Time for the Obama administration to release 9/11 intelligence papers.
The administration and Congress face important decisions involving Saudi Arabia, but neither should be terribly difficult.
First, it’s long past time to release the 28 pages of a bipartisan congressional inquiry into intelligence failures involving 9/11 that were suppressed in 2002 over sensitivity toward the Saudis.
Second, victims of 9/11 should not be allowed to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts for alleged connections to those attacks, as members of Congress are proposing.
As for the classified pages, the Bush administration fanned the flames of suspicion when it originally suppressed them. And the Obama administration’s decision to maintain the secrecy for so long is one of the many ways it has undermined its professed commitment to openness.
Some families of 9/11 victims claim President Obama personally promised them early in his first term that he would get the pages released. And yet still they wait.
At long last, however, the administration is reviewing the chapter in order to decide “whether to release at least parts of the documents,” according to The Associated Press. Unfortunately, a chapter even with redacted passages would do nothing to quell public suspicion and claims regarding a cover-up over Saudi Arabia’s links to the terrorists. The entire 28 pages must be revealed. Even the Saudis have said so — beginning as early as 2003.
People familiar with the contents of the classified work are weighing in, too, including members of Congress such as Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo. “Having read all 28 pages of the still classified chapter of the report,” Coffman wrote the administration in February, “I strongly recommend the federal govern- ment declassify the report in its entirely and make it available to the American public.”
Meanwhile, the bill in Congress authorizing lawsuits against Saudi Arabia is being presented as having limited application. It would curb what’s known as sovereign immunity for nations that facilitate terrorism on U.S. soil. What could be wrong with that?
But as Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith, law professors at Duke and Harvard, respectively, pointed out in a New York Times column, the U.S. conducts all kinds of activities abroad — from drone strikes to providing military aid to countries such as Israel — that critics claim foster civilian deaths. If other nations curbed sovereign immunity on such grounds, the U.S. “would become an attractive and high-profile target for politicized litigation designed to contest its foreign policy.”
They argue that no nation benefits from sovereign immunity more than the U.S. since “it conducts far more diplomatic, economic and military activities abroad than any other nation.” They’re right, and Obama should veto any law that would subject the U.S. to such legal harassment.