Disease and pestilence are, by no means, the only breeding grounds for conspiracy theory. For the past 15 years, since 9/11, skeptics ranging from the unconvinced to the unhinged have argued that the US government is hiding important details of the murderous plot. Most of the putative evidence, from melted steel beams attributed to US military demolition, to the supposed “zero Jewish victims” is hogwash.
On the other hand, the government absolutely is keeping something from us, namely, 3 percent of the 838-page Congressional Report on the 9/11 terror conspiracy, classified by the Bush and Obama administrations on national security grounds. Some who have seen the 28 pages say they are a revelation. Here’s Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie.
[CLIP]:
CONGRESSMAN THOMAS MASSIE: It’s in a room where it’s soundproof, and you’re escorted in there and you’re escorted out, and there are no notes. As I read it, I had to stop every couple of pages and just sort of absorb and try to rearrange my understanding of history for the past 13 years and the years leading up to that. It, it challenges you to rethink everything.
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BOB GARFIELD: Apparently, by uncovering a Saudi role in 9/11, not only the 15 of 19 Al Qaeda hijackers but a support network of others. If true, the Saudi connection could undermine a strategic US alliance of decades standing.
Philip Shenon is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. He says that there is already little doubt about at least a low-level official Saudi involvement in the terror plot.
PHILIP SHENON: A former diplomat by the name of Fahad al-Thumairy, a fully-accredited diplomat in the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles who had been sent to Los Angeles by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Thumairy appears to have been in touch with other members of the Saudi support network in Southern California that went out of its way to support the two hijackers.
BOB GARFIELD: It’s significant that this was the Ministry for Islamic Affairs because, although the Saudi's were important to the United States strategically in the Cold War and important strategically as one of the guarantors of stability with respect to Israel, it's also an exporter of its Wahhabi strain of Islam that is extremely fundamentalist, extremely radical, fully embraced by Al Qaeda. Even if the king and his ministers were not somehow in the loop, is it among the possibilities that there were elements within the Security Services and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs that were operating under a very different agenda?
PHILIP SHENON: Absolutely. The congressional investigators who went at this in 2001 to 2002 came away convinced that there was some sort of low-level tie to the Saudi government.
BOB GARFIELD: What was the official reason for keeping them classified?
PHILIP SHENON: President Bush, at the time, said that they would damage the war on terror if they were made public and he cited national security grounds. But, as best any of us really understands it, these pages have been kept secret all these years because somehow they might damage our strategic and financial relationship with Saudi Arabia.
BOB GARFIELD: There’s a character at the center of this [LAUGHS], a historian named Philip Zelikow. Tell me about him.
PHILIP SHENON: Philip Zelikow was a very well-regarded historian who was named as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He really ran the investigation on a day-to-day basis. But there was a lot of concern, from the very beginning, that he faced major conflicts of interest, if only because he was very friendly with people like Condoleezza Rice who was the national security advisor and who was, in many ways, a, a subject, if not a target, of the 9/11 Commission investigation. Some of the staff investigators on the Commission who focused specifically on the Saudi material felt that Zelikow was trying to limit their investigation. And, in fact, he fired one of the staff members who managed to obtain a copy of the 28 pages outside of official channels. And after the 9/11 Commission went out of business, Zelikow went to work as a senior advisor to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, at some point, this conversation begins to sound like an Oliver Stone movie, where murky facts and arbitrary investigative dead ends suggest a sinister back story that we as citizens simply are not presented. Has the very withholding of this information simply just inflated our sense of paranoia?
PHILIP SHENON: Well, I think this is so typical of, of government in action, that by keeping these pages secret for all these years so much attention has been focused on what may be in there. People may be very disappointed to discover what's in there, if only because so much has been out there on the public record for so long. And the evidence really isn't that murky, in many ways, about what happened in San Diego. There was a support network of Arab men, many of them Saudis, who stepped forward from out of the shadows to help the two hijackers. Some of those men do, indeed, have ties to the Saudi government.
BOB GARFIELD: So with that as prologue, now it seems that these 28 pages may finally become public. What's happened?
PHILIP SHENON: President Obama’s been tougher on the Saudis than his predecessors. That seemed to spark interest in trying to get the Obama administration to declassify them. But one of the reasons we’re hearing so much about the 28 pages now is because there is legislation pending before Congress that would allow American citizens to sue foreign governments that are tied to terrorism, and this legislation is particularly targeted at Saudi Arabia.
BOB GARFIELD: The government of Saudi Arabia is kind of on its heels right now. The low price of oil has devastated its economy, and its sphere of influence in the Middle East is under constant threat by Iran. If these pages are released and they do document ties of low-level Saudi officials with the 9/11 conspirators, is it going to totally upset the apple cart of a 60-year strategic alliance?
PHILIP SHENON: I, I tend to doubt that. To its credit, the Saudi government since 2002 has been asking for the 28 pages to be released to the public. It says it has nothing to hide. And I think perhaps if the United States government had given in to the Saudis all those years ago and released the pages that this might have all blown over years and years ago.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, so what’s gonna happen?
PHILIP SHENON: You get some sense that there is an effort by the Obama administration to stall on this. They originally suggested they would have a decision within weeks about whether or not to declassify the 28 pages this spring. Now that’s been pushed off ‘til June. And we've already heard in recent weeks from the CIA Director John Brennan, saying he does not want them to be released because he says they will do damage to our relationship with Saudi Arabia and they will smear innocent people. I think if we end this with a decision by the Obama administration to keep them secret, I won't be terribly surprised.
BOB GARFIELD: In the end, the fact remains that we were victims of a historic horror that required someone to get to the bottom of. Isn't this a case for just telling that story in as much context as possible and letting the chips fall where they may?
PHILIP SHENON: Absolutely! And, as somebody who's been dealing for many years with the families of 9/11 victims, you know, I believe they're entitled to every bit of information our government has about this turning point in American history. And I think for them to be tormented daily by the thought that there are secrets still being withheld from them is, is a terrible, terrible thing.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Phil, thank you.
PHILIP SHENON: My pleasure. Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Philip Shenon is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.
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Coming up, the life and death of a crusading journalist. This is On the Media.
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