Saudi complicit in 9/11 attacks

Declassified documents disclose links between Saudi officials and terrorist network in California led to terror attacks:

They took seats in front of a former Saudi diplomat who, many on the Commission’s staff believed, had been a ringleader of a Saudi Government spy network in the US that gave support to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers in California in the year before the 2001 attacks.

At first, the witness, 32-year-old Fahad al-Thumairy, dressed in traditional white robes and head-dress, answered the questions calmly, his hands folded in front of him. But when the interrogation became confrontational, he began to squirm, literally, pushing himself back and forth in the chair, folding and unfolding his arms, as he was pressed about his ties to two Saudi hijackers who had lived in southern California before 9/11.

Even as he continued to deny any link to terrorists, Thumairy became angry and began to sputter when confronted with evidence of his 21 phone calls with another Saudi in the hijackers’ support network – a man Thumairy had once claimed to be a stranger. “It was so clear Thumairy was lying,” a Commission staffer said later. “It was also so clear he was dangerous.”

An interrogation report prepared after the questioning of the Saudi diplomat in February 2004 is among the most tantalising of a sheaf of newly declassified documents from the files of the staff of the 9/11 Commission. The files, which were quietly released by the National Archives over the last 18 months and have drawn little public scrutiny until now, offer a detailed chronology of how the Commission’s staff investigated allegations of Saudi Government involvement in 9/11, including how the panel’s investigators flew to Saudi Arabia to go face-to-face with some of the Saudis believed to have been part of the hijackers’ support network on American soil.

Declassified

The newly declassified documents may also help resolve the lingering mystery about what is hidden in a long-classified congressional report about ties between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 attacks.

A former commission staff member in an interview said that the material in the newly released files largely duplicates information from “the 28 pages,”as they are commonly known in Washington, and then goes well beyond it.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said he was annoyed that so much attention has been focused on “the 28 pages” when, in fact, the Commission had full access to the congressional report and used it as a roadmap to gather new evidence and witness accounts that demonstrated sinister connections between low-level Saudi Government officials and a terrorist support network in southern California.

“We had lots of new material,” the former staffer said. Another, earlier memo from the commission’s files, unearthed last month by the website 28pages.org, which is pressing for release of the congressional report, lists the names of dozens of Saudis and others who had come under suspicion for possible involvement with the hijackers, including at least two Saudi naval officers.

The memo, dated June 2003, noted the concern of the staff that earlier US investigations of the Saudi ties to terrorism had been hindered by “political, economic or other considerations.”

US President Barack Obama has said he is nearing a decision on whether to declassify the 28 pages, a move that has led to the first serious public split among the 9/11 commissioners since they issued a final report in 2004. The Commission’s former chairman and vice chairman have urged caution in releasing the congressional report, suggesting it could do damage to US-Saudi relations and smear innocent people, while several of the other commissioners have called for the 28 pages to be made public, saying the report could reveal leads about the Saudis that still need to be pursued.

Clear Saudi link

Earlier this week, a Republican commissioner, former navy secretary John F. Lehman said there was clear evidence that Saudi Government employees were part of a support network for the 9/11 hijackers – an allegation, congressional officials have confirmed, that is addressed in detail in the 28 pages.

In an interview, Lehman said that while he had not meant to his comments to suggest any deep disagreements among the 10 commissioners about their investigation, he stood by his view – directly contradicting the Commission’s chairman and vice-chairman – that “there was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi Government.”

“The 9/11 investigation was terminated before all the relevant leads were able to be investigated,” he said. “I believe these leads should be vigorously pursued. I further believe that the relevant 28 pages from the congressional report should be released, redacting only the names of individuals and certain leads that have been proven false.”

For some of the families of 9/11 victims and others who have been harshly critical of the investigation conducted by the 9/11 commission, the newly declassified paperwork from the Commission’s files and the renewed debate over the 28 pages are likely to raise the question of why the blue-ribbon, 10-member panel effectively overruled the recommendations of some its staff and produced a final report that was widely seen as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers and the source of much of al-Qaida’s funding before 9/11.

Saudi witnesses

The files show that the commission’s investigators, which included veterans of the FBI, Justice Department, CIA and state department, confronted the Saudi witnesses in 2003 and 2004 with evidence and witness accounts that appeared to confirm their involvement with a network of other Saudi expatriates in southern California who provided shelter, food and other support to two of the 9/11 hijackers – Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar – in the year before the attacks. The two hijackers, both Saudis, were aboard American Airlines flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

According to the newly declassified interrogation reports, another key Saudi witness who appeared before the Commission, Osama Basnan, a man described as “the informal mayor” of the Islamic community in San Diego before 9/11, was repeatedly caught in lies when asked about his relationship to Saudis in the support network.

Basnan, who returned home to Saudi Arabia after coming under investigation after 9/11, had an “utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject” in denying any role in a terrorist support network, the report said.

Basnan came under scrutiny, in part, because of tens of thousands of dollars in cashiers’ checks that his ailing wife received before 9/11 from a charitable fund controlled by the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, Princess Haifa al-Faisal.

Although the 9/11 Commission’s report drew no final conclusion about the roles of Basnan and Bayoumi, former US senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who led the joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee that wrote the 28 pages, has said repeatedly over the years that he is convinced that both men were low-level Saudi Government intelligence officers and that money from the embassy charity fund may well have ended up with the two hijackers.

Graham has said he believes both Basnan and Bayoumi were Saudi Government ‘spies’ who had been despatched to southern California to keep watch on dissidents in the area’s relatively large community of Saudi expatriates.

About the author:

Philip Shenon is the author of “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation”

Guardian.com