No one could have predicted that the CIA would withhold evidence from the 9/11 Commission. Remember, before there was a 9/11 Commission there was a congressional inquiry. And when they published the congressional report, they redacted 28 pages of Saudi-related material. That led to speculation that high level members of the Saudi regime were involved in financing the attacks.
President Bush refused on Tuesday to release a congressional report alleging possible links between Saudi Arabian officials and the Sept. 11 hijackers. The White House sought to question a Saudi citizen who befriended two of the hijackers. Bush said he could not comply with a request by the Saudi foreign minister for a chance to clear the Arab kingdom’s name because publication of the report could hurt U.S. intelligence operations.
The foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, said he was disappointed but understood. The information is widely believed to center on Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers. Saudi Arabia has vehemently denied supporting the hijackers.
Sources tell CBS the redacted section lays out a money trail between Saudi Arabia and supporters of al Qaeda, reports CBS White House Chief Correspondent John Roberts.
Among others, it singles out Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave financial assistance to 9-11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar. The FBI charges al-Bayoumi, an official of the Saudi civil aviation authority, never lacked for money and is believed to have received funds from a charitable trust run by the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. The Saudis, for all their protestations of cooperating in the war on terror, still refuse to allow the FBI access to al-Bayoumi.
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal called suggestions of such links “an outrage to any sense of fairness” and said his country had been “wrongfully and morbidly accused of complicity in the attacks.”
“Twenty-eight blank pages are now considered substantial evidence to proclaim the guilt of a country that has been a true friend and partner of the United States for over 60 years,” the foreign minister said.
The most explosive revelation concerned the wife of ambassador and Bush family friend, Prince Bandar. It appears she indirectly funded the San Diego hijackers. Keep that in mind while we consider the reporting of Gerald Posner (note: a very suspect source):
In my 2003 New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I discussed Abu Zubaydah at length in Chapter 19, “The Interrogation.” There I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. Also, disclosed was how U.S. intelligence established a so-called “fake flag” operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.
Instead, when confronted by his “Saudi” interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. “He will tell you what to do,” Zubaydah assured them.
That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd’s nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.
I don’t know how Posner got this information which would obviously be highly classified, but if it has any truth to it whatsoever, you can imagine why video tapes of Zubaydah’s interrogations would be destroyed. Yes, it could be related to the harsh treatment (torture) captured on the tapes. But it could just as easily relate to what Zubaydah said about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11. The smoking gun here is the CIA’s misrepresentations. On the one hand, they argue:
Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had gone to “great lengths” to meet the commission’s requests, and that commission members had been provided with detailed information obtained from interrogations of agency detainees.
“Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active,” Mr. Mansfield said.
On the other hand:
[The Commission’s] requests for documents from the C.I.A. began in June 2003, when it first sought intelligence reports describing information obtained from prisoner interrogations, the memorandum said. It later made specific requests for documents, reports and information related to the interrogations of specific prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri.
Yet:
A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.
And:
At the meeting, it says, Mr. Hamilton told Mr. Tenet that the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents “even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”
The CIA provided summaries of the interrogations, but it is not known if the summaries matched the video record. It’s also extremely important that Zubaydah was our original source for determining that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (a Balochi Pakistani) was the mastermind of 9/11. Here’s how Bush explained it in September 2006.
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information — and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the “nominal” information he gave us turned out to be quite important. For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — or KSM — was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias “Muktar.” This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM.
Two things of note here. First, by Bush’s account, Zubaydah gave up KSM before he was waterboarded. But, second, Zubaydah also gave up a lot of information about terrorist attacks, none of which turned out to be true. Was his information about KSM true? What about his information about Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz? Why isn’t that information in the 9/11 Commission Report? Is that the kind of information the CIA destroyed?
And here’s the funny part:
A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the [9/11] panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.
Isn’t that typical? No one can just flat out say that a law was broken. And we thought Bill Clinton was a parser?
