9/11 Commissioner Pleads: Release the 28 Declassified Pages, ‘the Families Deserve to Know’
President Barack Obama‘s diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia this week comes amid continued heat over a proposed bill that would allow the family members of 9/11 victims to sue the foreign government for its role in the deadly terror attacks. All this, as speculation about the mysterious 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission Report mounts, with many suggesting that the missing content implicates high-ranking Saudis directly as financiers of the attack and presents evidence linking 15 of the 19 Saudi-born hijackers.
On Thursday morning, Representative Tim Roemer (D – IN) — former Ambassador to India and one of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission — appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to urge the release of the 28 pages.
“Many of us have come forward now Mika, and we believe that those 28 pages should be declassified,” Ambassador Roemer told Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski. He continued, “1: Because the American people deserve to know this, and the 9/11 families deserve to know it. 2: A lot has changed in the U.S.-Saudi relationship over the past 5-6 years, and we need to reset that relationship.”
Ambassador Roemer estimates that as many as eight of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission, which was comprised of five Republicans and five Democrats, support the release of the declassified information.
“We know it was a fertile fundraising ground for terrorism and terrorists and Al Qaeda,” Roemer said of Saudi Arabia. “We need to change the relationship with the Saudis, which the President is over there doing right now.”
When pressed for specifics of incriminating information contained in the 28 pages however, Roemer admitted to Willie Geist, “We did not discover senior, high-level Saudi government connection to the attacks.”
The bill that is currently working its way across Capitol Hill is known as the “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act,” a bipartisan push that would remove all immunity from foreign governments that are linked to, “… a terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil.” The bill has also resulted in bipartisan push-back of sorts, as well; President Obama as well as influential GOP members like Lindsey Graham and even House Speaker Paul Ryan have casted doubts about the “Justice” bill. The President said regarding the legislation, “If we let Americans sue Saudis for 9/11, foreigners will begin suing US non-stop.”
Senator Graham has said of the controversial bill that he would want to “make sure that anything we do doesn’t come to bite us… Anything we do in this bill can be used against us later.”
Watch the above clip from MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
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[image via screengrab]
