9/11 Commissioners Admit They Never Got the Full Story...

9/11 Commission Chair: Declassify EVERYTHING

Washington's Blog

9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Keane has previously called for the declassification of the secret 28 pages of the Congressional 9/11 Inquiry, and said that 60-70% of what was classified shouldn’t have been classified in the first place.

The New Yorker reported last week:

Thomas Kean remembers finally having the opportunity to read those twenty-eight pages after he became chairman of the 9/11 Commission—“so secret that I had to get all of my security clearances and go into the bowels of Congress with someone looking over my shoulder.” He also remembers thinking at the time that most of what he was reading should never have been kept secret. But the focus on the twenty-eight pages obscures the fact that many important documents are still classified—“a ton of stuff,” Kean told me, including, for instance, the 9/11 Commission’s interviews with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. “I don’t know of a single thing in our report that should not be public after ten years,” Kean said.

9/11 Commission Co-Chair Lee Hamilton agrees.

And so does 9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer. As the New Yorker writes:

“In some ways, it’s more dangerous today,” Timothy Roemer, who was a member of both the Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission, observed. “A more complex series of threats are coming together than even before 9/11, involving ISIS, Al Qaeda, and cyber-terrorist capabilities. The more the American people know about what happened thirteen years ago, the more we can have a credible, open debate” about our security needs. Releasing the twenty-eight pages, he said, might be a step forward. “Hopefully, after some initial shock and awe, it would make our process work better. Our government has an obligation to do this.”

And others who have seen the classified 9/11 materials agree that we can’t move forward with an effective security program until the American people know what’s in the classified materials. The New Yorker adds:

Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky and a sponsor of the House resolution to declassify the material, told me that the experience of reading those twenty-eight pages caused him to rethink how to handle the rise of ISIS. It has made him much more cautious about a military response. “We have to be careful, when we run the calculations of action, what the repercussions will be,” he said.

The Co-Chair of the congressional investigation into 9/11 – Senator Bob Graham – notes:

Although it’s been more than a decade ago when this horrific event occurred, I think [the questions of who supported the attacks] have real consequences to U.S. actions today.

Graham told PBS:

We need to have this information now because it’s relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing today.

And the Independent writes:

The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has been aided by the continuing failure of the US Government to investigate the role of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 attacks and its support of jihadi movements such as al-Qaeda in the years since, says former Senator Bob Graham, the co-chairman of the official inquiry into 9/11.

Senator Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that successive administrations in Washington had turned a blind eye to Saudi support for Sunni extremists. He added: “I believe that the failure to shine a full light on Saudi actions and particularly its involvement in 9/11 has contributed to the Saudi ability to continue to engage in actions that are damaging to the US – and in particular their support for Isis.”

But 9/11 Commissioners Admit They Never Got the Full Story...

Read the rest here:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/09/911-commission-chair-declassify-everything.html