Investigating the Saudi Government's 9/11 Connection and the Path to Disilliusionment - Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt 1
On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham explains why he persists in making the case that facts directly connect the Saudi government with 9/11 conspirators - November 28, 13
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Reality Asserts Itself - Bob Graham
Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham says greater awareness of Saudi Arabia as “essentially a co-conspirator in 9/11...would change the way in which, particularly in the current milieu of events in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is being viewed” by the U.S. public.
Saudi Arabia, an historic ally of the U.S., had put significant pressure on the Obama administration in recent months to militarily intervene in Syria, and had also attempted to derail recent U.S.-Iran rapprochement.
Senator Graham co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that investigated intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. The inquiry’s final report included a 28-page chapter describing the Saudi connection to 9/11, but it was completely redacted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I was stunned that the intelligence community would feel that it was a threat to national security for the American people to know who had made 9/11 financially possible,” said Senator Graham. “And I am sad to report that today, some 12 years after we submitted our report, that those 28 pages continue to be withheld from the public.”
The investigation into 9/11 intelligence failures and the subsequent cover-up of Saudi involvement by the Bush administration led Senator Graham to question his life-long reverence of presidential authority.
“I grew up with the idea that the president was almost a divine figure, that he was the literally the father of the country and always acted in a way that was beneficial to the mass of people in America,” said Graham. “You may have disagreements with the current occupant of the office, but the presidency itself was a beknighted position deserving of your respect and worthy of your confidence.”
“So when I got involved particularly at the national level in the U.S. Senate and saw some of the things that were happening—which were not theoretical; they were things that I was dealing with on a very day-to-day hands-on basis that were contrary to that view of what was the presidency—it was a very disillusioning experience. And maybe some of the comments that I make in the book Intelligence Matters reflect that path to disillusionment,” said Graham.
Transcript
Investigating the Saudi Government's 9/11 Connection and the Path to
Disilliusionment - Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt 1PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Miami Lakes, Florida. And welcome to Reality Asserts Itself.
You're wondering why I'm in Miami Lakes, Florida. Well, you're going to find out in just a few seconds.
But we're going to deal with a rather serious subject in this interview. We're going to deal with the role of Saudi Arabia and its effect or influence on U.S. foreign policy and a little bit of background, recent background about U.S.-Saudi relations.
Saudi Arabia, as everyone that follows this story, has been certainly one of the driving force in what's unfolding in Syria. The armed opposition in Syria has been armed by Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have been putting enormous pressure on the American government to directly militarily intervene.
United States is now involved in negotiations with Iran to make some kind of a pact that would have the Iranians back off on any nuclear program they have. The Iranians say it's not a weaponized program, and so does American intelligence, but there's a lot of fear or concern on the part of many that in fact it could become a weaponized program. So negotiations are finally taking place, but it's fairly well known that the Saudis are not very happy about these negotiations, along with Israel, at least behind the scenes. The Saudis have been saying these negotiations should not even take place. Prince Bandar, head of the Saudi National Security Council, recently told European diplomats that the United States was losing its credibility in the Middle East because it wouldn't militarily intervene in Syria and because of what they see as backing down to Iran.
I attended a dinner recently, where I was rubbing elbows with Saudi and other Gulf Cooperation Council country and military leadership, and all the talk at that dinner was about the Saudis wanting the United States not only to intervene in Syria but to actually directly attack Iran.
So if Saudi Arabia's having so much influence on U.S. foreign policy, shouldn't we pay attention to the words of Senator Bob Graham, who wrote a book, Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror? In that book he said fairly strong things about Saudi Arabia. Here's what Senator Bob Graham wrote towards the end of his book. I believe--and I'm adding a word here to give it context--there is a state-sponsored terrorist support network that still exists, largely undamaged, within the United States.
The whole book is about the role of Saudi Arabia and its connection to 9/11. And according to Bob Graham, members of the Saudi government and royal family were directly connected to inspiring, funding, and helping support the organization of certain 9/11 conspirators. That came about as a result of his work as chair of the congressional joint committee on 9/11. So if we're going to look at today's effect and role of Saudi Arabia on current policy and the important role it's playing, we should also pay attention to the recent history of Saudi Arabia.
And now joining us to talk about all of this is Senator Bob Graham.
Thanks very much for joining us.
BOB GRAHAM, FMR. U.S. SENATOR: Thank you very much. And I appreciate your interest in this very important and underreported subject.
JAY: And strangely underreported, given that this isn't just some piece of history that should be in a museum and isn't interesting to discuss it. But we're talking about the active role of Saudi Arabia today, not just in terms of affecting U.S. foreign-policy, but on other issues that you mention in terms of ongoing--potentially ongoing terrorist networks.
GRAHAM: Their active role, and how our perspective role on that active role would be different if there was an acceptance of the fact that Saudi Arabia was essentially a co-conspirator in 9/11, how much that would change the way in which, particularly in the current milieu of events in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is being viewed.
JAY: It would change everything, given so much of our policy is based on Saudi Arabia as being, you know, at least one of, if not the primary ally in the Middle East.
GRAHAM: And that perception that Saudi Arabia since World War II has been the object of a special relationship with United States I think has contributed--not the total reason, but a factor, in that we have gone so unexamined in this current relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
JAY: Okay. Before we go further, let me introduce Bob Graham properly, because Senator Graham is not just a senator, in the sense that there's a lot of senators but not all senators have played as prominent a role as Senator Graham has in the American intelligence community. And here's a little bit of an introduction, 'cause I know he's done a lot more than what I'm about to say.
So Bob Graham was born in 1936, was the 38th Governor of Florida from 1979 to 1987 and a United States senator from that state from 1987 to 2005.
Graham tried unsuccessfully for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. He dropped out of the race on October 6, 2003. He announced his retirement from the Senate on November 3 of that year.
Graham is now concentrating his efforts on the newly established Bob Graham Center for Public Service at his graduate alma mater, at the University of Florida.
After he left office, he served as chairman of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. Graham also served as cochair of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. And he's a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the CIA External Advisory Board.
So Senator Graham is not just a senator. Senator Graham has been at the center of a lot of very important issues that face American intelligence.
So, Senator Graham, in this show, Reality Asserts Itself--and you're going to--this is a bit of a tease, all this, because we're going to go back a little bit. We usually start with little bit of a back story of our subjects and a little bit of why they think what they think. And then we kind of get into the issues.
So tell us a little bit about growing up. Your father was a state senator. He was a dairy farmer, and became a fairly prominent family in Florida.
GRAHAM: I grew up on a farm which was an island in the middle of the Everglades. When I was a boy, I grew up with alligators and frogs and all the critters in the Everglades, and that had a significant effect on me, particularly my concerns about the environment and the protection of our water and land resources.
My father was a very strong influence on me. He had been a mining engineer in the West back in the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in 1885 of Canadian parents and was a very strong, forceful person, but had a special way of relating to people. People wanted to work with him because they admired his honesty and forthrightness and that he treated people with dignity and respect. Those are qualities which I learned from him and I hope I've been able to apply.
JAY: Now, he became a state senator. Did you grow up in a house filled with politics?
GRAHAM: Yes. He became a state senator because in the mid-1930s there was a great deal of corruption in South Florida. Al Capone had moved much of his operation from Chicago to Miami. My father was offended by that. And although he never had been in politics before, he thought one way that he might make a contribution would be to be elected to the Florida State Senate at a time when the state exercised almost total control over cities and counties in Florida.
He was elected. In fact, one of the first things he did was abolish the city of Hialeah, which was somewhat at the center of the corruption in Dade County, and then reestablished the city of Hialeah, naming the mayor and all the members of the City Council. Those new members in turn fired the police chief, brought in some honest people. Then Hialeah for a period of time was a very clean city. And I think that influence has continued to today.
JAY: Now, when you grew up, in terms of your conception of America and the American narrative, you know, there's an official narrative, and then there's kind of a real history. You become, when you are a senator, a very vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. And in your book you're pretty clear that you think that the Bush-Cheney administration essentially lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When you were growing up, could you imagine such a thing? You're seeing corruption, but can you believe the president would lie America into war?
GRAHAM: No. I grew up with the idea that the president was almost a divine figure, that he was the literally the father of the country and always acted in a way that was beneficial to the mass of people in America. I had very high reverence that you may have disagreements with the current occupant of the office, but the presidency itself was a beknighted position deserving of your respect and worthy of your confidence.
So when I got involved particularly at the national level in the U.S. Senate and saw some of the things that were happening--which were not theoretical; they were things that I was dealing with on a very day-to-day hands-on basis that were contrary to that view of what was the presidency--it was a very disillusioning experience. And maybe some of the comments that I make in the book Intelligence Matters reflect that path to disillusionment.
JAY: Prior to the Iraq War, are there moments on that path?
GRAHAM: That was the dramatic moment. There were some other things that I observed while I was in public office that caused me to adopt a more pragmatic and a less I'll give you the benefit of the doubt approach [crosstalk]
JAY: What year are you in the Senate?
GRAHAM: I'm in the Senate from 1987.
JAY: And when do you get onto the Intelligence Committee?
GRAHAM: In 1993.
JAY: So from '93 forward--and I suppose a lot of this stuff is classified--but are there things that you know from being on the Intelligence Committee that we're on this path to disillusionment?
GRAHAM: Again, the circumstances that surrounded 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War were the epiphany events in my full appreciation of this. But there had been other things that had occurred which began to harden me for this epiphany which I was to experience in the near future.
JAY: Are there examples of that? And let me say, because--I mean, you pursue stuff with your committee on 9/11 that it would've been a lot easier for you not to pursue, and especially would've been a lot easier for you to shut up afterwards. But you didn't. I mean, you wrote a book about it. You wrote a novel, because some of the stuff was classified, and the only way to get a sense of it was through fiction. And you write a nonfiction book, where you really come out with some bold statements. It would have been a lot easier for you to keep quiet. So what makes you that person?
GRAHAM: I think it's my growing up experience, the influence of my father, the unvarnished patriotism which, as a 50-year-old, became a little less unvarnished as I saw some of the realities of activities that fell short of my expectations of how people in the highest office should perform.
JAY: Now, the thing that brought this to my attention and I think that made this so much news was that when your committee reported, it became a story for those that followed this that there were--was it 27 or 28 pages?
GRAHAM: There were 28 pages in the final report, out of over 800 total, which were totally censored from--that were one to the end of that chapter. That was the chapter that largely dealt with the financing of 9/11, who paid for these very complex and in many instances expensive activities that were the predicate for 9/11. I was stunned that the intelligence community would feel that it was a threat to national security for the American people to know who had made 9/11 financially possible. And I am sad to report that today, some 12 years after we submitted our report, that those 28 pages continue to be withheld from the public.
JAY: Now, it's fairly clear from your book what's in the 28 pages, I mean, in general terms. The Times did a report on those 28 pages. A journalist for The Times spoke with someone who'd actually seen the 28 pages--didn't reveal the name. But apparently it's the actual names of the people in the Saudi government and Saudi royal family that are in on financing 9/11 conspirators. And your book makes it pretty clear that that's what it's about.
First of all, who ordered the redaction, that you weren't allowed to say this?
GRAHAM: First, I'm going to have to withhold my comment on what you have just said. I am under the strictures of classification. I have--although it was written in 2002, I still have a reasonably good remembrance of what was in those 28 pages, but I'm frustrated because I can't talk about it.
JAY: I know. And that's why I quoted The Times and didn't ask you.
GRAHAM: I appreciate--.
JAY: 'Cause I know you can't say it. But The Times said they had talked to someone. And I'm not even asking you to confirm it, 'cause that might get you in hot water, too. But the report from The Times was that this is actual names, and you actually said--you pointed and said who's who, and that all got redacted.
GRAHAM: Yeah.
JAY: So in the next segment of our interview with Senator Bob Graham, we're going to dig into the evidence uncovered by his inquiry and why he thinks the Saudi government and members of the royal family were directly involved in the events of 9/11.
Please join again on The Real News Network for Reality Asserts Itself with Senator Bob Graham.
Revealing the 9/11 Conspiracy Would Undo the Entire US-Saudi Alliance - Sen. Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt2
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself with Senator Bob Graham. We're talking about the Saudi role in the events of 9/11 and Saudis' influence on U.S. foreign policy.
The biography of Senator Graham in length you will find below our video player here. But just quickly again, Senator Graham was the 38th Governor of Florida from 1979 to 1987. He was a U.S. senator from Florida from '87 to 2005. He was on the Senate intelligence committee, and he chaired the congressional joint committee on 9/11.
Thanks again for joining us.
BOB GRAHAM, FMR U.S. SENATOR: Thank you.
JAY: Senator Graham is also the author of the book Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror.
Thanks.
GRAHAM: Good. Thank you.
JAY: So one question that's always kind of bothered me, 'cause I personally haven't been able to find something obvious about this--and there's so much to read, and I haven't read it all, but it's been reported that Prince Bandar, who was then the Saudi ambassador to the United States, within hours of 9/11, contacts what we now know must have been President Bush, because the heads of all the other agencies--it was very interesting. Nine-eleven Commission, they kept asking to the head of the FBI: did you authorize these flights to get Saudis out of the country? And he said no. And then the CIA said no. But I think it's fairly well known now it was the White House. But Prince Bandar, within hours of the attack, wants to get leading Saudis out of the country because 15 of the 19 conspirators on the planes are Saudis. Well, how does he know within hours of the attack that there are so many Saudis involved in this?
GRAHAM: It doesn't surprise me that he knew that. At the worst, you can say he knew it because he was aware that this plot was developing before 9/11. At the best, his press people had access to the wire services, which quickly did identify that 15 of the 19 people were Saudis. So I'm not--.
JAY: Now, how did the American government and then the wire services, how did anyone know so quickly?
GRAHAM: Well, they quickly found out who the people were because they had their names on the manifest of the four airplanes which they had entered. And some of these people, once their names popped up, were well known to the intelligence agencies. Two of them had participated in what was referred to as "the summit of terrorists" that took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. Others were not as well known. But it didn't take long to determine something as basic as what were the nationalities of these 19 people. So that doesn't surprise me.
What does surprise me is the reaction of the United States (and I think this was at the highest level--the president of the United States), how they reacted to this request. Here you have a mass murder, mainly U.S. citizens killed. Here you've got people who might have information about this mass murder that law enforcement would like to fully interrogate before they were out of our jurisdiction. And yet the president of the United States agreed, at the request of the Saudi ambassador, to allow a chartered plane to fly from Lexington, Kentucky, back to the Middle East with 144 persons who had not been prescreened, interviewed, or in any meaningful manner debriefed in terms of what they knew about this situation. After the flight, the FBI said, had we known who these people were, we would in fact have interviewed a number of them. They were people of interest.
JAY: So how do you explain it?
GRAHAM: I think the explanations are murky. And there are many. One is that the United States has had a special relationship with Saudi Arabia that goes back to World War II: we provide them a defense cover; they provide us a reliable source of petroleum. Some of it was the special relationship with the Bush family. Going back to the president's grandfather, there had been a close family relationship between the Bushes and the House of Saud. Other reasons might have to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia was looked at as being a source of stability in a very turbulent Middle East, and that we needed to keep their credibility and respond to their request. Bandar had said that precisely because three-quarters of the hijackers had been Saudis, that that put all persons of Saudi ancestry in the United States at some risk. And he selected who he thought were the ones that were most at risk, most prominent, probably closest to the royal family, to have this--.
JAY: And members of the bin Laden family.
GRAHAM: Yes, there were several members of the bin Laden family, which meets both tests: they were members of the bin Laden family, and that family was itself close to the royal family. And at a time when the request was made, most aviation in the United States was grounded. By the time they actually executed the flight, that restriction had largely been lifted.
JAY: I think the big issue isn't how could the plane fly. The big issue is how did they let a plane fly with people that might have been involved in the events.
GRAHAM: Because they weren't very curious as to what those people had known, or there were--I think more likely there were factors that went beyond finding out about 9/11 that trumped the normal policy of full briefing and interrogation--or debriefing and interrogation before people were allowed to leave the country.
JAY: Well, what--we'll kind of get into this as we move along, but does there not seem to you--and in your book you outline various points at which the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.
GRAHAM: About a dozen.
JAY: Does there not seem to have been almost a culture that's almost deliberately created not--that goes beyond lack of curiosity? And, like, I don't understand this. You become--you're president. You take over a new administration. Your head of CIA comes in in his first briefing, and according to George Tenet, he tells President Bush the number-one security threat to the United States is bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And then they demote Richard Clarke. How do you demote your antiterrorism czar, and at a time when you've been told this is your biggest national security threat? If you don't like Clarke, fine. You get somebody else. But why would you reduce his level, which was more or less cabinet level access, to when--like, Clarke testifies in 9/11 he couldn't get anyone's attention. He said our hair was on fire; there was so much going on that summer that we thought something might be coming, and we could get anyone's attention. It's almost like it goes beyond, almost, a lack of curiosity.
GRAHAM: Yeah. This culture of protection of the Saudis ran up and down the ranks of the federal government. A very significant event occurred at the Orlando airport in 2001, early in the year, when a man arrived from Saudi Arabia and was seen by one of the agents at the airport, one of the customs agents, as being suspicious. And so they interviewed him to find out why would a person have flown all the way from Saudi Arabia to Orlando for what appeared to be just a few days, maybe even hours, before he turned around and flew back. There had been some instances in which professional hitmen were brought into the United States to carry out a murder and then quickly leave, and the customs agent was suspicious that that might be such a person. So he refused the man the right to enter the United States.
He was severely chastised by other customs agents, who said, your career is now over, because don't you remember we were told that we're supposed to treat Saudis differently than we treat other people. But he persisted. And, in fact, the man was returned without ever gaining legal access to the United States. That may have been--probably was the 20th hijacker who would have filled out the ranks of the five people on each of the four planes.
But even at the level of a customs agent at an airport in the United States, the idea that Saudis were going to be treated with greater deference was an accepted part of the operation. You can imagine what it was like as you moved up into the higher ranks of the federal government.
JAY: Well, if you combine that with what was clearly a message that was sent throughout the police to the FBI, to the intelligence agencies, that we're not very interested terrorism anymore--. Coleen Rowley that was part of the FBI group in Minneapolis that tried to get a warrant for Moussaoui, who was this guy learning to take off and not land, and the air flight instructor tells the local FBI office, and they cannot get the warrant. FBI headquarters won't give them the warrant to go get the computer. And it's a longer, detailed story. And if people want, they can go watch. We've interviewed Coleen Rowley. But I asked Coleen, what did you make of this? I mean, why? And she said there just seemed to be coming from the top a culture: don't follow terrorism; we're not interested in it.
GRAHAM: And we had a number of instances such as that. There was a very suspicious and I think potentially central figure in the Saudi relationship to the hijackers who was an elderly man, retired university professor, who in his dotage had taken to inviting young Saudis to live in his house as boarders. It was both a source of some income, but also some comfort. It happened that two of the boarders that this man invited to live in his house were future hijackers.
We very much wanted to interview that elderly former professor to find out just what had he learned having these two hijackers living literally under his roof. We were denied access. Here's--the joint intelligence committees of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are being told, you cannot talk to this man. We said, could we send you questions and--.
JAY: Who is this you're--.
GRAHAM: The FBI.
JAY: FBI.
GRAHAM: And they say, no, we won't present the questions to him.
So we went to a federal judge and got a subpoena to require this man's arrival. It was on a Friday afternoon. I had the subpoena in my hand. The FBI agent in charge was in a small room in the capital, and I was prepared to hand him the subpoena. And he backed up against the wall and said, we don't like to have our people subpoenaed. And they described him as being "our people" because he was--in addition to taking in boarders, he also was paid by the FBI to allegedly oversee the actions of young Saudis.
JAY: Yeah. Isn't that the point? He was an FBI informant.
GRAHAM: Yeah. So that's why they were hiding him so much.
But anyway, the man said don't force the subpoena on us on Monday; seventy-two hours from now we will deliver this man.
So the biggest mistake maybe I made in my public life was accepting the truthfulness, the veracity of that man's statement, 'cause I did not push the subpoena into his hands. Seventy-two hours passed. No witness came forward. And from that point forward, they just ran the clock out until the session of Congress that we had legal authority to conduct our investigation ran out. And to my knowledge nobody has ever interviewed that man, who I think has a lot to say and to contribute to our understanding of the Saudi role in 9/11.
JAY: Where is he now?
GRAHAM: It think he's still in San Diego. The last time I checked, which was three or four years ago, he was.
JAY: This must frustrate you to no end that you weren't able to finish your work, in a sense, and then it has left the public discourse. There's no further inquiries.
GRAHAM: Well, what I've been thinking a lot about recently--and we're going through the period recognizing the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy--a lot of this discussion has gone back to various theories about how was Oswald able to do this. Was he helped by the mob, by the Cubans or somebody? My question is: what difference does it make? If you'd found out that, yes, there was such a conspiracy, how is that relevant to any decision that we would be making today?
In contrast, the issue of whether the 19 hijackers acted alone or whether they had a support network has enormous current consequences. If in fact the Saudi government was the source of financial, logistical support, provision of anonymity that allowed these people to stay in the country such a long time and go undiscovered, if they were part of the system that made that happen, think of what it would mean to U.S.-Saudi relations today. It would be a complete overturning of the premises upon which we have been dealing with Saudi Arabia, that it was a loyal ally of the United States to now being seen as a country which was prepared to sell its soul to the worst in the world, even if that meant putting the United States in jeopardy and the loss of life of 3,000 people.
JAY: Okay. In the next part of our interview, we'll ask Senator Graham a little more about why he thinks this is the case. Please join us on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News with Senator Bob Graham.
Why Would Saudi Arabia Support the 9/11 Conspirators? Why Would the US Government Cover it Up?
Senator Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself (Part 3)
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Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, believes that the Saudi government “had a high and what has thus far turned out to be credible expectation that their role” in 9/11 “would not be exposed” by the U.S. government.
“Everything that the federal government has done since 9/11 has had as one of its outcomes, if not its objectives—and I believe it was both outcome and objective—that the Saudis' role has been covered,” says Graham.
Senator Graham had talked to the other co-chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the two chairs of the citizen’s 9/11 commission about the possibility of the 19 hijackers acting independently.
“All three of them used almost the same word—implausible—that it is implausible that that could have been the case. Yet that has now become the conventional wisdom to the aggressive exclusion of other alternatives,” says Graham.
Graham says it is also possible that the Saudis gave financial support for Osama bin Laden’s operations in order to stop him from launching a campaign of civil unrest within Saudi Arabia as retaliation for allowing U.S. troops to occupy a part of the country during the first Gulf War.
The Saudis' “confidence in the fact the United States would not react, or that the United States would not go to the extremes that in fact it has to cover up their involvement, were sufficient to outweigh the reality that bin Laden had the capability and the will to topple the monarchy,” says Senator Graham.
Transcript
Why Would Saudi Arabia Support the 9/11 Conspirators, Why Would the US
Gov. Cover it Up? - Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt3PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself with Senator Bob Graham.
Senator Graham was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was also the chair of the congressional joint committee into 9/11. And he held many other important positions on intelligence, and from 2010 to 2012 was on the CIA External Advisory Board.
Thanks for joining us again, Senator.
So we were talking off-camera. And I think we're going to just pick up where we were, and then we'll kind of get back to where I was headed in the interview.
But we were talking about the role of the media and how little and practically no discourse there is, debate, followup on issues raised by your commission and other books that have come out on the whole issue of the Saudi 9/11 commission. What do you make of that?
BOB GRAHAM, FMR U.S. SENATOR: It's an enigma to me as to why something that is so important, not just to be sure we have a historical record right, but that justice is done--. One of the side consequences of this coverup of the Saudis is the 3,000 families and survivors of the victims of 9/11 have been trying to get justice in a federal court for their losses. And in each instance, they have been turned away under the shield of sovereign immunity. You cannot sue Saudi Arabia. And the United States government has gone into the courthouse on the side of the Saudis, not on the side of the U.S. citizens who have lost so grievously.
So this is an issue that is contemporary and has real impact and significance today. And why major U.S. media has not seen this as an issue worthy of in-depth investigation and dogged followthrough is an enigma to me.
JAY: Now, when the Saudis are asked about this issue, the former head of Saudi intelligence Turki says that the Saudi intelligence actually tried to warn the Bush administration that an attack was coming. He said that they had been monitoring people in the United States and that they told the Bush administration that they had specific information that something was coming and they were ignored, that there seemed to be no interest on the part of the Bush administration in what they had to say.
GRAHAM: I've heard rumors of that. I have not personally confirmed that that is an accurate statement. But I wouldn't be surprised. There was just sort of a general disbelief--I think the 9/11 Commission called it a lack of imagination--that something of this scale could occur in the United States, and therefore when people sounded alarms that it might in fact be on the verge of happening, they were largely ignored.
JAY: So when you say the Saudi state is involved in this, it's somewhat contradictory if the head of intelligence is trying to warn the United States that it's coming. I mean, do you see this as something that's, you know, government policy, or individuals in the government were involved?
GRAHAM: It wouldn't be government policy in the sense that someone would stand up in the State of the Union address and announce that we are going to have a policy of not following leads that suggest the United States may be in some immediate peril.
JAY: No. Back up. I'm talking about the Saudi policy. When you look at the Saudi role--and we're certainly going to get to, actually, where you're headed there, in terms of what we think was the U.S. government consciousness at the highest level on all of this, but right now I just wanted to ask, when you say this is the Saudi government involved, so is this Saudi government at the highest levels making Saudi government policy? Or these are individuals involved in the government and royal family that are doing something sort of on their own?
GRAHAM: The reality is that the line between what is private and what is public in a monarchy of the length and pervasive influence of the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia is ephemeral. And, in fact, in these cases where Americans have tried to sue entities, some of which are governmental, some of which are what we would call private sector--some are even charitable--because of their alleged involvement in 9/11, the same shield of sovereign immunity has been raised by the Saudi government to protect everything that is of a Saudi origin. So they by their actions have accepted the fact that this is a fully integrated country, and it is legally possible to say that everything that happens is an action of the government.
JAY: Now, we're going to get into more detail later. And there's much, much more detail in Senator Graham's book Intelligence Matters about--you know, where his committee really traced the data points that connected Saudi government officials to the conspiracy. And we'll get into it a little bit later. But I still want to talk a little bit more big picture.
Why would they? Assuming you're right about the Saudis, what's in it for them?
GRAHAM: Well, I wrote a novel called Keys to the Kingdom out of frustration that much of what I knew had occurred had not been made available to the American people, because every time it was suggested, it was immediately classified and rendered out-of-bounds. It was mentioned to me by another former high-ranking government official that he, facing the same frustration, had overcome it by writing exactly what he would have written in a nonfiction book, but put the word "novel" on it, and it got by the censors.
So in the novel I suggest some answers to that, and I don't think they are farfetched or extreme. One of those is that we know that at the end of the first Gulf War, bin Laden was very angry at the royal family for having allowed U.S. troops, foreign troops of any nationality, to essentially occupy a portion of Saudi Arabia. He would--his anger was deepened by the fact that he had offered to become--come to the defense of the kingdom using several tens of thousands of war-hardened troops that had fought with him in Afghanistan against the Russians. That anger upset the royal family.
And so I project: what if bin Laden had said to the royal family, if you won't deal forcefully with the Americans, we will do it, but we need your help in terms of being able to assist, support, maintain our operatives who are going to be in the United States, and if you refuse to give us that support, then I'm going to launch civil unrest inside the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and your monarchy will be under the same threat that the former Shah of Iran was when he was toppled from power?
JAY: Well, we know the Saudis took this threat pretty seriously, 'cause they actually made the American base move to Qatar.
GRAHAM: Yeah. And so I'm suggesting that something like that may have been the motivation, the excuse, the rationale that the Saudis look to to say, alright, we will in fact provide assistance to the 19 hijackers, or at least significant numbers of them, in order to avoid this credible threat of civil unrest.
JAY: But the Saudis are no fools. They have to know, whatever bin Laden might be able to throw at them, it's nothing compared to what the United States could throw at Saudi Arabia if it came out that the Saudi were involved at a governmental level. It's almost like they have to have known going in that this wasn't going to happen.
GRAHAM: Well, would a country whose ambassador was so brazen as to go into the private quarters of the White House within hours after an attack in which 15 of his fellow countrymen had been in lead positions and almost demand that the president of the United States facilitate 144 additional Saudis being able to get out of the country, would a country that had that kind of attitude towards the willingness of the United States to stand up for its own interest and not be cowered into submission, would not they be likely to have had that attitude towards the United States and therefore felt it was a risk that they were prepared to take to--.
JAY: But doesn't it lead you to think that they have good reason to think that they're not going to be targeted? I mean, you know, instead of regime--being in Afghanistan, if this had come out, regime change would have been in Saudi Arabia.
GRAHAM: Their level of confidence in the fact the United States would not react or that the United States would not go to the extremes that in fact it has to cover up their involvement were sufficient to outweigh the reality that bin Laden had the capability and the will to topple the monarchy and--.
JAY: 'Cause bin Laden has been quoted, assuming all this really is from bin Laden, that the plan was to suck the United States into a war in Afghanistan and, kind of Russian style, wear the United States out. And I think bin Laden apparently was a little disappointed that in fact the emphasis got moved to Iraq, 'cause they were hoping to tie American troops down in much bigger numbers. And it kind of worked out in the long run, in a sense, what they wanted, but not at the scale they wanted. They wanted a major presentation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to be there for decades and decades and bleed the American economy. The Saudis have to understand that's his logic.
GRAHAM: Well, you know, we talk a lot about the intelligence capabilities of al-Qaeda. That's one of the reasons that the NSA is engaged in a lot of its data mining and other high-tech intelligence gathering operations.
The fact is, I think that if bin Laden was operating from the premise that he could suck the United States into Afghanistan and, once there, they would be treated as the Russians had been treated, a war of attrition and finally submission, the fact is, if he thought that way, his intelligence wasn't very good. The United States almost immediately instituted the single most effective aerial bombardment in the history of mankind in Afghanistan against troops and military installations. We were using--this was pre-drone--we were using traditional military aircraft with laser bombs, smart bombs, bombs that were able to get into places that previously had thought to be impregnable, and just devastated the Taliban's military ability.
JAY: But let's assume his intelligence was wrong--and I think it was, if that's what he said afterwards. But if that's what the plan was and the Saudis are in on this, then they have to do their own kind of math about where does all this lead. If this leads to--I mean, Saudis have to know the United States isn't going to just sit there and do nothing. It's going to come after--somebody's going to pay for this. And if it isn't going to be them, and they have confidence that their role in this is going to be hidden and covered up (and the evidence is, whether they were confident because they were told to be confident or not, their role was hidden; that much is a fact), then they start doing the math. And what I mean by math is they have to work out what the next steps and the consequences of this are. And either they share the belief that it's going to be a tie-down in Afghanistan, or for some reason they're also understanding that the real target's going to be Iraq and they don't mind.
GRAHAM: And therefore that they are immune, that the United States is going to take its vengeance out someplace else.
JAY: More or less on Saddam Hussein, yeah.
GRAHAM: Yeah. Well, I think, first, they had a high and what has thus far turned out to be credible expectation that their role would not be exposed. Everything that the federal government has done since 9/11 has had as one of its outcomes, if not its objectives--and I believe it was both outcome and objective--that the Saudis' role has been covered. So they could be prepared to assess it was a greater risk that bin Laden would attack them than that the United States would attack them, and therefore they, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, took actions that would avoid bin Laden with some sense of immunity from the possibility of the United States attacking them.
JAY: Is there a possibility they shared the objective of drawing the United States into a war, that it isn't just out of fear of bin Laden that they share the agenda?
GRAHAM: Well, I don't know what they would want to accomplish by encouraging the United States to go into a war other than a war against the place where the attack against the United States had been organized and emanating.
JAY: We know within days of the attack, even though there's talk of what to do to Afghanistan, President Bush is already issuing instructions to get ready for a war with Iraq. If Prince Bandar is so close to President Bush that he sits in the living room--and I think it's smoking cigars; I don't know if he drank scotch or not. I don't suppose he's supposed to. But would he be unaware of that's where this would all lead?
GRAHAM: You know, we are now--.
JAY: It's speculation.
GRAHAM: We're now into the outer ranges of speculation.
I believe what we do know or are capable of knowing is what was the full extent of the Saudi role. We know they were involved in San Diego, where, under people who were employees of the Saudi government, protection was given to two of the 19 hijackers.
There was a very suspicious case in Sarasota Florida where three of the pilots of the planes were doing their flight training and at the same time were closely connected to a family of Saudis, which in turn was close to the royal family. That has been another area that has been closely held and with--except the American people had been blocked from understanding what happened in that instance.
What we don't know is what was going on in other places, like Falls Church, Virginia, places in New Jersey, other places in Florida, where there were substantial numbers of hijackers. Was a full investigation done to determine if they were receiving external support? And if so, why has this not been made available?
JAY: And your main point is that these 19 guys can't do this without a support network, and you have evidence the support network was at least in part linked to the Saudi government.
GRAHAM: Yeah. And I might say, I have personally talked to the other cochair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry, a man who was a very distinguished congressman and, later, director of the CIA, I have talked to the two chairs of the citizens' 9/11 Commission, asking them, what do you think were the prospects of these 19 people being able to plan, practice, and execute the complicated plot that was 9/11 without any external support? All three of them used almost the same word, implausible, that it is implausible that that could have been the case. Yet that has now become the conventional wisdom to the aggressive exclusion of other alternatives.
JAY: In the next segment of our interview with Senator Graham, we're going to look at the role of the Bush administration after 9/11 and before. In his book Senator Graham calls the Bush administration's hindrance of 9/11investigation "disgraceful", he goes on to write: "... orchestrated by the White House to protect not only the agencies that failed but also America's relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
So please join us for the next segment of our interview with Senator Bob Graham.
Statistics: Posted by seemslikeadream — Sat Nov 30, 2013 12:34 am