Graham: 911 Inquiry, Saudi Ties Blocked

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Registered: 07-20-2003
Graham: 911 Inquiry, Saudi Ties Blocked
4
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 11:33pm
Graham book:

Inquiry into 9/11, Saudi ties blocked

WASHINGTON - Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.

The discovery of the financial backing of the two hijackers ''would draw a direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia, and trigger an attempted coverup by the Bush administration,'' the Florida Democrat wrote.

And in Graham's book, Intelligence Matters, obtained by The Herald Saturday, he makes clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Graham also revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks told him on Feb. 19, 2002, just four months after the invasion of Afghanistan, that many important resources -- including the Predator drone aircraft crucial to the search for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda leaders -- were being shifted to prepare for a war against Iraq.

Graham recalled this conversation at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa with Franks, then head of Central Command, who was ``looking troubled'':

``Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.''

''Excuse me?'' I asked.

''Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,'' he continued.

Graham concluded: 'Gen. Franks' mission -- which, as a good soldier, he was loyally carrying out -- was being downgraded from a war to a manhunt.''

Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2001 through the buildup to the Iraq war, voted against the war resolution in October 2002 because he saw Iraq as a diversion that would hinder the fight against al Qaeda terrorism.

He oversaw the Sept. 11 investigation on Capitol Hill with Rep. Porter Goss, nominated last month to be the next CIA director. According to Graham, the FBI and the White House blocked efforts to investigate the extent of official Saudi connections to two hijackers.

Graham wrote that the staff of the congressional inquiry concluded that two Saudis in the San Diego area, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassan, who gave significant financial support to two hijackers, were working for the Saudi government.

Al-Bayoumi received a monthly allowance from a contractor for Saudi Civil Aviation that jumped from $465 to $3,700 in March 2000, after he helped Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhdar -- two of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- find apartments and make contacts in San Diego, just before they began pilot training.

When the staff tried to conduct interviews in that investigation, and with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who also helped the eventual hijackers, they were blocked by the FBI and the administration, Graham wrote.

The administration and CIA also insisted that the details about the Saudi support network that benefited two hijackers be left out of the final congressional report, Graham complained.

Bush had concluded that ''a nation-state that had aided the terrorists should not be held publicly to account,'' Graham wrote. ``It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety.''

Saudi officials have vociferously denied any ties to the hijackers or al Qaeda plots to attack the United States.

Graham ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination and then decided not to seek reelection to the Senate this year. He has said he hopes his book will illuminate FBI and CIA failures in the war on terrorism and he also offers recommendations on ways to reform the intelligence community.

On Iraq, Graham said the administration and CIA consistently overplayed its estimates of Saddam Hussein's threat in its public statements and declassified reports, while its secret reports contained warnings that the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was not conclusive.

In October 2002, Tenet told Graham that ''there were 550 sites where weapons of mass destruction were either produced or stored'' in Iraq.

''It was, in short, a vivid and terrifying case for war. The problem was it did not accurately represent the classified estimate we had received just days earlier,'' Graham wrote. ``It was two different messages, directed at two different audiences. I was outraged.''

In his book, Graham is especially critical of the FBI for its inability to track al Qaeda operatives in the United States and blasts the CIA for ``politicizing intelligence.''

He reserves his harshest criticism for Bush.

Graham found the president had ''an unforgivable level of intellectual -- and even common sense -- indifference'' toward analyzing the comparative threats posed by Iraq and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

When the weapons were not found, one year after the invasion of Iraq, Bush attended a black-tie dinner in Washington, Graham recalled. Bush gave a humorous speech with slides, showing him looking under White House furniture and joking, ``Nope, no WMDs there.''

Graham wrote: ``It was one of the most offensive things I have witnessed. Having recently attended the funeral of an American soldier killed in Iraq, who left behind a young wife and two preschool-age children, I found nothing funny about a deceitful justification for war.''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9584265.htm

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Registered: 07-20-2003
Sun, 09-05-2004 - 11:48pm
Sen. John Kerry released the following press statement today on allegations made in Sen. Bob Graham's new book:

"Sen. Graham is a respected member of the United States Senate and a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee. These are serious allegations being made by a well respected and informed leader. If the White House and the FBI did in fact block an investigation into the ties between the Saudi government and the 9-11 hijackers, then this would be a massive abuse of power. We need an independent investigation into these allegations immediately to determine if the very agencies charged with investigating the war on terror have been compromised by White House politics."

Publishers webpage http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?0-7393-1782-2

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 10:26am
Is this the report you're refering to? (This happenend over a year ago.)

Read Between the Lines of Those 28 Missing Pages.


Love the truth; it ultimately bows to no master. Even for the President of the United States, the commander in chief of the world's most powerful propaganda machine, deceptions inevitably unravel.

In the last week we've moved from the 16 deceitful words in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech to the 28 White House-censored pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia's role in the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States.


Yet even in its sanitized version, the bipartisan report, long delayed by an embarrassed White House, makes clear that the United States should have focused on Saudi Arabia, and not Iraq, in the aftermath of September 11.


As we know, but our government tends to ignore, fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; none came from Iraq. Leaks from the censored portions of the report indicate that at least some of those Saudi terrorists were in close contact with--and financed by--members of the Saudi elite, extending into the ranks of the royal family.


The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists. It is now quite clear that the President--unwilling to deal with the ties between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden--pursued Hussein as a politically convenient scapegoat. By drawing attention away from the Muslim fanatic networks centered in Saudi Arabia, Bush diverted the war against terror. That seems to be the implication of the 28 pages, which the White House demanded be kept from the American people when the full report was released.


Even many in Bush's own party are irritated that the President doesn't think we can be trusted with the truth.


"I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly," Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on "Meet the Press." "My judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know."


Asked why he thought the pages were excised, Shelby, a leading pro-Administration conservative, said, "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations."


Quite an embarrassment if the censored pages reveal that the Bush Administration covered up the Saudi connection to the terrorist attacks.


Obviously alluding to Saudi Arabia, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said Sunday, "High officials in this government, who I assume were not just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial contributions to the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated their ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of September 11."


On Monday, Graham, responding to reports that Saudi Arabia would welcome making public some of the pages, called on Bush to fully declassify "the currently censored pages."


Newsweek, relying on anonymous government sources, reported Monday that the "connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers" included helping Al Qaeda operatives enter the United States and financing their residence in San Diego, where they plotted their infamous attacks.


Remember too that it was well known that Saudi charities with ties to the royal House of Saud were bankrolling the Al Qaeda operation in Afghanistan--even as George H.W. Bush visited the kingdom shortly after his son was elected, eager to secure contracts for his then-employer, the Carlyle Group.


The fact is, Riyadh, unlike Baghdad, has long been a key hotbed of extremist Muslim organizing. By shielding and nurturing our relationship with the Saudi sheiks, Bush & Son have provided cover for those who support terror.


After all, is it really likely that career-conscious FBI and CIA officers would be willing to criticize possible Al Qaeda-House of Saud links when the President's father is out hustling business ties with the same family?


Even after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration immediately protected Saudis in the United States, including allowing members of the large Bin Laden family who were in this country to be spirited home on their government's aircraft before they could be questioned. This at a time when many immigrants from all over the world were being detained arbitrarily.


Bush has used September 11 as an excuse to turn this country upside down, making a hash of civil liberties and bankrupting our federal government with unprecedented deficit spending on war and its materiel. Before we do any more irrevocable damage in the name of an open-ended "war against evil," we have a right and a responsibility to confront the uncensored truth of what happened that black day--no matter what powerful people are brought to account.

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 07-20-2003
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 11:44am
>> Before we do any more irrevocable damage in the name of an open-ended "war against evil," we have a right and a responsibility to confront the uncensored truth of what happened that black day--no matter what powerful people are brought to account. <<

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I agree 110% libraone.

This is an issue absolutely vital to American national security.

It's much, much more important than Swiftvet allegations or President Bush's missing military records from 30 years ago.

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>> Perhaps Graham's most explosive charge is that a support network for al Qaeda, backed by Saudi officials and Saudi money, aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers and ``still exists, largely undamaged, within the United States.''

Saudi officials have denied any connection to al Qaeda operatives in the United States.

Graham said the FBI and the White House frustrated efforts by the Sept. 11 investigation he co-chaired to thoroughly investigate the connection between two of the hijackers and two Saudis in San Diego, who the CIA believes were Saudi spies." <<

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9592045.htm

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This goes far beyond partisan politics.



iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 12:09pm
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It absolutely does. Remember the 9-11 Commission agreed not to look into WH relations to 9/11 until after the election, maybe this is why. In the book "American Jihad" there were insinuations that Bush had connects with a terrorist organization in Maimi.

This is very disturbing but not surprising.