A long
running campaign over redacted pages of a Senate report into 9/11 which
allegedly reveal Riyadh as the principle financier is gathering new momentum
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Smoke
pours from the twin towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit
by
two hijacked airliners in a terrorist attack September 11, 2001
Photo: Getty Images |
The Obama administration
is facing renewed pressure to release a top secret report that allegedly shows
that Saudi Arabia directly helped to finance the
September 11 attacks.
Rand Paul, the Libertarian
Republican senator from Kentucky, is demanding that Mr Obama declassify 28
pages that were redacted from a 2002 US Senate report into the 9/11 attacks.
Mr Paul, who been vocal in
attacking the bulk NSA spying programmes revealed by the rogue security
contractor Edward Snowden and is running for president in 2016, has now
promised to file an amendment to a Senate bill that would call on Mr Obama to
declassify the pages.
The blacked-out pages, which
have taken on an almost mythical quality for 9/11 conspiracy theorists, were
classified on the orders of George W. Bush, leading to speculation they
confirmed Saudi involvement.
According to Bob Graham, the
former Florida senator who was chair of the Senate Intelligence committee at
the time of the report, they show that Saudi Arabia was the “principle
financier” of the attack.
The White House said in January
that it was reviewing the file, said that it had set no timetable for the
conclusions of its deliberations.
Some families of 9/11 victims
have campaigned for several years for the declassification of the 28 pages,
supported by Mr Graham who has now enlisted the high-profile Mr Paul to his
cause.
“Information revealed over the
years does raise questions about [Saudi Arabia’s] support, or whether their
support might have been supportive to these Al Qaeda terrorists,” Mr Paul said
at the press conference in Washington this week.
“We cannot let page after page
of blanked-out documents be obscured behind a veil, leading these families to
wonder if there is additional information surrounding these horrible acts.”
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers
were from Saudi Arabia, but previous investigations always failed to find a
formal link between the country and the terrorist attack, which killed 2,996
people.
Many victims groups believe the
full extent of Saudi involvement in 9/11 has long been covered up by both the
Obama and Bush administrations to protect US-Saudi relations.
Terry Strada, who leads 9/11
Families and Survivors United For Justice Against Terrorism, said that the
supposed Saudi funding link was not a surprise.
"Nearly every significant
element that led to the attacks of Sept. 11 points to Saudi Arabia," he
said. "Money is the lifeblood of terrorism. Without money, 9/11 wouldn’t
have happened."
Earlier this year, the theory
of Saudi involvement was given added impetus by fresh testimony from
Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker"
who had taken flying lessons but was arrested weeks before the September 11 attacks
– although was later disowned by Osama bin Laden.
In a plea to a New York court
released last February, Moussaoui said that senior members of the Saudi royal
family were major al-Qaeda donors and were intimately involved with Osama bin
Laden's terror network in the 1990s.
He named Prince Turki
al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the
longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal,
a prominent billionaire investor.
However the Saudi Embassy
dismissed Moussaoui – who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic - as
"a deranged criminal" trying to "get attention for himself and
try to do what he could not do through acts of terrorism – to undermine
Saudi-US relations".
