By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Two CIA directors. Two conflicting opinions.
On Monday, former CIA director Porter Goss strongly disagreed with current CIA chief John Brennan’s assertions on Meet the Press as to why President Obama should keep secret 28 classified pages from a 14-year-old congressional report about 9/11 said to implicate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the terrorist attacks.
“I favor full declassification of the 28 pages unless there is a national security reason not to,” Goss told FloridaBulldog.org. “If there is such a reason, I feel the Administration should tell us specifically what it is. I will not settle for generalities about ‘offending allies.’ ”
Brennan, who has been CIA director since 2013, told TV interviewer Chuck Todd Sunday the top secret 28 pages contain information that was “thoroughly investigated” and in some cases found to be inaccurate by the subsequent 9/11 Commission and last year’s lesser-known 9/11 Review Commission.
“I think some people may seize upon that uncorroborated, unvetted information that was in there that was basically just a collation of this information that came out of FBI files and point to Saudi involvement which I think would be very, very inaccurate,” Brennan said.
The Obama Administration’s Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, which includes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is reviewing the hidden chapter in the 838-page congressional report about “specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”
The review process for the 28 pages has been underway since June 2013 when the Florida Bulldog’s parent, Broward Bulldog Inc., invoked what’s known as the Mandatory Declassification Review process. James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, told reporters last week that an “interagency position on the declassification of the 28 pages” is ongoing and that a decision on whether to release the 28 pages was likely by June.
Goss, who helped write the 28 pages, believes the government will act soon, yet will continue to withhold some information they contain from the public.
“My guess is that some of the 28-page material will be released soon, but some bits will still be redacted. Thus the speculation will continue. I think this will all be settled about the same time everyone agrees about the Kennedy assassination,” Goss said.
Goss, the CIA director from 2004 to 2006, was a veteran Republican congressman from Southwest Florida and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence when in 2002 he was tapped to help lead Congress’s Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. His co-chairman was Florida Sen. Bob Graham, the Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Rebuffed by the FBI director
Graham has been a leading figure in calling publicly for the release of the 28 pages. In a recent 60 Minutes report, Goss told how Graham and he met with then-FBI Director Robert Mueller before the Joint Inquiry’s report was released to secure declassification of the 28 pages, but were rebuffed.
“I distinctly recall that after Bob [Graham] and I were turned down by Bob Mueller at FBI, we both were disappointed and a bit puzzled about ‘why.’ We were under some time constraints to get our Joint Inquiry Report out and we had the option of handing off the material to the 9/11 Commission for further attention – which we did,” Goss said in an email. “I have never had a satisfactory explanation of why this material has not been declassified – though there may be one.”
The 9/11 Commission’s final report later stated that while “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding … we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization. (This conclusion does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda.)”
As FloridaBulldog.org has reported, Saudi King Salman “actively directed” one Saudi charity that court papers filed by 9/11 victims and their families say was “especially important to al Qaeda acquiring the strike capabilities used to launch attacks in the U.S.”
Goss said he hasn’t “pushed as hard as Bob on this, possibly because I do not think there was any official Saudi State complicity in the 9/11 attacks …
Obviously there could have been a rogue ‘official’ or misguided ‘Royal’ in the mix, but even that is uncertain.
“For me the salient point today is just how tolerant are we as a civilized society to allow exploitation of our freedoms by foreigners who deliberately want to undermine those freedoms with systematic violence and malevolent propaganda,” Goss said.
“I am not sure why the Obama Administration thinks the Radical Islamists are rational enough to negotiate with or emotionally stable enough to live peacefully among us. The concept of trying to appease those who have no interest in anything less than a whole new Caliphate is dangerously foolish. Using mosques as forward based platforms to preach and perform violence is a reality that far outstrips my understanding of Freedom of Religion,” Goss said.
Goss called the continued classification of the 28 pages “a minor irritant compared to the idiocy of ‘over-tolerance’ and mishandling of the real threat by the current (and likely next) Administration.”
“If you surmise that I have low confidence the Administration will tell us the truth, you have a high perception,” said Goss. “I guess they could send [National Security Advisor] Susan Rice out to the Sunday Talk Show Circuit to explain it.”
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