Sen. Graham: 9/11 Came from Top of Saudi Power Pyramid

In addition to re-airing the April 2016 segment of 60 Minutes on the 28 pages fight, CBS TV Miami’s Jim DeFede conducted a ten-minute interview on Sunday with Sen. Bob Graham, in which Graham delivered one of the sharpest indictments yet of the Saudi Royal Family. Asked to comment on the now infamous paragraph in the final report of the 9/11 Commission, which said there was no evidence of high-level Saudi Monarchy or government support for the 9/11 hijackers, Graham said “I strongly disagree.” He explained that he believed that it went “to the top of the pyramid” and that such an “attack on an ally” could not have been carried out without such top-down approval. He reviewed the fact that the hijackers spoke no English, had no previous travel to the United States and were not particularly well-educated. They had to have received help from inside the United States and that help had to have come from outside the country. “I think it points a very strong finger to Saudi Arabia as the ultimate source,” Graham declared.

Asked by DeFede to comment on a recent letter by Sen. Bill Nelson to President Obama, reporting that he had read the 28 pages and “intelligence reports that debunk them,” Graham said that all of the documentation still classified should come out publicly. He cited the fact that a Federal Judge in Ft. Lauderdale is reviewing 80,000 pages of FBI documents from the Tampa field office on a Sarasota investigation into a wealthy Saudi family that had ties to Mohammed Atta and several other hijackers who spent months in the area.

Graham said that if the 28 pages are made public, he will call for a full-scale re-assessment of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, noting that Saudi Arabia is the number one arms purchaser in the world, with much of the sales coming from the United States. “Do we want to sell arms to a country that was our enemy in the run-up to 9/11?”

Graham called Saudi Arabia a “perfidious, unreliable ally,” emphasizing that the Saudi Monarchy’s “primary goal is survival. They are an absolute monarchy” that is obsessed with how to prevent the kind of Iran-style coup that overthrew the Shah.

Graham referenced the JASTA bill, noting that the 9/11 families have been in court for years against the Saudi Monarchy, but have had the cases dismissed, due to issues of sovereign immunity and the courts finding that the plaintiffs lacked evidence of Saudi Royal involvement. That evidence, Graham noted, “is locked up.”