The Saudi government has said it had no connection to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite numerous links between the 15 hijackers of Saudi origin and several high-ranking Saudi officials in the US, who helped them gain entry to the country and to get settled after they arrived.
The White House announced on Friday that in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it would begin the process of reviewing documents related to the attacks for possible declassification and release before the end of the year.
Last month, the DOJ committed itself to such a review ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks in response to years of petitioning by victims’ families. Biden has also faced demands by 1,800 survivors of the attacks to skip the upcoming memorial events if he refused to release the documents.
The attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers from the al-Qaeda* terrorist group who took over four airliners, flying two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a fourth which plummeted from the sky in southern Pennsylvania after the passengers attempted to retake control of the aircraft. Some 2,977 people were killed in the attacks, which successfully collapsed the two 110-story skyscrapers in lower Manhattan and sparked a raging fire in one part of the Pentagon, which houses Department of Defense offices.
Ayman al-Zawahri, left, holds a press conference with Osama bin Laden in Khost, Afghanistan in 1998.
Beginning in 2002, Congress created a massive investigative commission to look into the attacks and the intelligence failures leading up to them, which were published in 2004 in the 9/11 Commission Report. However, the report was itself criticized for failing to adequately explore the many failures of both domestic and foreign intelligence that allowed the attacks to occur.
In April 2020, the DOJ reversed the planned release of more documents to the families, but said it couldn’t explain why the information had to remain secret because that information was also secret.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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