Forgery and planted disinformation · 2003-2016 · US, Saudi Arabia

The "28 pages"

The congressional Joint Inquiry into the 11 September attacks completed its report in December 2002, but a 28-page section on possible foreign support for the hijackers was fully redacted when the report was published in July 2003 and was released only on 15 July 2016. Bob Graham and others called the redaction unwarranted; the 9/11 Commission and the 2016 statements of its co-chairs found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials funded al-Qaeda. The case is the long classification; what the pages imply remains disputed.

Official Senate portrait of Senator Bob Graham of Florida.
Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who co-chaired the 2002 Joint Inquiry whose 28-page section was withheld, in his official Senate portrait (before 2001). Credit: United States Senate, via Wikimedia Commons. License: Public domain.
Run by
US executive branch
Per Rep. Walter Jones and Sen. Bob Graham, the Bush administration classified the section
Fully redacted in the 2003 public report
28 pages
Withheld for roughly 13 years
Between the 2003 publication and the 2016 release
13 years
Release followed a declassification review and House Intelligence Committee publication
Time to exposure
15 Jul 2016
The pages were posted by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Timeline

  1. Dec 2002 · Context

    The Joint Inquiry of the Senate and House intelligence committees completes its report; the 9/11 Commission cites it as "Joint Inquiry report, Dec. 2002".

  2. Jul 2003 · It worked

    The report is published with the 28-page section fully redacted, after the Bush administration classified it; Sen. Byron Dorgan said it refused to declassify.

  3. 28 Oct 2003 · Exposed

    Senator Bob Graham refers in the Senate to "these 28 censored pages" and argues that public access to relevant information is "not an issue of national security". Senator Richard Shelby, quoted in the same debate, says the pages were classified "for the wrong reason" and that about 95 percent should be declassified.

  4. 2004 · Context

    The 9/11 Commission reports that it found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded" al-Qaeda, and says that does not exclude "charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship" diverting funds.

  5. 2013-2015 · Exposed

    Representatives Walter Jones and Stephen Lynch, joined in 2015 by Thomas Massie, introduce resolutions urging the President to declassify the section; Jones says the pages "posed no national security risk".

  6. 15 Jul 2016 · Exposed

    The pages are released. They describe leads about "individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government" assisting some hijackers in the US, and the FBI "paused its investigation" of one lead "due to the sensitivity of the matter". Rep. Devin Nunes calls them "unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the Intelligence Community".

  7. 2016 · Context

    Commission co-chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton say the Commission investigated "all the leads contained in the 28 pages, and many more".

The public was told the section could not be shown for national security reasons; the released leads were raw and unverified, which is why the length of the secrecy, not the contents, is the documented part.

The playbook

  1. 1

    Suppress the correction

    The section was redacted in full in 2003, and requests to declassify it, including from the Senate committee's own former chair, went unmet for years.

  2. 2

    Borrowed authority

    The justification was national security and the protection of sources and methods, a claim the public could not test while the pages stayed closed.

  3. 3

    Win before the facts

    The unreleased section became a vacuum in which both strong claims and flat denials of Saudi involvement circulated for years.

Through the FATE framework

  • Focus3/10

    The classification pulled attention to a single unseen section of a long report.

  • Authority6/10

    The withholding rested on the executive branch's authority to classify.

  • Tribe2/10

    There was little in-group framing in the official handling itself.

  • Emotion5/10

    The secrecy fed suspicion among victims' families and others for years.

Propaganda techniques used

Same playbook today

The same playbook can be run by anyone, on any side. We list every current PSYOP that matches The "28 pages", whoever is behind it.

No live PSYOP we track matches this playbook right now. When one does, it will appear here.