Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) is criticizing the Obama administration as having tried to strong-arm a former senator who is pushing to declassify 28 pages of the 9/11 report dealing with Saudi Arabia.
He recounted how Rep. Gwen Graham (D-Fla.) and her father, former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.), were detained by the FBI in 2011 at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. The message from the agents, according to the Grahams, was to quit pushing for declassification of the 28 pages.
The FBI “took a former senator, a former governor, grabbed him in an airport, hustled him into a room with armed force to try to intimidate him into taking different positions on issues of public policy and important national policy, and the fact that he wasn’t intimidated because he was calm doesn’t show that they weren’t trying to intimidate him,” Sherman said in an interview with The Hill’s Molly K. Hooper.
– From last week’s post: Disturbing Claim – FBI Interrogated Former Senator for Wanting “28 Pages” Declassified
Critics of my repeated focus on highlighting the Saudi role in 9/11 claim that anything revealed in the “28 pages” will be marginal at best, leaving many of the most important questions surrounding the attacks shrouded in secrecy. I agree. What I disagree with is the conclusion that aggressively pursuing a declassification of the 28 pages is therefore meaningless.
There’s almost always a underlying reason behind my relentless pursuit of certain topics. One of the key purposes of this website is to chronicle the myriad examples of U.S. government lies, corruption and criminality on behalf of a handful of insiders at the expense of the citizenry. This is because I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson when he wrote to Charles Yancey:
If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.