Saudi nationals connected to the government in Riyadh may have aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers in the United States before they carried out their attacks, according to a long-classified portion of a congressional inquiry.
The 28-page section was made public Friday by the House Intelligence Committee with some portions blacked out after U.S. intelligence agencies delivered on a long-pending promise to declassify it as sought by the families of the almost 3,000 victims of the attacks.
“While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government,” the report said.
Saudi officials and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency have long said the 28 pages provide no evidence that the U.S. ally was involved in the attacks, and American lawmakers underscored that in releasing the material.
“It’s important to note that this section does not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the intelligence committee,” Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the committee’s Republican chairman, said in a statement.
Complaints have re-emerged in recent months from some Americans, including relatives of Sept. 11 victims, that Saudi Arabia or organizations and wealthy individuals based there have financed groups linked to terrorism or failed to crack down on militants. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers in the attacks were identified as Saudi nationals.
The U.S. commission that investigated the 2001 attacks said in its 2004 report that it “found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al-Qaida.”
But some current and former members of Congress have said that formulation left room for less direct involvement and pressed for the release of the 28 classified pages. A CBS “60 Minutes” report in April suggested a Saudi diplomat “known to hold extremist views” may have helped the hijackers after they traveled to the U.S. to prepare for the attacks.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Friday that “we do not think” the 28 pages shed any new light on a Saudi role in the Sept. 11 attacks. He said release of the “investigative material” is in keeping with the Obama administration’s commitment to transparency even though he acknowledged that “it did take quite some time for the decision to be made.”
On June 17, Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir called the 28 pages an “internal U.S. matter, not a Saudi matter” and said when to release them was up to U.S. officials. But he added that the Saudi government has urged the U.S. to release the 28 pages since 2002, when they were initially classified. At that time, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who was foreign minister, came to Washington with a message from then-Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz to President George W. Bush, according to al-Jubeir.
“In the White House we said we would like the 28 pages released so that we can respond to any allegations against us and so that we can punish any Saudis that may have been involved in this plot,” al-Jubeir told reporters at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. “But we cannot because we don’t think it’s fair or just to respond to blank pages. That has been our position.”
The foreign minister also said the Saudis understand that investigations were “conducted into the allegations that are in the 28 pages and that those investigations have revealed that these allegations are not correct,” al-Jubeir said. “They don’t hold. These allegations are unsubstantiated, unproven and nobody should make a big deal out of them.”
Saudi officials have pointed to statements from U.S. officials supporting their position, including an interview CIA Director John Brennan did with the Saudi-owned Arabic news channel Al Arabiya on June 12 in which he said the 28 pages were part of “a very preliminary review.”
“People shouldn’t take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks,” Brennan said. “Indeed, subsequently the assessments that have been done have shown it was very unfortunate that these attacks took place but this was the work of al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri, and others of that ilk.”
But Brennan also has addressed the underlying concern about the kingdom’s embrace, since its founding more than eight decades ago, of Wahhabism, a deeply conservative branch of Sunni Muslim theology that has proved fertile ground for terrorists.
“The Saudi government and leadership today has inherited a history whereby there have been a number of individuals both inside of Saudi Arabia as well as outside who have embraced a rather fundamentalist – extremist in some areas – version of the Islamic faith, which has allowed individuals who then move toward violence and terrorism to exploit that and capitalize on that,” Brennan said in a speech in Washington on July 13.
While the U.S. and Saudis are longtime allies, relations have been roiled by the Obama administration’s participation in a nuclear deal with Iran and by Senate legislation passed in May that would let American victims and their families sue other countries over alleged involvement in the 2001 attacks.
In an interview with the Atlantic magazine published in April, Obama called the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia “complicated” and said the Sunni-led kingdom should “share” the Middle East with Shiite Iran, its chief rival.
