It looked for a brief moment there as if the Bush administration might declassify those 28 pages of the 9/11 investigation that deal, in large part, with the involvement of a “foreign government” with the hijackers. That foreign government would be Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are said to be “furious” about allegations that some of them may have helped some of the 9/11 highjackers who levelled the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon (15 of the 19 were Saudis). Prince Saud Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, flew to Washington to meet with President Bush on the matter. The administration so far is refusing to declassify the report because it might disrupt “ongoing investigations” important to national security.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida (a Democratic presidential candidate) had pushed hard for declassification of the 28 pages before the report’s release. Yesterday Graham made the request to Bush again in writing, citing this statement by the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan: "Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages."
We have to wonder if the White House refusal to declassify the material, which several members of congressional intelligence committees who have seen it say does not endanger national security, isn’t a dog-and-pony show to allow the Saudi government to assert its innocence while keeping any evidence to the contrary buried.
And if it turns out that the Saudi’s really are clean on this, I’ll be the first to apologize for all the suspicions I’ve aired.
But perhaps I'm too cynical. Kevin Drum at Calpundit has a different take on this.
Stay tuned.
Bush defaces an American flag?!
Yep. He autographed one, according to the Drudge Report. There’s a photo. Don’t some Republicans still want to send people to prison for this?
Whatever happened to the anthrax terrorist?
Nothing yet. The Seattle blog Orcinus lets us in on why (link via Atrios).
Democrats look very weak in new poll
The defection of white male voters has left the Democratic party perhaps fatally weakened and Bush’s re-election virtually certain if present numbers stand up through next year, a new poll says.
Update: No futures market on terrorism after all
Even Congress, which already had agreed to fund it to the tune of $8 million, has decided that DARPA’s idea that allowing speculators to bet on possible future terrorist events was crackpot. The program now appears to be dead.
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