Q. What is the official line on the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks?
A. Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks, 15 were from Saudi Arabia. They were all affiliated with Al Qaida, the terrorist organisation founded by Osama Bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy and connected Saudi family. The Saudi royal family also has been accused of tolerating extremist clerics within the kingdom in exchange for domestic stability and political support.
After the attacks in 2001, these facts contributed to a widespread suspicion that Saudi Arabia, a US ally for 70 years, had somehow aided the plotters, possibly with financing. However, when the 9/11 Commission released its final report on the attacks in 2004, it suggested only that the Saudi government had “turned a blind eye” to charities that funded the attack but was not directly involved.
The report’s conclusion has served as the official line on any allegations of a Saudi government link to the attacks: “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al Qaida funding, but we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaida.”
Q. What are the 28 pages?
A. The source of the new speculation about the alleged Saudi role in the attacks is a report that came out in 2002, two years before the 9/11 Commission released its findings. This report was the product of a bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures that led to the attacks.
And the problem isn’t so much what the publicly released version of this report said. It was what it didn’t say.
Under the orders of then President George W. Bush, 28 pages of the joint inquiry’s final 838-page report were classified. They sit under lock and key in a vault. According to multiple accounts from those who have seen the pages, they contain an entire section on the alleged links between Saudi officials and the 9/11 hijackers.
Of particular notoriety are the alleged links between two of the hijackers and a Saudi network that helped them when they arrived in California. These hijackers, Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar, could not speak English and may have been expected to struggle with adapting to American life. The government gave several reasons for not releasing the 28 pages, including national security. At the time, Saudi officials were among those who called for those pages to be released. “Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide,” the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, said in 2003. “We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”
Q. Why are these 28 pages still so controversial?
A. Over the years, there have been some who have suggested that the 28 pages weren’t quite as scandalous as they were often presented — in fact, as the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright has reported, the 9/11 Commission report attempted to substantiate the allegations contained in those 28 pages and apparently failed.
Recently, Saudi foreign minister Adel Jubeir told reporters that the allegations in the 28 pages had been investigated and found false. “There is no there there,” he said in June, while reiterating Saudi calls for their release.
Yet the controversy surrounding the pages has remained; in fact, some point towards the 9/11 Commission report’s cautious wording on the alleged Saudi link as evidence of a cover-up. Groups, including families of the attack victims, have repeatedly called on the government to release the 28 pages. These groups have gained the support of several members of Congress and US officials — President Barack Obama is reported to have made a promise to the families of victims in 2008 and 2009.
The whole controversy has been brought back in a big way recently by a “60 Minutes” documentary that aired on April 10 — about a week before Obama was due to visit Saudi Arabia. In the segment, correspondent Steve Kroft spoke to a number of members of the 9/11 Commission, who said they wanted the 28 pages released.
“We certainly didn’t pursue the entire line of inquiry in regard to Saudi Arabia,” former US senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat, told CBS.
