Rand Paul urged President Obama to declassify 28 additional pages of the 9/11 commission’s report on Tuesday, but made clear that he does not intend to exercise his constitutional prerogative as a senator and read the pages on the floor of Congress – yet.

The Kentucky Republican joined other members of congress at a press conference on Tuesday to promote bipartisan legislation urging Obama to declassify the pages, which are widely believed to detail ties between Saudi Arabian funders and al-Qaida.

Rep Thomas Massie, also from Kentucky, said “the information in these 28 pages establishes a chain of liability” around the attacks. The conference was held with members of an advocacy group called 9/11 Families and Survivors United For Justice Against Terrorism, who have engaged in legal efforts to hold the Saudi government legally liable for the September 11 attacks.



Democrats also spoke on behalf of the bill. Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts said it was important “to hold accountable those who aided and abetted these savage attacks on our homeland”. Lynch went on to emphasize “this wasn’t a mere deletion of a few words but a full-fledged blackout of 28 pages of the report”.

It “may have been a matter of national security to secure pages in 2002 but it is long since time that we made these reports public”, he said.

The legislation would prove unnecessary if a member of Congress read the classified material into the record on the floor. This is protected under the speech or debate clause in Article I of the US constitution.

When asked if he would read the currently unreleased pages into the congressional record, Paul demurred and said “we’re going to try the normal legislative procedure first and see how that goes”.

Many famously private papers were made public in 1971, when Alaska senator Mike Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the record. With this legislation pending, as well as a presidential campaign and an ongoing battle to reform the NSA, it doesn’t seem likely that Paul is ready to follow in Gravel’s footsteps.

