Bush and Obama Joined at the Hip in Shameless Coverup of Anglo-Saudi 9/11- Part 2 | WPN World People News

The 28 Pages—Again

Under the law creating it, the 9/11 Commission was supposed to build its investigation upon the record of the Congressional Joint Inquiry. Graham was encouraged by the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission, and was hopeful that it would get to the bottom of what had gone on with the Saudis in San Diego—which his Congressional Inquiry had been unable to do, because of pressure and stonewalling by the White House and the FBI.

Two staff investigators from the Joint Inquiry, Justice Department lawyer Dana Leseman and FBI counterintelligence analyst Mike Jacobson, were brought onto the Commission staff, at the suggestion of one of the Democratic Commissioners, former Rep. Tim Roemer. Jacobson had been the primary author of the suppressed 28 pages.

Both Leseman and Jacobson were familiar with the Saudi investigation; moreover, they had the requisite security clearances, and they were anxious to follow through on the work they had started in the Congressional Inquiry. Jacobson did not have a copy of the classified 28 pages that he himself had written, so, early on, Leseman asked Zelikow to provide it to them.

Although all the documents of the Joint Inquiry were supposed to be available to the Commission, Zelikow refused.

When Zelikow later found out that Leseman had somehow managed to obtain a copy of the classified portions of the Congressional report anyway, he fired her on the spot. This, despite the fact that she needed the 28 pages to do her job, she had the required clearances, and she handled the documents totally properly, always keeping them in the Commission's offices, and locking them away at night. After this, no one, even Jacobson, dared to seek access to the secret 28 pages.

Zelikow, like the White House, had little interest in getting to the truth behind 9/11.

On to Baghdad

Meanwhile, in March 2003, Bush had ordered the long-planned invasion of Iraq, billing this as the next step in the "war on terror." Zelikow faithfully followed Bush and Cheney's lead, in attempting to concoct the case that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Zelikow went so far as to feature, as a prominent witness in a July 2003 public hearing, the neo-con crackpot Laurie Mylroie, who blamed Iraq for just about every terrorist attack in the history of the world, including the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after this, 9/11 families' representative Lori van Auken (who had earlier confronted Kissinger over whether he had any Saudi clients), tore into Zelikow at a meeting of families and the Commission staff. "That took a lot of nerve putting someone like that on the panel," she said. "This is supposed to be an investigation of September 11. This is not supposed to be a sales pitch for the Iraq War."

Zelikow's pushing of the Iraq War was also a factor in the resignation from the Commission of former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.). The other major element was Cleland's perception that Tom Kean and the Commission's vice-chairman Lee Hamilton were totally unwilling to confront the White House. Cleland later said he did not want to participate in the "whitewash" and coverup of 9/11 being orchestrated by the White House.

Saudis Questioned

Meanwhile, Mike Jacobson, who had originally uncovered the evidence of the Saudi support network in San Diego, kept pushing the Saudi issue, particularly attempting to get access to Saudi intelligence agent Bayoumi, and also to Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Saudi diplomat who had been in contact with Hamzi and Mihdhar in Los Angeles. (Bayoumi fled to London after 9/11, where he was detained by Scotland Yard. When the FBI sent agents to London to interview him, the British, at the request of the Saudi Embassy in London, released him and allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia.) Thumairy, a professed jihadist, was technically not a diplomat; he worked for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and was the liaison from the Saudi Consulate to the Saudi-financed King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles. In 2003, he was deported from the United States.

Jacobson and other investigators found evidence suggesting that Thumairy had orchestrated support for the hijackers through a network of Saudi expatriates and others, which included Bayoumi. They were anxious to confront Thumairy with the evidence they had collected. In the interview in Riyadh, Thumairy was uncooperative, even denying that he knew Bayoumi, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Later Commission memos evaluated his answers as "deceptive" and his explanations as "implausible."

Bayoumi was twice interviewed by Commission investigators, after which Zelikow—incredibly—expressed his view that Bayoumi was not a Saudi agent.

John Lehman, a former Navy Secretary and a Republican Commissioner, was also concerned about the Saudi ties to 9/11, and particularly about the money flows from Bandar's wife to San Diego. On a number of occasions, Lehman pressed the White House on the Saudi question, and, according to author Philip Shenon, he was struck by the White House's determination to hide any evidence of the Saudi-al-Qaeda relationship. "They were refusing to declassify anything having to do with Saudi Arabia," Lehman told Shenon later. "Anything having to do with the Saudis, for some reason, it had this very special sensitivity."

When it came to writing the 9/11 Commission's Final Report, Jacobson and others, believing that they had explosive evidence on the Saudi government connections to the hijackers, tried to get their material included in the body of the report, but it was downgraded, and relegated to the footnotes.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington was so happy with the final report, claiming that it "debunked the myths" about Saudi involvement, that they posted excerpts on the Embassy website.

Obama's Promises

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, hopes were raised that he might release the 28 pages. Shortly after his inauguration, some of the 9/11 family members met with Obama, who assured them that he would get the 28 pages released. Bill Doyle, whose son died in the World Trade Center, says that Obama promised him personally that he would release them. Graham states that he too was promised that Obama would release the missing pages.

But tellingly, within a few months of taking office, the Obama Administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Saudi royal family members who were seeking to defeat a lawsuit by 9/11 families trying to hold the Saudis responsible for the 9/11 attacks. "I find this reprehensible," said Kristen Breitweiser, a leader of the families. "One would have hoped that the Obama Administration would have taken a different stance than the Bush Administration."

The Sarasota Revelations

The Obama Administration didn't just carry on the Bush-Cheney coverup; it added a new one of its own.

In September 2011 (as EIR has reported), dramatic new disclosures came to light, linking Saudi nationals living in Sarasota, Fla., to a number of the 9/11 hijackers. What emerged was that shortly before Sept. 11, 2001, a wealthy Saudi family abrupty fled from their luxury home in Sarasota; subsequent investigations revealed that a number of the future hijackers, including lead hijacker Mohamed Atta (who crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) had visited the house, and others had been in telephone contact. Security records of the gated community showed that two other hijacker-pilots, Marwan al-Shehhi (South Tower, World Trade Center) and Ziad Jarrah (Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania) had also visited this particular house. All three had taken flight lessons at the Venice Airport, less than 20 miles from the Sarasota house.

The house in question was owned by Esam Ghazzawi, who had been a financial advisor to a high-ranking member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Fahd bin Salman. (Prince Fahd's father is a brother of King Fahd; his younger brother, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, was one of three Saudi princes who died suddenly in the Summer of 2002, after reportedly being identified as financiers of al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.)

Also living in the Ghazzawi house were his daughter and her husband, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii. Al-Hiijjii fled to London, where, ten years later, he was living in a luxury flat, and working for Aramco Overseas Company UK Limited, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian state oil company.

After the Sarasota story surfaced, former Senator Graham told the Daily Beast, "There's no question in my mind that the Saudi government was involved in 9/11."

"This is the most important thing about 9/11 to surface in the last seven or eight years," Graham told the St. Petersburg Times. "It's very important for the White House to take control of this situation. The key umbrella question is: What was the full extent of Saudi involvement prior to 9/11, and why did the U.S. Administration cover this up?"

In a Sept. 15, 2011 interview on Democracy Now!, Graham described the Saudi "support network" for the 9/11 terrorists that the Congressional Inquiry had uncovered earlier in San Diego, and said, "We've just learned about another pod of this network in Sarasota."

"What we know to date," Graham said, "is that there was a wealthy Saudi family living in a gated community near Sarasota, which had numerous contacts with Atta, the leader of the hijackers, and two others who were doing their pilot training near Sarasota. We also know that this family left the United States under what appear to be very urgent circumstances on August 30, 2001, just before 9/11." Graham stressed that the FBI did not tell the Congressional Joint Inquiry about the Saudi hijacker contacts in Sarasota, just as it had not disclosed the San Diego network until his investigators discovered it.

Graham in Federal Court

In May 2013, in a declaration filed in Federal court in Florida, Graham called for the FBI to make full disclosure of all documents relating to its investigation of the Sarasota Saudis. After describing the FBI's failure to provide the relevant information to both the Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission, he declared:"I am deeply troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the 9/11 attacks." Graham was joined in his call for full disclosure by the organization representing 6,600 survivors and relatives of those injured and killed in the 9/11 attacks.

What triggered Graham's and the 9/11 families' new demands, were statements made by the FBI in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit pending in Federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. After the FBI at first denied that there was any connection between the Sarasota Saudi family and the 9/11 attacks, the Bureau then claimed, in Spring 2013, that disclosure of certain classified information about the Saudi family "would reveal current specific targets of the FBI's national security investigations."

In his court declaration in May, Graham also pointed out to the court, that the section of the Joint Inquiry's report that deals with Saudi support for the hijackers is still being withheld from the public. "The 28-page section of the Inquiry's Final Report dealing with 'sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,' remains classified to this day even though declassification would not, in my opinion, endanger national security."

'Stop Protecting Saudi Potentates'

Almost immediately after Graham made his court filing, the group representing survivors and relatives of those injured and killed in the 9/11 attacks issued its own statement, which said:

"The Steering Committee of the 9/11 Families United To Bankrupt Terrorism endorses the efforts of investigative reporters Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers and calls on the FBI to come clean regarding an investigation involving a Saudi family, former residents of Sarasota, Fla., who may have provided aid to the 9/11 hijackers."

Sharon Premoli of Dorset, Vt., who had been pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, stated: "After almost 12 years, the time has come for the Department of Justice, the FBI and this administration to give the American people access to the truth about who financed the murder of 3,000 people on 9/11. It is simply implausible that release of this information would interfere with any current national security investigation. Rather, the FBI's obstruction creates at least the perception of a cover-up to protect Saudi potentates."

Although there is some question as to who has the power to declassify and release the 28 pages dealing with the Saudis—Congress or the Obama Administration—the families put the onus directly on Obama.

"First President Obama promises me personally to release the 28 pages removed from the Congressional committees' report and doesn't, and now the FBI is pulling this stunt," said Bill Doyle. "The FBI keeps contradicting itself. On one hand, they say they found no evidence connecting the Sarasota Saudis to 9/11. On the other hand, they say releasing the information would threaten national security. But they can't have it both ways. And the Courts should not let them get away with it."

'Questions for Obama'

"I think that in the period immediately after 9/11 the FBI was under instructions from the Bush White House not to discuss anything that could be embarrassing to the Saudis," Graham was quoted by MSNBC as saying in March 2012. "It is more inexplicable why the Obama Administration has been reticent to pursue the question of Saudi involvement. For both administrations, there was and continues to be an obligation to inform the American people through truthful information."

As recently as July 13, 2013, Graham has continued to press the issue. In a Miami Herald op-ed, entitled "Questions for Obama," Graham took up the President's recent call for "a national debate on liberty and security in post 9/11 America."

"I welcome this call," Graham wrote, "but the difficulties with your proposal include: how to have a debate on a subject you don't know exists; and how to have a debate if the facts necessary to engage in an informed discussion are withheld."

Graham cited the Sarasota situation, which, he said, raises questions such as: "Could the 19 hijackers have conducted such a complex operation alone?" and "Did the terrorists have the support of a network, perhaps directed by elements of a foreign nation-state?" After reviewing the basic facts of the Sarasota situation, Graham then posed a series of questions for Obama, which include: "Why have the Saudis been treated in a distinctively different manner than other nationalities?" Graham pointed out that "this stark difference was highlighted after the Boston marathon bombing in April. Within hours of the massacre, the FBI was aggressively investigating whether the two Muslim Russian Chechen bombers had acted with the connivance of Muslims from Russia's volatile North Caucasus region. Yet, more than 10 years after 9/11, it appears everything possible is being done to conceal Saudi assistance to the 19 hijackers."

Indeed it is.

Source: Executive Intelligence Review