The most anticipated news story of the summer was overshadowed last Friday.
It was good the release of the previously-classified Part Four of the 9/11 Commission Report got buried by news of Turkey’s attempted coup. We would have been disappointed anyway.
In April, former Senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Graham made a shocking statement on 60 Minutes: the 28-page portion of the Report that remained classified would “point a strong finger at Saudi Arabia” as the financial backer for the September 11 attacks.
From then on, we pinned great hopes onto Part Four. Its contents would answer questions and provide closure. The push to release it breathed new life into a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for damages. Part Four, we hoped, would provide the definitive proof those suits would need. It might also restore faith that Washington didn’t favor its relationship with Riyadh over its pursuit of the truth.
It did none of these things.
The shortcomings in the case against Saudi Arabia
In Part Four, the Commission lays out a compelling, albeit speculative, case linking Saudi Arabia to 9/11. Even if its details were confirmed as fact, the case would still fail to overcome two important hurdles:
It does not draw a direct link between the Saudi Government and the 9/11 hijackers.
It does not prove Saudi support for terrorism is officially sanctioned policy.
No direct link.
Part Four leaves the dots between the Saudi government and the hijackers unconnected. It focuses on two ambiguous individuals, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan. Al-Bayoumi provided support to two of the 9/11 hijackers. He gave them a place to stay when they arrived in the United States, and co-signed on their first apartment. Bassnan and his wife received money directly from the Saudi royal family regularly.
However, the Commission never draws an indisputable link from the Saudi Government to the hijackers. Al-Bayoumi presents equally as spy and as a beneficiary of corruption. A company linked to the Saudi Ministry of Defense paid him a monthly salary to do nothing, but the FBI concluded “there is no evidence” that he was a Saudi intelligence officer.
Bassnan seems a lot more like a Saudi agent. The financial links between he, his wife and Riyadh are clearer. Despite Bassnan’s bragging to an FBI informant that he “did more for the hijackers than al-Bayoumi,” the Commission notes “there is only limited evidence” that Bassnan had contact with the hijackers.
Conspiracy or corruption?
Secondly, as the Commission itself notes, neither the FBI nor the CIA could determine conclusively whether Saudi support for terrorism (to include 9/11), “if it exists, is innocent or intentional in nature.” That is to say, it’s unclear whether Saudi support for terrorism reflects officially sanctioned policy or mismanagement and corruption.
In testimony, one unidentified official said there’s “a lot of smoke” in the links between Saudi Arabia and terrorism. Yes, money from Saudi Arabia ends up in the hands of terrorists. But, it’s unclear “who knows about the payments, on whose behalf are the payments being made, are they being made on behalf of the central government or are they being made by a local official or person.”
This is not to say Part Four proves Saudi Arabia is innocent. And, the civil suits 9/11 victims hope to file require a lower threshold of proof than a criminal case would. Even so, the evidence described is circumstantial, speculative and hedged with words like “reportedly” and “may have.”
Also, the Commission deliberately include statements that inject doubt into the findings in Part Four. Perhaps the most damning came from former FBI Executive Assistant Director Pasquale D’Amruo: “To date, I can’t sit here and tell you that those ties go back, that we can prove the Saudi royal family is supporting terrorism.”
Relations with Saudi Arabia came first.
The origin of all this uncertainty is quite certain. Part Four reveals that the FBI did not investigate Saudi nationals in the United States (15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi) or Saudi government ties to terrorism “due to Saudi Arabia’s status as an American ally.’”
In fact, the FBI and CIA set up a working group to look into Saudi Arabia’s ties to terrorism well after 9/11, in part due to what the Commission’s investigation revealed.
The Commission uncovered a memorandum authored by a CIA officer that examined the links between the Saudi royal family, Saudi government, and the 9/11 hijackers. He provided copies of the memorandum to the FBI agent responsible for the investigation, but that agent never forwarded it on to headquarters. It’s reasonable to assume this memo died a political death.
The strategic importance of the Saudi-US relationship created a vacuum of ambiguity in the CIA and FBI investigations. Both the relationship and the resulting ambiguity led many to oppose the release of Part Four.
Just ten days after Graham’s appearance on 60 Minutes, President Obama was in Riyadh to meet with King Salman of Saudi Arabia. “The two leaders reaffirmed the historic friendship and deep strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia,” the White House statement reported.
Some feared the release of Part Four would lead readers jump to conclusions. As CIA Director John Brennan told Meet the Press:
“I think some people may seize upon that uncorroborated, un-vetted information that was in there, that was basically just a collation of this information that came out of F.B.I. files, and to point to Saudi involvement, which I think would be very, very inaccurate.”
Had Part Four been Friday’s top news story, Brennan’s concerns would have been justified. The rush to be the first (or failing that, the splashiest) would have led pundits to skip right over the critical caveats attached to the section’s detailed speculation.
Brennan makes a second point that’s also important. It’s not only that Part Four says very little definitively, it also says nothing new. The Commission noted it didn’t conduct an independent investigation or try to assess if what they uncovered was accurate. It merely reported what it found in in the CIA and FBI reports. Its findings were meant to identify areas of future study, not to stand alone as facts.
We only learned what we may never know.
This is perhaps the most disappointing part of Part Four’s release. It only told us what we don’t know. Or, more accurately, what we didn’t know 13 years ago, when the report was written and sent to the FBI and CIA.
We don’t know what progress these agencies have made since, if any. We can hope that the same political considerations that prevented these agencies from investigating Saudi Arabia before 9/11 and kept this section secret for years don’t persist today, but we can’t be sure.
The release of Part Four does not signal mission accomplished. It did little to help victims of 9/11 find closure and justice, or instill confidence that we’re better positioned to prevent this from happening again.
Instead, just as Part Four gave the FBI and CIA a list of things to follow up on in 2003, its release in 2016 gave us a list to follow up on as well.