As the push to declassify the 28 pages implicating the Saudis in 9/11 intensifies, the Washington establishment is circling the wagons around our Saudi “friends.”
On Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan pooh-poohed the credibility of the chapter of the 2002 congressional 9/11 inquiry dealing with foreign sponsorship of the attacks that his boss still, despite repeated promises to 9/11 families, refuses to make public.
Brennan told “Meet the Press” he’s “quite puzzled” by the mounting bipartisan campaign to release the censored pages, which are said to tie Saudi government officials to some of the hijackers through financial and phone records, among other evidence. He dismissed them as a grab-bag of “uncorroborated, unvetted information” and “just a collation of information that came out of FBI files.”
In fact, much of the information sprang from Brennan’s own files at Langley.
I’m told the very first page of the redacted chapter quotes an Aug. 2, 2002, CIA memorandum that found “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.” Brennan was deputy CIA director at the time.
Brennan’s remarks echo those of 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, who last week penned a piece in USA Today also attempting to discredit the 28 pages and casting doubt on the need to reveal them to the public — even though a recent national poll shows nearly three-fourths of Americans want the government to release everything it knows about the plot.
Kean and Hamilton suggested the commission “thoroughly” investigated the Saudi leads and cleared all the suspected Saudi officials cited in them.
They even made a point of suggesting they exonerated one key Saudi official ID’d in the 28 pages — Fahad al-Thumairy — when in fact internal commission reports I’ve obtained reveal investigators concluded the former Los Angeles-based Saudi consulate official wasn’t being truthful about his relationship with the hijackers.
“Only one employee of the Saudi government mentioned in the 28 pages, Fahad al-Thumairy, was implicated in our plot investigation. He was employed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs and was an imam at a mosque in Los Angeles,” they wrote. “The earlier congressional panel did not interview him or any other Saudi. Our staff did interview him in Saudi Arabia. So did the FBI.
“But, ultimately, we acknowledged in our report that we had ‘found no evidence’ that he assisted the two future hijackers who passed through Los Angeles,” they added.
This is a whitewash.
Internal commission notes of the 2004 interview with Thumairy in Saudi Arabia — which took place at a royal palace under the watchful eye of Saudi military guards — reveal the witness repeatedly dissembled under questioning, something frustrated investigators clearly acknowledged in their unpublished report.
Implausibly, Thumairy claimed he only knew the hijackers’ alleged handler — Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi — from photos broadcast on TV, despite FBI records showing a flurry of phone calls between Thumairy and Bayoumi on both Thumairy’s cellphone and landline over a short period in December 1999 — just before the hijackers arrived in Los Angeles. He also insisted he’d never met Bayoumi there, despite eyewitnesses who said they saw the two meet on several occasions at a Los Angeles mosque controlled by the Saudi consulate.
Kean and Hamilton also claimed all “9/11 Commission members and relevant staff were given access to the 28 pages,” but at least one senior staff investigator was fired by the commission director for requesting access to the 28 pages, even though she had clearance and was working Saudi leads. And Hamilton himself admitted in an interview last year that he’d “never read” the 28-page section — “I don’t know what’s in it. No one ever came to me and said you ought to read these pages.”
Last year, both Kean and Hamilton said they wanted all 28 pages released in full, adding they were “embarrassed they’re not declassified.” Now, suddenly, they’re urging a selective release, if at all, and are downplaying the idea there’s anything explosive to uncover.
Yep, nothing to see here, folks, move along.
Paul Sperry is former Washington bureau chief of Investor’s Business Daily and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”