On the eve of President Obama’s final state visit to Saudi Arabia, 60 Minutes produced a story suggesting that 28 classified pages from the 9/11 Commission report point to direct Saudi government involvement in the attacks. There has been a lively debate over those pages since the report was first published 12 years ago, with lawmakers and others petitioning for the pages to be declassified, while intelligence and law enforcement officials as well as both the Bush and Obama White Houses have demurred. So why was the story aired now?
Yes, there's legislation pending that may allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its ostensible role in the attacks, but it was rolled out last September. So what, in journalistic parlance, was the peg for the story? Simple: Obama was heading to Riyadh.
There must have been some awkward moments between Obama and King Salman last week. The Saudis, after all, know the 9/11 story is nonsense. If Riyadh had something to hide, former foreign minister Saud al-Faisal wouldn't have called for the pages to be declassified all the way back in 2003. Still, the story was an embarrassment to the Saudis, who no doubt assumed that the American president had come to smile in their face even as he stabbed them in the back.
"There's nothing newsworthy in those 28 pages," says a source who worked in the National Security Council staff of the George W. Bush administration and read the documents. Nothing in those pages, according to the source, suggests Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
What is known about Saudi Arabia's role has been common knowledge for nearly a decade and a half—15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudi citizens, under orders from another Saudi citizen, Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 Commission, in the words of its report, "found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization." The careful wording highlights the fact that Saudi citizens as well as Islamic "charities" helped fund al Qaeda. If Riyadh had too often turned a blind eye to the subvention of terror by its wealthy princes, al Qaeda operations in Saudi itself convinced the kingdom it was vital to join the war on terror. As the Obama administration acknowledges, the Saudis have been a valuable partner in fighting Islamic terrorism, providing intelligence that prevented attacks on the United States.
So what's in those 28 pages then? "It's spy vs. spy stuff," the NSC staff source told me last week. In 2003, Bush refused to declassify the pages, saying, "we won't reveal sources and methods that will compromise our efforts to succeed" in fighting terrorism. As the 60 Minutes report shows, it was then-FBI director Robert Mueller who seemed most insistent that the pages stay classified. His chief concern would have been to protect our ability to collect intelligence on terror suspects in the United States as well as on foreign intelligence services.
What is the work of Middle East security services—like Egypt's, or Iran's, or Saudi Arabia's—in the United States? Partly to hunt for American secrets, but also to keep an eye on their own citizens, students, for instance, or businessmen.The 28 pages seem to be about American agencies spying on Middle Eastern services, who are spying on their own people.
The Obama administration has had seven years to declassify the 28 pages but hasn't. Where Bush explained that classification was to protect American national security, Obama officials hint that they're protecting Saudi Arabia from facts that wouldn't reflect well on Riyadh. The administration's intention is to make the Saudis look bad.
Not surprisingly, the Saudis were furious. But they should have seen it coming. The fear that Obama was going to take a shot at them if they strongly opposed the Iran deal was one reason they kept quiet when the Israelis encouraged them to speak out. Their silence didn't buy them any leniency, as they saw when Obama unloaded on Riyadh in his Atlantic interview last month. The Saudis, Obama said, were "free riders" who needed to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran.
Riyadh doesn't see it like that. Rather, they see themselves as part of the U.S. regional order. Or at least they saw themselves as part of that security architecture. Those days, say some Saudi officials, are now over. Former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal told CNN that the U.S.-Saudi relationship will have to be recalibrated. And "I don't think that we should expect any new president in America to go back to . . . the yesteryear days when things were different."
That probably made Obama's day. He has sought to destroy the old regional order and like all presidents would prefer to see his "achievement" preserved after he's left office. Now, no matter how much the next administration might want to restore easy relations with Riyadh, it is going to have to contend with the mess Obama's policy has created.
And there's another reason Obama is beating up on Saudi Arabia. In painting the Saudis as terrorists, the White House changes the subject from the Iranian aggression facilitated and encouraged by Obama's misbegotten deal with Tehran. As in a political campaign, the White House is finding it increasingly difficult to make a positive case for its candidate, Iran. So it resorts to driving up the negatives of Saudi Arabia.
It's Obama's standard operating procedure—denigrate allies while ignoring the threats posed by adversaries. Our partners in the Middle East and elsewhere must think that Washington has lost its mind. The reality is worse—America is not able or willing to lead at this point because for the last seven years we've been governed by a man consumed with contempt for the rest of the world, and especially for America's allies.