We Deserve the Truth About the Saudis' Role in 9/11 I'm

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We Deserve the Truth About the Saudis' Role in 9/11
I'm fed up. Release those 28 pages.

I've tormented some of you with this liberal columnist's biting sarcasm directed toward conservatives in general and Republicans in particular. I think that you'll find little if anything to disagree with in this column.



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BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 18, 2016

Fourteen years ago, I spent two weeks in Qatar covering a World Cup zone qualifying tournament. The participating teams were Saudi Arabia, Japan, Iran, Iraq, and both Koreas. Which meant that, sometime during the previous 50 years, each of the participating nations had bombed, invaded, occupied, or otherwise made war upon one of the other participating nations. Throw out the record books when these traditional rivals tee it up.

Anyway, it was the longest two weeks of my life. I frankly found my Qatari hosts to be perfectly pleasant, but I found Qatari society completely revolting. It was utterly parasitic—a plutocratic class of native Qataris existing on oil revenues and the virtual slave labor of indentured immigrants.

The Filipino bartender at my hotel hadn't seen his passport since he got off the plane. The kid jockeys in the camel races in many cases could look forward in their adolescence to a brand new career as commodities in the sex-trade business.

This noxious system has stood revealed before the world with the revelations of the atrocities associated with Qatar's having been chosen to host the 2022 World Cup. I can't say I was surprised.

And, see, here's the thing. The Saudis are worse. The Saudis, in fact, should shut the fck up right now about everything.

"The relationship is troubled. It's rocky," said Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But, he added, "it's not headed for an impending collapse."

That is because the two nations still need each other. The United States provides military and intelligence support to the kingdom for its regional security, and is expected to announce additional support this week. Saudi Arabia helps fight terror groups like Al Qaeda and remains the second-largest provider of oil imports to the United States, selling about one million barrels per day.

Now, with Mr. Obama in the twilight of his presidency, Saudi leaders are looking past him, to the winner of November's presidential election.

Well, that's awfully broadminded of them, considering there's one question that our good friends have enthusiastically refused to answer.

Another simmering problem is the longstanding suspicion among some in the United States that the Saudi government or some of its officials participated in the plotting for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In recent days, Saudi officials warned American lawmakers that they might sell off hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in United States courts for any role it may have had in the attacks.

I know this makes me sound like I'm channeling my inner Frank Gaffney, but where do these overfed hypocrites get off? They are a human rights nightmare. Their government is repressive and utterly corrupt. And now, they are blackmailing the president and the Congress over information the American people absolutely have a right to know—namely, if any of members of the country's royal elite were involved in the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on American soil.

That the two of the hijackers involved in the September 11th attacks landed in Los Angeles, moved to San Diego and obtained housing, language lessons and identification is widely known. However, those 28 pages could shed more light on the money and connections used to do so and are said to include information "suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States," according to the chapter's introduction in the report.

Former Senator Bob Graham told "60 Minutes" in an interview, "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."

God bless Graham. He's been agitating to release this material since the moment it was classified. Now, though, Senator Chuck Schumer is behind a bill to release what's contained in the 28 papers to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by 9/11 survivors against the Saudi government. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders are supporting Schumer's bill.

The White House is opposed to it, alas, and has resorted to some enthusiastic tap-dancing on the topic.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he did not know if allegations of Saudi support for the hijackers might come up during the trip and pointed out the 9/11 Commission has already looked closely at that possibility and ruled it out.

"Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of funding. But we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization," Earnest quoted from the 9/11 Commission report during a briefing last week.

There are obvious loopholes in that explanation that are big enough to sail a supertanker through. As far as I know, there are approximately 958,789 Saudi princes of one kind or another.

Not all of them work for the Saudi government, nor can they be considered "senior Saudi officials." But they are all connected in the network of autocrats and plutocrats that dominates Saudi society, and that are part of the egregiously backward treatment of women and the generally retrograde human-rights situation in the Kingdom. If any of them were involved in the 9/11 attacks, the actual Saudi government and those "senior Saudi officials" would have every reason to want to bury that fact.

American popular opinion—and American popular prejudices—would ignite in a second. There is no other reason for the Congress to have agreed to keep the 28 pages locked away. And. in any case, the renewed attention to the 28 pages is what prompted the tantrum in Riyadh, which should be evidence enough.

It's 15 years ago this fall that a group of Saudi nationals commandeered airplanes and slaughtered north of 3000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The site of the World Trade Center has been completely rebuilt. The Pentagon is back up and running. And there is a lovely memorial in Somerset County in Pennsylvania to the people killed defending Flight 93.

There have been movies made of the event. It belongs to history in every way but one. It does not yet fully belong to history in its truth, a vital part of which remains hidden away in a locked room, the final bit of our common history hidden away for fear of inconveniencing a medievalist regime that has the gall to threaten the one country that has guaranteed its safety against its bellicose neighborhood, a neighborhood in which the Saudis have done their level best to agitate, and which has done so at the expense of a considerable amount of its moral credibility in the world. Shut up now, and take your medicine.