Does a Classified Sarasota Investigation Hold Shocking Truths About 9/11?
Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham believes it does.By Lucy Morgan 10/26/2016In September 2011, Bob Graham, a former Florida governor who served as United States senator from 1987 to 2005, got a call from an Irish journalist, Anthony Summers, who told Graham he was working with his wife Robbyn Swan on a book about the 9/11 attacks.
“He briefly told me about suspicious circumstances in Sarasota,” Graham says, “and he agreed to meet me at the Miami airport.”
Graham told me he was “surprised” by what Summers told him. “This was new information,” he said.
At the airport, Graham sat down with Summers, who was flying back to Ireland, and Dan Christensen, a journalist with the investigative blog Florida Bulldog. The two said an unnamed counterterrorism official had told them that the FBI’s Tampa office had compiled a lengthy report about connections between the hijackers and a wealthy Saudi family living in Prestancia, an exclusive gated Sarasota community where basketball superstar Michael Jordan once rented a home.
A young Saudi couple, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife, Anoud, and their two young twins had lived in Prestancia for about six years before the attacks, the journalists told Graham.
But two weeks before the attacks, the journalists told Graham, the family left under what Graham describes as “urgent conditions—a new car left in front of the house, food in the refrigerator, and clothes in the washer.”
Graham, who says he’d long been concerned about evidence suggesting the Saudis may have played a role in 9/11, was electrified by the story. Neither he nor Porter Goss, co-chair of the joint congressional committee, had heard anything about the Saudi family in Sarasota during the 2002 investigation, he says. He contacted the FBI and was told the bureau had provided that information to the committee, but a search of the records proved otherwise.
The FBI had responded to the Bulldog story with a statement saying it had reviewed the Sarasota investigation and found no connections between the family and the hijackers. “That piqued my interest,” says Graham. He asked the FBI to show him the records of the investigation, and the bureau agreed to send them. But no records arrived. So in October 2011, Graham paid a visit to the custodian of the FBI records in Washington, D.C. “He told me he’d never received any requests [to send the reports to Graham], then asked, ‘Would you like to read them now?’” Graham says. He showed Graham two reports; one said there were “many” connections between the Prestancia family and the terrorists and suggested that further trails of inquiry should be pursued.
Since then, Graham has intensified his crusade to uncover more information about Saudi Arabia’s connections to 9/11, connections for which he says there is “voluminous evidence” and which the victims’ families and the American people deserve to know. “I was 65 when I started this and now I’m 79,” says Graham, who estimates he devotes at least a third of his time to this issue.
Graham said that in 2011, he and Adele flew into Dulles International Airport on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their daughter in Virginia. Much to their surprise, they were greeted by two FBI agents, who escorted them to an office at the airport where Sean Joyce, the deputy director of the FBI, awaited. Graham figured they had decided to release the Sarasota records. After his meeting at the Miami airport two months earlier, he had tried to contact Gregory J. Sheffield, the FBI agent who wrote the report and had since been transferred to Honolulu, to learn more about the investigation.
https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/articles/2016/10/26/secrets-and-lies
