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Violent Jihad

Release the “28 Pages” of the 9/11 Report

Saudi Arabia's role in the worst terrorist attack on American soil has never been fully exposed.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | April 21, 2016

In preparation for the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda’s operatives had serious problems to overcome.  Through what CBS News calls “an incredible series of circumstances,” they were able to get everything they needed to carry out the attacks — including flight lessons.  In 28 classified pages of the 9/11 report, there are charges that Saudi intelligence met with and assisted the 9/11 hijackers on numerous occasions.  Now former NSA officer John R. Schindler, who has seen much of the classified information, writes that there remains real work to be done to expose Saudi Arabia’s role.

[T]he U.S. Government, even in highly classified channels, demonstrated a stunning lack of interest in running down possible Saudi connections to the Planes Operation. Nobody really wanted to know what Riyadh’s role might have been. Accepting that a close ally may have had some sort of hand in 9/11 was a possibility seemingly too awful for the George W. Bush White House to contemplate.

Worse, the Bush administration enabled numerous Saudi nationals—including some with worrying connections to the hijackers—to flee the United States after 9/11, preventing any real investigation from taking place. While it is overwrought to present this as a grand conspiracy, as some seek to do, Americans should have questions about what was going on here. At a minimum, the FBI seems to have stonewalled efforts to look into what some of those Saudis were up to in the months before the attacks.

This point dovetails with another former national security professional, former assistant US attorney Andy McCarthy.  He writes that the US national security establishment has “bored its head ever deeper in the sand” in trying to avoid struggling with the truth about the terrorist threat facing the United States.  One of the things that the national security establishment insists upon believing is that Saudi Arabia is a key ally in the war on terror (or whatever the Obama administration is now calling it).

McCarthy, who is not relying on classified material, is able to cite specific examples.  One of them is from Sarasota, Florida.  Abdulazziz al-Hijji, a son of one of the Saudi Crown Prince’s closest advisers, abruptly fled the country — leaving behind substantial wealth in real estate and automobiles — days before the 9/11 attacks.  Members of his household had attended the same flight school as the 9/11 killers.  Cars connected with those killers were seen as his house.  Yet he has never been brought to justice or been questioned about what he knows.

In Southern California, a Saudi diplomat (and radical imam) and a known Saudi government agent were tightly connected to two of the 9/11 attackers.  That agent also left the United States abruptly before the 9/11 attacks.  Anwar al-Awlaki was also tied to the 9/11 hijackers.  The FBI interviewed him several times, but allowed him to slip out of the country in 2002.  He was later killed in a drone strike while acting as a leading al Qaeda operative.

Releasing the 28 pages of the 9/11 report would be a good start on forcing the government to come to terms with Saudi Arabia’s support of terrorism.  At a minimum, it would prompt a public debate.  It might drive Congress to more completely fulfill its oversight role.  Perhaps the next President will take these matters seriously, especially if elected among the intense public anger that is likely to follow once people know the truth.

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