So, I offer--h/t emailer Jim--the following article on the continued Deep State efforts to prevent fuller details on the Saudi connection from being made public.
Let me be clear on where I stand. I recognize that there can be valid national security reasons for restricting access to some information. Nevertheless, we're approaching 20 years after this most devastating terrorist attack. That attack has served as the justification for the resulting GWOT and almost incalculable expenditures and suffering. In my view, if the United States is to function as a republic rather than an empire, the citizenry deserves more transparency in order to give informed consent to the policies that continue to flow from that traumatic event.
This article--
The Saudi Connection: Inside the 9/11 Case That Divided the F.B.I.
A
small team of agents spent years investigating whether one of
Washington’s closest allies was involved in the worst terror attack in
U.S. history. This is their story.
recounts at considerable length the background of the continuing efforts to make the details of the Saudi connection public. Those efforts include the participation of FBI agents who worked on the 9/11 related cases, but who believe that the government is refusing to reveal details without sufficient justification. Excerpt:
On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, before having a photograph taken with the first couple. Still, it was an opportunity the visitors were determined not to squander.
One after another, the families asked Trump to release documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 9/11 plot, documents that the Justice Department has long fought to keep secret. After so many years they needed closure, they said. They needed to know the truth. Some of the relatives reminded Trump that Presidents Bush and Obama blocked them from seeing the files, as did some of the F.B.I. bureaucrats the president so reviled. The visitors didn’t mention that they hoped to use the documents in a current federal lawsuit that accuses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — an American ally that has only grown closer under Trump — of complicity in the attacks.
The president promised to help. “It’s done,” he said, reassuring several visitors. Later, the families were told that Trump ordered the attorney general, William P. Barr, to release the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an F.B.I. report years earlier. Justice Department lawyers handed over the Saudi official’s name in a protected court filing that could be read only by lawyers for the plaintiffs. But Barr dashed the families’ hopes. In a statement to the court on Sept. 12, he insisted that other documents that might be relevant to the case had to be protected as state secrets. Their disclosure, he wrote, risked “significant harm to the national security.”
Surely more could be revealed at this point?
https://www.floridabulldog.org/2012/03/new-questions-about-fbi-probe-of-saudis-post-911-exodus/
ReplyDelete9–11 Saudi connection is Pandora’s box.
ReplyDeleteMy guess on what the Saudi’s did:
1. Made a deal with Sunni radical Islam after kabala / Mecca siege that supported their external operations overseas, including more mosques asks madrases overseas. And allowed their interpretation of the Koran in Saudi Arabia to flourish. And ignored external funding to Islamic fighters / terrorists. As long as they kept Saudi Arabia itself peaceful. The royal family in Saudi is closely intertwined with Wahabi faith.
End result is Islam world wide has become a lot more fundamentalist. Pakistan is a poster child of these efforts, and the fruit they have born.
2. Intervened anytime a Saudi got in trouble in the us, to get them out of the country ASAP. Saudis also helped out their Overseas nationals with money.
3. Saudi Arabia is now at war with Al Queda and Isis, and with the Saudi economy hurting due to fracking, they have deradicalized a bit.
4. The current amount of Saudi funding of governments.
I suppose the bottom line is that this was a massive Deep State failure, both on the intel as well as the policy level. The decision not to let the crisis go to waste led to additional failures.
ReplyDelete>massive Deep State failure
DeleteUse of the term Islam in any way negative, has been made into a third rail in US Politics. An overton window has been created there. Showing how the Saudi Government has been spreading a medieval, fundamentalist flavor of super strict Islam worldwide, including in the US, is something that the US deep state wants to gloss over. A lot of gulf state money has also flowed to think tanks, university middle eastern programs, etc. Basically buying off the government deep state Alumni with sinecures.
Exposing the Saudi involvement in 9-11, could expose a lot of the hidden influence of the Gulf States, including Saudi's, in the US. Not to mention their funding of Mosques and Madrasses (religious schools) in the US and around the world. I think of it as the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil way of dealing with Islam in US politics.
Excellent points. This is part of why I'm so disappointed that Barr seems to be part of this decision to continue to resist getting the truth out. As I said, if we're to continue as a republic, we need an informed citizenry, and that means basic information has to be made available.
DeleteMr. Wauck wrote
ReplyDelete"Let me be clear on where I stand. I recognize that there can be valid national security reasons for restricting access to some information. Nevertheless, we're approaching 20 years after this most devastating terrorist attack.
As the holder of a high-level clearance, I agree with that. There are valid reason to withhold from the public.
DoD defines top secret thusly
"1.) Security classification that shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe."
So inconvenient truths about the Saudis don't qualify as a reason to withhold the truth from the public.
The point of classifying information is that its release damages the nation, not a politician's reelection chances or an agency director's (Rosenstein, Comey)legal exposure or a senator's (Warner) reputation.
Secrets are necessary only for the correct reasons.