BEFORE THE 28 PAGES WERE RELEASED

Food Travel USA with Elizabeth DoughertyAlbum: The TRUTH About Food and Travel Original Broadcast Date: 01/27/2016 BEFORE THE 28 PAGES WERE RELEASED On January 27, 2016, Elizabeth interviewed former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham. At the time, 28 pages from the congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks remained classified. Nobody outside a relatively small circle of government officials was allowed to read them. Bob Graham had. And he wanted the rest of us to see them. Graham had served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and co-chaired, with Florida Congressman Porter Goss, the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the intelligence failures surrounding September 11. This was separate from the later, much more highly politicized "9/11 Commission Report."  The Joint Inquiry completed its work in 2002, but an entire section dealing with possible sources of foreign support for some of the hijackers was withheld from the public. Those became known simply as "the 28 pages." When we spoke with Graham, they had been secret for nearly 13 years. Elizabeth asked him a pretty simple question: If the purpose of investigating 9/11 was to tell the American people what happened, why were 28 pages of that investigation being kept from the American people? That's when the conversation got interesting. Graham couldn't tell us exactly what was in those pages. They were still classified. But he could tell us where they pointed. SAUDI ARABIA Graham told us the withheld material dealt primarily with the question of who provided financial and other support connected with the September 11 attacks. And when Elizabeth pressed him about Saudi Arabia, he didn't exactly tell her she was looking in the wrong direction. Quite the opposite. Graham made clear that the material raised serious questions concerning Saudi connections to people who assisted some of the hijackers. There was an almost strange dance taking place during the interview. We could ask the questions. Graham knew the answers. But there were details he simply could not discuss while the material remained classified. So we kept pushing right up against the fence. Who classified it? Why was it classified? Was the decision really about national security? Why had the Bush administration refused to release it? And, after seven years in office, why hadn't President Obama released it either? Graham believed the long relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia played a major role. He argued that keeping the information secret was not protecting the American people and that Americans deserved to see the evidence and draw their own conclusions. Then we asked him something that seems even more important today. If the 28 pages were released, would that be everything? Or were there other investigative records sitting behind those pages that would remain classified? Graham's answer was essentially: there was more. The 28 pages represented only part of the underlying investigative material, and Graham believed those records should eventually be made public as well. THEN, 170 DAYS LATER... On July 15, 2016, just 170 days after our interview, the federal government finally released the 28 pages and suddenly we could see some of what Bob Graham had been carefully talking around. The pages discussed contacts between two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, and people investigators believed, (or wanted to sell to the American people) may have had connections with Saudi government officials or institutions. One of the central names was Omar al-Bayoumi, who met the two men shortly after their arrival in Southern California and helped them find an apartment and establish themselves in San Diego. The material also examined other Saudi-linked individuals and financial relationships. But there is an important distinction. The 28 pages did not establish that the Saudi government ordered the September 11 attacks, nor did they constitute a final finding that senior Saudi officials knowingly financed the plot. The material contained intelligence reports, investigative leads, allegations and unanswered questions, some of which had not been independently verified when the Joint Inquiry completed its work. The later 9/11 Commission concluded that it found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded al-Qaeda, while acknowledging that Saudi Arabia had been an important source of private funding for the organization. But th