Why Is Saudia Arabia's Complicity in 9/11 Still Being Redacted?

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the ruins of the Twin Towers still smoldering, nothing stank to high heaven like the Bush administration unseemly haste to spirit various members of the Saudi “royal” family out of the United States as quickly as possible. Similarly, 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report, which apparently implicated the tribe in the financing and planning of the attacks, were redacted and remain unseen by the public to this day. Eleanor Clift, of all people, wonders why:

A story that might otherwise have slipped away in a morass of conspiracy theories gained new life Wednesday when former Sen. Bob Graham headlined a press conference on Capitol Hill to press for the release of 28 pages redacted from a Senate report on the 9/11 attacks. And according to Graham, the lead author of the report, the pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the 9/11 hijackers.

“This may seem stale to some but it’s as current as the headlines we see today,” Graham said, referring to the terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris. The pages are being kept under wraps out of concern their disclosure would hurt U.S. national security. But as chairman of the Senate Select Committee that issued the report in 2002, Graham argues the opposite is true, and that the real “threat to national security is non-disclosure.”

Graham said the redacted pages characterize the support network that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, and if that network goes unchallenged, it will only flourish. He said that keeping the pages classified is part of “a general pattern of coverup” that for 12 years has kept the American people in the dark. It is “highly improbable” the 19 hijackers acted alone, he said, yet the U.S. government’s position is “to protect the government most responsible for that network of support.”

Noting that the Senate Intelligence Committee recently released a no-holds-barred report documenting torture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Jack Quinn told The Daily Beast, “It’s rather bizarre that we would go to these great lengths to air this heretofore confidential information about how we reacted to 9/11, and at the same time we keep secret information about protecting those who helped launch the attack.”

A national tragedy was made even more shameful by the Bush administration’s feckless and misdirected response to the attacks, covering up for the Saudis while wasting blood and treasure to pointlessly overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq and nation-build in Afghanistan. When the history of the Obama administration is written, the history of the Bush administration must be considered as well. Saudi Arabia and Iran were always the real enemies, and the Bush administration’s failure to engage with them and neutralize them will have terrible consequences for America down the road.