Former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., argued Sunday that Saudi Arabia was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Sunday.
“The most important unanswered question of 9/11 is did these 19 people conduct the very sophisticated plot alone or were they supported? I think it’s implausible to think people who couldn’t speak English, had never been in the United States before as a group, were not well educated, could have done that,” Graham said on “Meet the Press.”
“So who was the most likely entity to have provided them that support? I think all the evidence point to Saudi Arabia. We know that Saudi Arabia started al Qaeda. It was a creation of Saudi Arabia,” said Graham, a two-term Florida governor who chaired the Senate intelligence committee.
Graham said it was not fully clear if it was the Saudi Arabian government or the business community behind the attacks, as such distinctions are less clear in Saudi society.
“That is a very murky line,” Graham said. “Saudi Arabia has made it murky by its own legal action. Whenever a U.S. group sues a Saudi Arabian entity, whether it’s a bank, a foundation, a charity, immediately the defense of sovereign immunity is raised.”
“The Saudis don’t recognize the difference between a decision and a societal decision in the same way that other countries might, Graham said. “So I think it covers a broad range from the highest ranks of the kingdom through these what would be private entities,” Graham said.
Graham — along with many members of Congress — has urged the public release of the so-called “28 pages” of a Joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11, along with related documents. The pages were sealed by the George W. Bush administration in 2002.
Some lawmakers who have seen them say the pages are shocking.
“I had to stop every couple pages and … try to rearrange my understanding of history,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., has said. “It challenges you to rethink everything.”
Graham is among those urging the release of the papers.
“Why don’t we let the American people read the 28 pages and the other thousands of documents that have been withheld that relate to the Saudi involvement in 9/11, and then make up their own minds?” Graham said Sunday.
Graham also said that the U.S. government might be more open to releasing these pages now because the close U.S.-Saudi relationship is collapsing. The U.S. is no longer as reliant on Saudi oil, he said.
“We are less dependent on the Saudis for petroleum, as some of the things that the Saudis are doing are dramatically adverse to our interests, such as training the next generation of young terrorists in their mosques and schools, their madrassas,” Graham said.
“The schism between the United States and Saudi Arabia is now very apparent,” he said. “I think this is the time to inject the truth of that relationship in the process of deciding what we should be doing in the future.”
John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, who is known as an extreme hawk on national security, also urged the release of the 28 pages on Sunday.
“Absent some possible compromise of U.S. sources and methods of intelligence-gathering, I’d just make all 28 pages public,” Bolton told supermarket mogul and New York mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis on his radio show on AM 970 in New York. “Let’s see what’s in there and then we can talk about it.”
“It’s important to note that the Saudi government itself has said for 10 or 12 years now that they agree to make the pages public, so I don’t know what the Obama administration’s holdup is,” Bolton said. “I think the sooner we get them out and let the American public see them, the better off we’ll be.”
