What a Surprise, The 911 Report on the House of Saud is Dumped on a Friday Evening

The 28 pages on the potential connections between the House of Saud and the 911 hijackers has finally been released.

There are what appear to be connections between Saudi Officials and the 911 hijackers, though they are indirect:

Saudi nationals connected to the government in Riyadh may have aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers in the U.S. before they carried out their attacks, according to a long-classified portion of a congressional inquiry.

"While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government,” according to the section released Friday by the House Intelligence Committee with some portions blacked out.

But top U.S. intelligence officials who approved releasing the report, as families of some of the 3,000 victims of the attacks have long demanded, emphasized that they didn’t consider it accurate or reliable. Saudi officials have long said the 28 pages from the report written in 2002 provide no evidence that the U.S. ally was involved in the attacks, and that conclusion was echoed by the lawmakers who released the document.

The 28 pages do “not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the intelligence committee,” Representative Devin Nunes of California, the committee’s Republican chairman, said in a statement.

………

The release also was praised by former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who has long differed with most fellow lawmakers about the significance of the 28 pages and the likelihood of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We’re now at a point where the American people can read the 28 pages and form their own opinion," Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said in a telephone interview. "This makes a very compelling case that the Saudis were the source of assistance to the 9/11 hijackers."

Rather unsurprisingly, there appear to be ties between the hijackers and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan:

One of the individuals cited in the previously classified material is Osama Bassnan, who the FBI and CIA suspected may have been in contact in San Diego with two of the 19 hijackers — 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. The document states that the FBI "confirmed" that Bassnan's wife received money directly from the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the ambassador to the United States.

Like a bad penny, we find Prince Bandar yet again.

I won't go as far as the folks at New York Post, who flat out declare Saudi culpability, but the history of the Saudi regime, particularly when juxtaposed by efforts to suppress this information by the Saudis, does create the impression that the House of Saud is not the stalwart ally that the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC portrays them to be.