{"id":181541,"date":"2016-05-25T19:36:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T00:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/25\/time-to-stop-covering-for-our-friends-in-riyadh\/"},"modified":"2016-05-25T19:36:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T00:36:00","slug":"time-to-stop-covering-for-our-friends-in-riyadh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/25\/time-to-stop-covering-for-our-friends-in-riyadh\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to Stop Covering for Our Friends in Riyadh"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a Congressional hearing, former 9\/11 commissioners refused to contradict an implication that the House of Saud knew of the attacks before they occurred<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A former member of the 9\/11 Commission on Tuesday left open the possibility that the Saudi royal family knew about the 9\/11 terror plot before it happened.<\/span>

<\/span>Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked members of the panel at a House Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing to raise their hands in response to this question:<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cHow many of you there believe that the royal family of Saudi Arabia did not know and was unaware that there was a terrorist plot being implemented that would result in a historic terrorist attack in the United States, in the lead-up to 9\/11?\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Two of the four panelists raised their hands, but Tim Roemer, 9\/11 Commission member and a former congressman from Indiana, did not. Neither did Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Those 28 pages remain classified despite calls for their release from several former members of the 9\/11 Commission \u2014 a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel that from 2002 to 2004 investigated the 9\/11 attacks and the intelligence failures that allowed them to succeed.<\/span>

<\/span>Sen. Bob Graham, co-chairman of the congressional inquiry into the attacks, has suggested that the pages contain \u201csubstantial\u201d evidence of Saudi involvement \u2014 both by the government and private citizens. \u201cI think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn\u2019t speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn\u2019t have a high school education \u2014 could\u2019ve carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States,\u201d Graham said on 60 Minutes last month.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Graham and his Republican co-chair, former Sen. Porter Goss, have joined 9\/11 victims\u2019 family members<\/a>, activists<\/a>, and congressional leadership<\/a> to call for the release of the 28 pages. The chapter was initially classified by the George W. Bush White House, fearful of upsetting a U.S. ally. Despite twice promising<\/a> to release the pages, President Obama has withheld them. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We really need to stop coddling the Saudis.  It’s bad policy, and with a Presidential election coming up, it is piss poor politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a Congressional hearing, former 9\/11 commissioners refused to contradict an implication that the House of Saud knew of the attacks before they occurred: A former member of the 9\/11 Commission on Tuesday left open the possibility that the Saudi royal family knew about the 9\/11 terror plot before it happened.Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1149,969,1031,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-conspiracy","category-evil","category-house-of-saud","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}