HOUSE OVERSIGHT 015007 the 9/11 attacks"; 4. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9/11. It might sound from these citations that the 9/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my chapter is to show that 1. one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the "al-Qaeda connection," if you will); 2. one major intention of the 9/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection; 3. those on the 9/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell), and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists' protectors. In the course of writing this chapter [Scott continues], I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9/11 Commission's false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, ignoring not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "principal architect of the 9/11 attacks." The establishment claims that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global "war on terror." But this "war on terror" has been fought in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan - precisely the principal political and financial backers of the al-Qaedist networks the United States has supposedly been fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic oppo