Abu Tahir Mustakim :
Politics of the Middle East have suddenly become more turbulent again. This unrest has started over the establishment of diplomatic relations of some Arab countries with Zionist Israel. Behind this, there has been the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA in September, 11, 2001. Although it seems that all the solutions have been done, but there are various quarters active inside.
In January 2020, it was revealed that the FBI had an investigation named Operation Encore into Saudi Arabian links to the 9/11 attacks. In April 2020, the FBI neglected to redact one of several instances of a Saudi diplomat Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah (MAJ) in a court filing in the lawsuit brought by 9/11 families. In 1999-2000 MAJ was a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was working in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC. Former embassy officials said MAJ reported to the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, and managed the employees throughout the United States of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers.
Analysts say staunch pro-Jewish President Trump has used the FBI to increase pressure on Saudi Arabia. Through this, he is taking financial advantage as well as diplomatic advantage ahead of the US election. Fearing to get involved in the 9/11 attacks he is pressuring Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. And in the face of this pressure several countries in the Saudi Arabian block have begun taking steps to establish bilateral relations with Israel.
‘The 9/11 Commission Report’ is the official report of the events leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The commission was established on November 27, 2002 (442 days after the attack) and their final report was issued on July 22, 2004 (1045 days after the attack). The commission interviewed over 1,200 people in 10 countries and reviewed over two and a half million pages of documents. The commission also relied heavily on the FBI’s PENTTBOM investigation. Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited as necessary.
According to the commission, all 19 hijackers were members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, led by Osama bin Laden. 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks were from Saudi Arabia, but the commission ‘found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization’ to conspire in the attacks.
But in a 2004 article titled, ‘Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation’, Harper’s Magazine writer Benjamin DeMott stated that:
‘The plain and sad reality is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. …the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises.’
In a 2004 interview with Bernard Gwertzman, of the Council on Foreign Relations, Anthony H. Cordesman stated of the report:
‘Again, one of the great problems in the commission report is that it looked at exactly one issue – counterterrorism – and none of the others. … But this is a 13-chapter report. Eleven chapters are a masterful description of what happened and what went wrong that led to the 9/11 attack. There is no chapter that explains what people did after 9/11. There is no chapter that qualifies that this is only one of many problems in intelligence and intelligence reform.’
When the congressional joint inquiry report was published in July 2003, the 28-page section on possible Saudi links to the attacks was completely redacted at the insistence of the George W. Bush administration. Bush claimed that releasing the material would ‘reveal sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the war on terror.’ On the drive to declassify the 28 pages, former and current Senators, congressmen and 9/11 Commission members, attorneys representing 9/11 family members, survivors and insurers continued their effort to release of the pages.
The Saudi government voiced support for the declassification of the 28 pages, saying it would ‘allow us to respond to any allegations in a clear and credible manner.’ In March 2016, Saudi Arabia threatened the Obama administration to sell $750 billion worth of American assets owned by Saudi Arabia if the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) designed to create an exception to the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act was enacted. This caused fears of destabilizing the US dollar.
In 2016, following a declassification review, the Obama Administration approved the declassification of the partially redacted 28 Pages, the Joint Inquiry’s only wholly classified section. The document was then sent to congressional leadership and on July 15, 2016, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence approved publication of the newly declassified section.
The much talked ‘The 28 pages’ document is kept in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in the basement of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
The alleged Saudi role in the September 11 attacks gained new attention after 2017 a New York lawyer, Jim Kreindler, said that he had found ‘a link between Saudi officials and the hijackers.’ The Saudi government had long had broad immunity from September 11 tragedy lawsuits in the United States. But in March 2018, a US judge allowed a suit to move forward against Saudi Arabia brought by 9/11 survivors and victim’s families, that the government should pay billions of dollars in damages to victims. At any cost Saudi Arabia wants to avoid these diplomatic and financial catastrophes.
(Mr. Mustakim is a columnist).
