Paul Haeder, Author

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. “Those twenty-eight pages tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report,” Lynch maintains. Another congressman who has read the document said that the evidence of Saudi government support for the 9/11 hijacking is “very disturbing,” and that “the real question is whether it was sanctioned at the royal-family level or beneath that, and whether these leads were followed through.” Now, in a rare example of bipartisanship, Jones and Lynch have co-sponsored a resolution requesting that the Obama Administration declassify the pages. Laurence Wright

Holding hands with your friends —

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: DICK CHENEY, PRINCE BANDAR, CONDOLEEZZA RICE, AND GEORGE W. BUSH, ON THE TRUMAN BALCONY OF THE WHITE HOUSE ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2001. [SOURCE: WHITE HOUSE VIA HISTORYCOMMONS.ORG]

Saudi policy is to bet on all players in any conflict, so it can truthfully claim to be backing the Afghan government and fighting terrorism, though it is also indirectly funding a resurgent Taliban. The US was not blind to this, but only occasionally admitted so in public. Six years after 9/11, in 2007, Stuart Levy, the under secretary of the US Treasury in charge of putting a stop to the financing of terrorism, told ABC news that regarding Al-Qaeda, “if I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia”. He added that not a single person identified by the US and the UN as a funder of terrorism had been prosecuted by the Saudis.

Most candid admissions by senior US officials were classified and are only known because of leaks. In a cable published by WikiLeaks, for instance, the then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, wrote that, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LET [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups.” — By Letting Saudi Arabia Off the Hook Over 9/11, US Encouraged Jihadism