Some classified knowledge shouldn’t stay classified

pages pertaining to 9/11 can be inferred from this sentence in the commission’s report: “We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded (al-Qaeda).” Those five italicized words constitute a loophole large enough to fly a hijacked airliner through.

CBS’ “60 Minutes” recently reported that former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chaired the bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 intelligence failures, says the pages suggest the existence of a network that supported the hijackers when they were in America. Former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer, who was a member of the joint inquiry and then of the commission, and who has studied the 28 pages, says they contain “provocative evidence — some verified, and some not” of possible “official Saudi assistance for two of the hijackers who settled in Southern California.” “60 Minutes” said the two Saudi nationals had “extremely limited language skills and no experience with Western culture.” Yet “they managed to get everything they needed, from housing to flight lessons,” after being seen in the company of a diplomat from Saudi Arabia’s Los Angeles consulate.

Before John Lehman was a member of the 9/11 Commission — which unanimously supported release of its report uncensored — he was a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff during the Nixon administration and was secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Lehman understands the serious and the spurious arguments connecting secrecy to security. He says the 28 pages contain no “smoking gun,” but he believes senior Saudi officials knew that Saudis were assisting al-Qaeda.

A federal appeals court has ruled, 2-1, against a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of the history. Citing a FOIA exemption that protects secrecy deemed essential to preserving government agencies’ deliberative processes, the court held that even after more than half a century the history is “still a draft” — never mind that its author retired in 1984 and died in 1997.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in his book on the subject, secrecy is government regulation, but unlike most regulations, which restrict what people can do, secrecy restricts what they can know.

On “Fox News Sunday” April 10, Obama was asked if he could say that Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified data on her email server “did not jeopardize America’s secrets.” He intimated that many classified documents are not all that important to security. He should apply this insight to documents pertaining to 9/11 and to the debacle 40 years before it.