9/11Saudi government officials supported 9/11 hijackers: John Lehman
John F Lehman, who sat on the 9/11 Commission from 2003 to 2004 which investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has said that Saudi government officials supported the hijackers. There was an “awful lot of circumstantial evidence” implicating several employees in the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Lehman claimed. “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he said. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”
John F Lehman, who sat on the 9/11 Commission from 2003 to 2004 which investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has said that Saudi government officials supported the hijackers. There was an “awful lot of circumstantial evidence” implicating several employees in the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Lehman claimed.
“There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he told the Guardian. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”
CNN report that links between the Saudis leadership and the 9/11 attacks have long been suspected, with fifteen of the eighteen hijackers being Saudi citizens.
The 2004 9/11 Commission’s report found no evidence of direct collusion between Saudi Arabia and the terrorists, concluding: “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al-Qaeda funding but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.”
These conclusions notwithstanding, the U.S. government has so far refused to release the 28-page chapter of the report dealing with the role Saudi officials played in the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. intelligence community has insisted that that chapter of the report remain classified in order not to harm relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
President George W Bush said publication of the classified section would damage U.S. national security by revealing “sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the War on Terror,” while the former chairman of the 9/11 Commission said that the classified section contained “raw, unvetted” material which, if released, could damage innocent people.
Members of the 9/11 victims, but also some members of the commission – former Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) and former Representative Tim Roemer (D-Indiana) – called for the release of the document.
Lehman, an investment banker who was Secretary of the Navy in the Ronald Reagan administration, also called for the classified 28-page section to be released, but added he did not believe that the Saudi royal family or the country’s senior leadership played a role in supporting al-Qaeda or the 9/11 plot.
CNN notes that the CIA inspector-general in June 2015 issued a report saying that there had been no reliable information confirming Saudi “involvement with and financial support for terrorism prior to 9/11,” but that that agents believed “dissident sympathizers within the government may have aided al-Qaeda.”
