WASHINGTON — Congress on Friday released 28 pages of newly declassified material used by the 9/11 Commission in its 2004 report on the intelligence failures that led to the terrorist attacks.
The pages, sent to Congress by the Obama administration, have been the subject of much speculation over what they might reveal about the Saudi government's involvement in the attacks masterminded by terrorist Osama bin Laden when he led al-Qaeda.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he hopes the newly released pages will reduce the continued speculation over Saudi involvement.
"I hope that the release of these pages, with appropriate redactions necessary to protect our nation’s intelligence sources and methods, will diminish speculation that they contain proof of official Saudi Government or senior Saudi official involvement in the 9/11 attacks," Schiff said in a statement. "The Intelligence Community and the 9/11 Commission...investigated the questions they raised and was never able to find sufficient evidence to support them. I know that the release of these pages will not end debate over the issue, but it will quiet rumors over their contents — as is often the case, the reality is less damaging than the uncertainty."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes cautioned that the newly released information contains unverified leads provided to U.S. intelligence officials in the wake of the attacks.
"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 Community," Nunes, R-Calif., said in a statement. "Many of the Intelligence Community’s findings were included in the 9/11 Commission report as well as in a newly declassified executive summary of a CIA-FBI joint assessment that will soon be released by the Director of National Intelligence."
The 9/11 Commission did not actually write the newly released pages. Instead, the pages were part of the material the panel reviewed. The commission's chairmen have described the pages in the past as information based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material received by the FBI and handed over to House and Senate intelligence committees in 2002 as part of an earlier investigation of 9/11.
Current and former members of Congress have been calling for the pages to be declassified and released for more than a decade.
The 9/11 Commission concluded in its report that senior Saudi officials did not knowingly support the terrorist plot to attack the U.S. The panel also found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded" al-Qaeda.
While the 9/11 Commission found no evidence that senior Saudi officials were involved in the 9/11 attack, the report did criticize the Saudi government for tolerating and sometimes fanning the flames of radical Islam by funding schools and mosques around the world that spread extreme ideology. The report also noted that some rich Saudis gave money to charities with terrorist links.
Fifteen of the 19 terrorists who hijacked planes on 9/11 were Saudi nationals.
