The 'missing' pages of the 9/11 report allege Saudi links to the World Trade Center hijackers

The final 28 pages of the official US intelligence Joint Inquiry into the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were released Friday.

The pages, which describe what the US intelligence services knew about Saudi government links to the 9/11 attacks, got fewer news headlines than expected because the world was transfixed that night by the attempted coup in Turkey.

What headlines the newly unredacted pages did get were surprising: While the pages allege numerous financial and political links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 terrorists, the headlines from Friday say the opposite: "New 9/11 Document Reveals No Smoking Gun of Saudi Complicity," The New York Times said. The Washington Post went with, "White House says 28 pages of 9/11 report show no evidence of Saudi role." And the BBC said, "9/11 attacks: Newly released pages 'show no top Saudi link.'"

But as Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said Friday, "Preliminary readings show that there may well have been Saudi involvement in the terror of 9/11 both in the Saudi government and within the Saudi country, within Saudi Arabia ... if the Saudi government was complicit in 9/11 they should pay the price to the families who deserve justice."

You can read the 28 pages for yourself here.

This is the first line of the report:

The report later goes on to qualify that "neither CIA nor FBI witnesses were able to identify the extent of Saudi support for terrorist activity globally or within the United States and to the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature."

The links were later debunked by further investigation, according to Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and vice chairman Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat. In 2014, the commission's director, Philip Zelikow, told Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker that the pages were "an agglomeration of preliminary, unvetted reports ... They were wild accusations that needed to be checked out," and ultimately the FBI did not find evidence that money from the Saudi government went to the hijackers.

Nonetheless, they make spectacular allegations regarding the Saudi suspects and their financial links to the kingdom.

Here is a summary of the most serious allegations: