What's in The Report?
Saudi terror ties would `blow people's minds'
A dramatic bit of political theater unfolded in the White House Rose Garden last week. President Bush insisted that he would not declassify 27 pages of a congressional report on the 9/11 attacks that detail, sources say, Saudi government support for the hijackers. Two hours later, Prince Saud Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, urged the president to release the material. The prince told reporters: "We do not seek, nor do we need, to be shielded."
Be careful what you wish for, some warn. "They would not be asking for this to be released if they knew what was in it," says an official who has read the Saudi section. "There is so much more stuff about Saudi government involvement, it would blow people's minds."
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a Democratic presidential candidate who co-chaired the congressional inquiry, is blunt in describing a role by at least some parts of the Saudi government. Without referring to the Saudis by name, he told U.S. News: "The reality is that the foreign government was much more directly involved in not only the financing but the provision of support--transportation, housing, and introduction to a network which gave support to the terrorists." He says "scores" of contacts occurred between 9/11 hijackers and operatives of "foreign" officials. "They were not rogue agents," he says, but "were being directed by persons of significant responsibility within the government."
Forty-five senators have urged Bush to unseal the material and could force a vote on the matter. At week's end, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, met with CIA and FBI officials to discuss the disclosure issue.
Open season. A senior U.S. intelligence official says some lawmakers are "making far too much" of the issue. Some information, he says, is "misleading, fragmentary, and uncorroborated." Officials say that disclosure could harm existing investigations and reveal intelligence sources and methods.
Whatever comes of this flap, in Washington it's clearly open season on the Saudis. Lawmakers are expressing frustration over the apparent slowness of efforts to investigate and shut down Saudi charities engaged in funding terrorist groups. Last week, a senior treasury official, Richard Newcomb, told a Senate panel that during the Clinton years, his staff's efforts to "designate" Saudi entities as terrorist financiers had been overridden by other agencies, including the State Department and the FBI. Committee members pointedly asked Newcomb to supply within 24 hours a list of Saudi entities that he had tried to sanction. A treasury spokesman later sought to downplay the differences.
At the same hearing, a senior FBI official, John Pistole, said the Saudi government has been much more cooperative since the May 12 terrorist bombing in Riyadh. He called the FBI's work with the Saudis "unprecedented," including the sharing of witnesses and forensic evidence. But he added that "the jury is still out" on whether the Saudis are cutting off the flow of cash to terrorists.
With David E. Kaplan and Edward T. Pound
This story appears in the August 11, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.