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A member of the 9/11 commission has broken his silence about some of the unreleased findings:
A former Republican member of the 9/11 commission, breaking dramatically with the commission's leaders, said Wednesday he believes there was clear evidence that Saudi government employees were part of a support network for the 9/11 hijackers and that the Obama administration should move quickly to declassify a long-secret congressional report on Saudi ties to the 2001 terrorist attack.
The comments by John F Lehman, an investment banker in New York who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, signal the first serious public split among the 10 commissioners since they issued a 2004 final report that was largely read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday May 15 2016, @01:13PM
I would have been very surprised to see the US go after the Saudis in 2001, for one simple reason: The Saudi royal family (and the Saudi-based bin Laden family, for that matter) are business partners of the Bush family, to the point where the Saudi ambassador to the US is a Bush confidant. George H.W. and by extension George W. would have lot a *lot* of money had the US gone after Saudi Arabia militarily.
And yes, I think that was also part of the motivation of the decision to get involved in the Persian Gulf back in 1991-2, when we deployed our troops to protect the Saudis. Which was the move that according to Al Qaida propaganda videos was Osama bin Laden's primary motivation for attacking us.
Oh, and the chemical weapons in Iraq? The reason the Bush people were so certain Saddam Hussein had lots of them was that the same people had sold Saddam Hussein those weapons back in the Reagan administration, hoping that he'd use them to attack the Iranians.
Basically, we've spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to cover up mistakes made by the Reagan administration, and to benefit Bush business interests like the Carlyle Group.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday May 16 2016, @07:54PM
Oh, and the chemical weapons in Iraq? The reason the Bush people were so certain Saddam Hussein had lots of them was that the same people had sold Saddam Hussein those weapons back in the Reagan administration, hoping that he'd use them to attack the Iranians.
While I agree with the gist of your post I believe you are giving the "Bush people" too much benefit of the doubt. Yes they knew what WMD's Hussein had been sold, but they also had to know that anything he had had long ago been used (to gas the Kurds for example) or deteriorated to the point they were useless. Maybe they expected to find a deteriorated stockpile which they could have held up as "proof" Saddam had WMD's to a public bloodthirsty for revenge (or whatever). That they did not even find that exposes another level of their basic incompetence.