President Obama could declassify those pages tomorrow if he wished. And he should do so. No good national security reason exists to continue keeping this material under wraps. Indeed, the opposite can be argued. The resistance to releasing it seems, in fact, to be a matter of maintaining ties to the Saudis, totalitarian extremists dubbed "moderates" because of their alliance with the United States, as well as their oil riches, not because of their actual worldview.
Moussaoui's testimony is scarcely the first time high-level Saudis have been accused of being funders of Al Qaeda. In a Monday statement, the Saudis rejected the latest allegations, noting that the Sept. 11 commission exculpated them:
“Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent,” the statement said. “His words have no credibility.”Since 2006, Moussaoui has been serving a sentence of life without parole in the supermax prison at Florence, Colorado, after being convicted for conspiring with Al Qaeda to commit acts of terror. Upon sentencing, the judge in the case said: "You came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper. You will never get a chance to speak again and that's an appropriate ending." It turns out he has gotten another chance.
The October testimony came as a result of a long-running lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Specifically, Moussaoui claimed that he had spoken in Afghanistan with a member of the Islamic Affairs Department at the Saudi embassy in Washington about a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile. He testified that he was involved in a trial run of a bomb for use on the U.S. embassy in London, a type of weapon that was actually used in attacks on the U.S. embassy in Kenya and Tanzania.
As you can read below the fold, that's not all.