President Obama will soon decide whether to declassify 28 pages of high-risk documents on the 9/11 attacks, according to Former Florida Democrat Sen. Bob Graham.
In an interview with Fox news, Graham stated that he had pressed for the high-risk documents to be made public. He also stated that he was glad that after two years the matter will finally be decided upon by the president.
The Bush and Obama administrations had decided against unsealing the high-risk documents, claiming that doing so could jeopardize national security.
This didn’t sit well with critics though who claimed that the reluctance of the presidency to release the information is a calculated attempt to hide Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the attacks that claimed the lives of over 3000 people.
There has been renewed pressure on Obama to make the content of the documents public, especially since there is a planned presidential trip to Saudi Arabia next week.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), has spoken out in favor of the “high-risk” document, which she has seen, being released.
“I don’t know how the Saudi government will react to it, but I think it’s just information… [It] would be appropriate that this document is released before the president makes [the Saudi] trip so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document.”
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he doesn’t know whether the president had read the 28-page document, but that they are the subject of an intelligence community “classification review.”
According to Earnest, there was absolutely no evidence to suggest the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials funded Al Qaeda.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also wants them made available:
“As the former Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and top the House Democrat on the Joint Congressional investigation looking into the 9/11 attacks, I agree with former Senator Bob Graham that these documents should be declassified and made public, and that the Bush Administration’s refusal to do so was a mistake.”
“I have always advocated for providing as much transparency as possible to the American people consistent with protecting our national security.”
Convicted Al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui implicated high-ranking Saudi royals in the 911 attacks and this has led to calls to quickly declassify the high-risk report.
Some Saudi connections to the attacks are already established as 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens and mastermind Osama Bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian contractor with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
Graham said that the 28-page high-risk documents contain information on those that helped the hijackers obtain housing in the United States and enrolled them in flight school.
On 9/11, four airliners were hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda militants. Two of the planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York, another plane hit the Pentagon while a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
The mastermind Osama Bin Laden has since been killed in a covert operation by the U.S. in May 2011.
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