It’s time for President Obama to declassify the 28 sealed pages of the 9/11 Commission Report — the section that details the Saudi role in the attacks.
The main noise in Washington now is over a bill to let 9/11 families sue Saudi Arabia over its alleged complicity. Obama’s threatening a veto, and there are reasons to keep private lawsuits out of foreign policy.
But there’s no good reason to continue keeping the American people in the dark about the report, which dates to 2002.
The 9/11 Commission’s chairman, Tom Kean, says the pages should be made public. Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton says he’s “embarrassed” it hasn’t happened already. Both Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, refused to declassify them.
Yet word of the contents has leaked out.
As early as 2003, a US official who’d read the pages told the Los Angeles Times they linked “direct involvement of senior Saudi government officials in a coordinated and methodical way directly” to the terrorists.
And on Wednesday, it emerged that back in 2002, investigators found a certificate for an al Qaeda bombmaker showing he’d taken flight lessons with 9/11 attackers. The evidence was in an envelope obtained from the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
Paul Sperry has been writing in The Post about this for over three years, reporting that Riyadh’s involvement “was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government.”
Federal investigations were quashed and leads ignored. Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the 9/11 Commission members that they were the only ones actually investigating the Saudi government connection.
Riyadh actively funded al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists for decades — officially stopping only after they turned on the Saudi kingdom. How many of the perfidious princes kept it up anyway?
Only the 9/11 commissioners have dared pursue that question. The rest of official Washington shied away, for fear disclosure would threaten the US-Saudi relationship.
It’s now nearly 15 years since 9/11. The American people finally deserve to learn the full, unvarnished and ugly truth.