Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) said on Sunday that President Obama should order the declassification of 28 pages of a congressional commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that some believe documents links to Saudi Arabia.
“The president’s staff, at least, has said that they will make a decision by June. And I hope that decision is to honor the American people and make it available,” Graham, who was a co-chairman of that panel, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
{mosads}The former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman said the most important unanswered question is whether “these 19 people conducted this very sophisticated plot alone, or were they supported.”
“I think it’s implausible to think that 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,” he said.
“So who was the most likely entity to have provided them that support? And I think all the evidence points to Saudi Arabia. We know that Saudi Arabia started al Qaeda. It was a creation of Saudi Arabia.”
Graham said the president has full authority to order the declassification of the documents, adding he hopes he will do more than just declassify the 28 pages.
“There are 80,000 documents in a federal courtroom in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., relative to an investigation that took place on a relationship between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19, and two of his henchmen and a prominent Saudi family living in Sarasota.”
He added that he thinks the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has changed.
“It’s changing almost on a daily basis, as we are less dependent on the Saudis for petroleum, as some of the things that the Saudis are doing are so dramatically adverse to our interests, such as training the next generation of the young terrorists in their mosques in schools — their madrasas,” he said.
“The schism between the United States and Saudi Arabia is now very apparent. And 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.”