By the month of June, Brennan realized the release of the 28 pages could not be prevented. So on June 12, he did an interview on Saudi-owned Arabiya TV (of all places) and stated: "So these 28 pages I believe are going to come out and I think it's good that they come out. People shouldn't take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks." He added: "These so called 28 pages that were part of the joint inquiry that was published in 2002. Just a year after 9/11, was a very preliminary review trying to pull together bits and pieces of information reporting who was responsible for 9/11. Subsequently, the 9/11 commission looked very thoroughly at these allegations of Saudi involvement, Saudi government involvement and their finding, their conclusion was that there was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution or Saudi, senior Saudi officials individually had supported the 9/11 attacks."
Brennan's statement that the 9/11 commission followed up on the 28 pages "and looked very thoroughly at these allegations of Saudi involvement" is a bold-faced, easily disproven lie.
The originator of this lie is none other than the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow. Zelikow was on the National Security Council during the administration of George H.W. Bush, co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice during the Clinton years, was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board by George W. Bush, and served on that board until 2003 when he became Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. Another element of Zelikow's background is that he directed the Aspen Strategy Group (ASG), a group organized "to explore the preeminent foreign policy challenges the United States faces." Members of ASG have included Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz Judith Miller and Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
In 2014, Zelikow told the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright that the twenty-eight pages were "an agglomeration of preliminary, UNVETTED reports," merely "wild accusations that needed to be checked out." Zelikow went on to tell Wright that the 9-11 Commission checked out these accusations and "ultimately" were "unable to prove" any Saudi complicity.
Soon after CBS's 60 Minutes segment on the 28 pages was broadcast on April 10 (2016), Zelikow appeared on NBC News to describe the 28 pages as "UNVETTED investigative material." He added: "The pages provide no further answers about the 9/11 attacks that are not already included in the 9/11 Commission report." Lost in the hubbub, according to Zelikow, is that there are some far more fundamental questions about the attacks that remain unanswered, such as why the Iranian government "facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members through Iran on their journey to the United States."
Then on April 22, former governor Tom Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who served as chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission issued a statement that included: "The 28 pages were based almost entirely on raw, UNVETTED material that came to the FBI " We deemed vigorously pursuing the congressional panel's leads so important that we hired the person who drafted the 28 pages to work on our staff, along with the person who had assisted him. They were part of a team " augmented by the Commission's executive director [that] investigated over the course of 18 months all the leads contained in the 28 pages -- One must wonder how Kean and Hamilton were induced to repeat the lie that the leads in the 28 pages were "vigorously pursued" by the 9-11 Commission.
Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission by Kean and Hamilton was published in 2006. In this book, they state they were "set up to fail" and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation by the Bush administration. They also state they were misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the FAA; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate referring the matter to the Justice Department for perjury charges. In 2008, the NY Times published an op-ed by Kean and Hamilton titled "Stonewalled by the CIA," in which they stated that the CIA "obstructed our investigation."
As shown above, Brennan's statement about the un-vetted 28 pages being properly investigated by the 9-11 Commission was made about 10 days after Zelikow's and eight days after Kean's and Hamilton's. Then one day after Brennan's statement, Josh Earnest, White House Press Secretary, at a Press Briefing, in response to questions about the 28 pages, stated: Kean and Hamilton "described those 28 pages as UNVETTED, law enforcement investigative materials. And they said they had an opportunity to review that material, to follow up on leads " [and] they found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution had supported al Qaeda " Director Brennan's comments are entirely in line with those that were put forward by Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton " [Y]ou can reliably assume that [the President views] what [Brennan, Kean and Hamilton] have described is an accurate understanding of the contents of those 28 pages."
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