When the official report of the congressional 9/11 commission was released in 2003, 29 (not, as often claimed, 28) pages had been removed. These pages have now been released. As has been rumored for some time, they do in fact show evidence of connections between Saudi officials and the hijackings. Simon Henderson writes:

It is instantly apparent [upon looking at the passages] that the widely-held belief for why the pages were not initially released—to prevent embarrassing the Saudi royal family—is true. The pages are devastating. . . . The inquiry . . . quotes a redacted source alleging “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.”

[In a recent] interview, the CIA’s director, John Brennan, [stated that] “there [is] no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually had supported the 9/11 attacks.”

That could very well be right. But it still allows for the possibility, indeed the probability, that the actions of senior Saudis resulted in those terrorist outrages. [One need not believe] that the Saudi government or members of the royal family directly supported or financed the 9/11 attacks. But official Saudi money ended up in the pockets of the attackers, without a doubt. . . .

On Friday, the Saudi foreign minister held a news conference at the Saudi embassy where he declared “The matter is now finished.” Asked whether the report exonerated the kingdom, he replied: “Absolutely.” I think not.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.