By the time the commission was created, President George W. Bush had characterised the attacks as “acts of war”, adding that “freedom and democracy are under attack”. It was therefore to be expected that anyone who was actually, or even imagined to be, involved in these attacks was going to be labelled as an enemy. However, when on 22 July 2004, after two years of investigation, the 9/11 Commission’s report was released, something was missing. Twenty-eight pages had been withheld from publication. These pages specifically discussed the connections between the 9/11 hijackers and individuals working in the US for the government of Saudi Arabia. The withholding from publication of these specific pages was apparently ordered by the same George W. Bush who was ostensibly willing to confront anyone who would, in his worldview, threaten the US.
For the next 12 years, that is, between July 2004 and July 2016, the 28 pages remained “classified” and therefore unavailable to the public or the press. They were available to members of Congress if they would travel to a “secure location”, one person at a time, to read the document. They could take no notes nor reveal to anyone what they learned. So, what was going on here? According to Senator Bob Graham, a long-time advocate of declassifying the pages, what all these years of suppression came to was a “carefully orchestrated campaign to protect our Saudi ‘friends’” from the public revelation of “ample evidence of Saudi Arabia’s intimate ties to Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks”. If Graham is correct, Saudi Arabia received a free pass despite being involved in acts of war against the United States. How was this possible? Well, consider the following: there exists a long-standing commercial relationship and personal friendship between the Bush clan and the Saudi royal family. Even more important, Saudi Arabia has long managed the oil market to keep prices in the West at affordable levels. Presently, the Saudis have hundreds of billions of dollars invested, in various ways, in the United States. These include stocks, bonds, real estate and currency holdings. And, finally, Saudi Arabia is the top purchaser of US weapons, periodically buying as much as USD60 billion worth of armaments at a time from US defence contractors.
