Reality Asserts Itself - Bob Graham Archives

Sen. Graham: President Must Side with Openness About CIA and 9/11

March 17, 2014

Sen. Bob Graham, a former Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the President should declassify the Senate report on CIA torture and the still secret 28 pages of the Congressional report on who financed the 9/11 attacks

The 9/11 Conspiracy: Did Bush/Cheney Create a Culture of Not Wanting toKnow? – Sen. Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt4

December 2, 2013

On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham says there was a pervasive pattern in police and intelligence agencies: “You don’t have everybody moving in the same direction without there being a head coach somewhere who was giving them instructions as to where he wants them to move” The 9/11 Conspiracy: Did Bush/Cheney Create a Culture of Not Wanting to Know? Former Senator Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself (Part 4) Former Senator Graham says that a new inquiry into 9/11 should be launched to ask whether the 19 hijackers acted alone, the extent of Saudi involvement in the attacks, and why the US concealed evidence of a support network for the hijackers. The Bush administration also failed to seriously respond to a Presidential Daily Brief from August 6, 2001 that contained a section titled “bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” “It was a fairly stark and specific call,” says Former Senator Bob Graham. “The president, from all evidence, basically ignored that warning and no steps were taken to try to dig deeper or to disrupt the plot.” Graham served as the co-chair of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. A 28-page chapter in the final report detailing Saudi involvement in the financing, support, and execution of the attacks on the World Trade Center was redacted by the FBI. The FBI also withheld information about the support networks for several of the 9/11 hijackers located through the United States, says Graham. When asked about whether a deliberate culture had been created by the…

Why Would Saudi Arabia Support the 9/11 Conspirators, Why Would the US Gov. Cover it Up? – Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt3

November 29, 2013

Why Would Saudi Arabia Support the 9/11 Conspirators? Why Would the US Government Cover it Up? Senator Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself (Part 3) Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, believes that the Saudi government “had a high and what has thus far turned out to be credible expectation that their role” in 9/11 “would not be exposed” by the U.S. government. “Everything that the federal government has done since 9/11 has had as one of its outcomes, if not its objectives—and I believe it was both outcome and objective—that the Saudis’ role has been covered,” says Graham. Senator Graham had talked to the other co-chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the two chairs of the citizen’s 9/11 commission about the possibility of the 19 hijackers acting independently. “All three of them used almost the same word—implausible—that it is implausible that that could have been the case. Yet that has now become the conventional wisdom to the aggressive exclusion of other alternatives,” says Graham. Graham says it is also possible that the Saudis gave financial support for Osama bin Laden’s operations in order to stop him from launching a campaign of civil unrest within Saudi Arabia as retaliation for allowing U.S. troops to occupy a part of the country during the first Gulf War. The Saudis’ “confidence in the fact the United States would not react, or that the United States would not go to the extremes that in fact it has to cover up their involvement,…

Revealing the 9/11 Conspiracy Would Undo the Entire US-Saudi Alliance – Sen. Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt2

November 28, 2013

Paul Jay asks Senator Graham if a culture of “not wanting to know” was created to prevent the conspiracy from being uncovered and to protect the role of the Saudi government

Investigating the Saudi Government’s 9/11 Connection and the Path to Disillusionment – Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt 1

November 27, 2013

On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham explains why he persists in making the case that facts directly connect the Saudi government with 9/11 conspirators Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham says greater awareness of Saudi Arabia as “essentially a co-conspirator in 9/11…would change the way in which, particularly in the current milieu of events in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is being viewed” by the U.S. public. Saudi Arabia, an historic ally of the U.S., had put significant pressure on the Obama administration in recent months to militarily intervene in Syria, and had also attempted to derail recent U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Senator Graham co-chaired the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that investigated intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. The inquiry’s final report included a 28-page chapter describing the Saudi connection to 9/11, but it was completely redacted by U.S. intelligence agencies. “I was stunned that the intelligence community would feel that it was a threat to national security for the American people to know who had made 9/11 financially possible,” said Senator Graham. “And I am sad to report that today, some 12 years after we submitted our report, that those 28 pages continue to be withheld from the public.” The investigation into 9/11 intelligence failures and the subsequent cover-up of Saudi involvement by the Bush administration led Senator Graham to question his life-long reverence of presidential authority. “I grew up with the idea that the president was almost a divine figure, that he was the literally the father of the country and always acted…

The Neocons and 9/11

September 13, 2012

Robert Parry: The emerging history of 9/11 reveals that President George W. Bushâ€™s failure to protect the nation resulted from neocon insistence that Iraq was the real threat, not al-Qaeda. The political relevance today is that the neocons want back into power under a Mitt Romney presidency