Former Florida Senator Bob Graham was one of the loudest voices calling for the declassification of 28 pages of a report studying possible links between Saudi Arabia and the September 11, 2001 terrorists, and now that the pages have been released, Graham says that they strongly imply that Saudi Arabia was in fact assisting the hijackers.
The Tampa Bay Times reports that Graham made the comments during a radio interview on WMNF. “I think they point a very strong finger that Saudi Arabia was a collaborator with the hijackers,” said Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Noting that the hijackers were not well-educated, didn’t speak English, and had never been in the United States before, Graham argued that it was “highly implausible” that they were the masterminds behind the terrorist attack.
“Saudi Arabia is not the ally that we’ve pretended it to be,” added Graham, noting that they have provided training to terrorists for years.
The report, titled “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” was kept classified for thirteen years until Congress released it last Friday.
The New York Times described the report as “a wide-ranging catalog of meetings and suspicious coincidences,” including “contacts between Saudi officials and some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and the discovery of a telephone number in a Qaeda militant’s phone book that was traced to a corporation managing an Aspen, Colo., home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington.” Some of the leads in the report have since been investigated and debunked, but “the mythology surrounding the document grew with each year it remained classified.”
Photo credit: Harrison Diamond via Wikipedia.
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