kingdom's biggest exports. Saudi clerics, entrusted with Islam's holiest shrines have immense power and billions of dollars to spread the faith. Building mosques and religious schools all over the world that have become recruiting grounds for violent extremists. 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman says all of this comes across in the 28 pages.
John Lehman: This is not going to be a smoking gun that is going to cause a huge furor. But it does give a very compact illustration of the kinds of things that went on that would really help the American people to understand why, what, how, how is it that these people are springing up all over the world to go to jihad?
Tim Roemer: Look, the Saudis have even said they're for declassifying it. We should declassify it. Is it sensitive, Steve? Might it involve opening-- a bit, a can of worms, or some snakes crawling out of there? Yes. But I think we need a relationship with the Saudis where both countries are working together to fight against terrorism. And that's not always been the case.

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  Steve Kroft

  Few journalists have achieved the impact and recognition that Steve Kroft's 60 Minutes work has generated for over two decades. Kroft delivered his first report for 60 Minutes in 1989.

WTC Security Firm Held Its Meetings in Saudi Offices

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Kevin Ryan

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/04/wtc-security-firm-saudi-offices.html
There continues to be some limited interest in the many links between Saudi Arabia and the crimes of 9/11. Although those links often point back to powerful people in the U.S., the mainstream media tends to focus the story on Saudi Arabia alone. That seems to be due to the fact that control of natural resources in the Middle East is what really drives terrorism. Nonetheless, it’s important to continue revealing Saudi connections to 9/11 because they can help us understand what really happened.
One very interesting link is that Stratesec, the security company for the World Trade Center and other 9/11-impacted facilities, held its annual meetings in offices leased by Saudi Arabia. That fact highlights the glaring lack of investigation into the men who ran Stratesec.
For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission suspected Stratesec’s CEO, Wirt D. Walker, of 9/11 insider trading. Despite that documented suspicion and the SEC’s call for FBI investigation of Walker’s trades, neither the FBI nor the 9/11 Commission questioned Walker at all.
Stratesec had security contracts not only for the WTC complex, but also for Dulles airport—where American Airlines Flight 77 took off—and United Airlines, which owned two of the other three hijacked planes. The company’s directors and investors were an interesting group as was the chief operating officer, Barry McDaniel.

Walker was the son of a CIA officer and his activities paralleled those of known CIA operatives. Today, many of Walker’s colleagues have top-secret clearances, suggesting that, like his father, Walker has ties to U.S. intelligence.
Stratesec held its annual meetings in office space leased by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission. This was at the Watergate office building in Washington DC (2600 Virginia Ave, NW), in suite 900. Stratesec’s parent company, the Kuwait-American Corporation used that Saudi-leased office as its business address.
Some of Walker’s other businesses listed the Saudi Cultural Mission’s offices as their primary business address in SEC filings. This included Prism Entertainment, which made and distributed movies, and ILC Technology, a maker of “high intensity lamps.” Coincidentally, ILC’s subsidiary United Detector Technology made flash detectors that could be used for igniting explosives.
Walker’s company Aviation General also held its annual meetings in the Saudi-leased offices. What’s more, the operational offices for Aviation General are now occupied by Zacarias Moussaoui’s flight trainer.
U.S. politicians and media have no interest in these and other facts that link Saudi Arabia and the U.S. deep state to the crimes of 9/11. Apparently, it’s not the truth that drives the calls for more information about Saudi connections to 9/11, it’s only the possibility of gaining more control over Saudi resources.
Kevin Ryan blogs at Dig Within.