WASHINGTON-The U.S. Congress on Friday released a long-classified section of the official report on the September 11 attacks that discussed potential links between some of the hijackers and Saudi Arabia but said the links were not independently verified.
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USA intelligence officials have finished reviewing 28 classified pages of the official report on the September 11 attacks on the U.S. and they show no evidence of Saudi complicity, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Friday.
Published after 13 years of first being classified, the White House said the reports show no link between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Bush Administration deemed 28 pages of that report classified and withheld the information from public release citing that releasing the pages could compromise intelligence sources and methods.
Newly declassified pages from a congressional report into 9/11 released Friday have reignited speculation that some of the hijackers had links to Saudis, including government officials – allegations that were never substantiated by later US investigations into the terrorist attacks. Bob Graham, who said the 28 pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia”, and Minnesota Congressman Rick Nolan, who said the pages “confirm that much of the rhetoric preceding the US attack on Iraq was terribly wrong”. Graham has long said that releasing it would provide compelling evidence that the Saudi government had a direct hand in the terrorist plot. The House intelligence panel released it a few hours later. The 9/11 Commission report, however, found him to be an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” with Islamic extremists.
Part of a Congressional report that had been kept under wraps for more than a decade showed USA intelligence believed that Saudi officials might have had multiple contacts with some of the 9/11 hijackers.
Another figure highlighted in the documents is Osama Bassnan, a Saudi citizen who was an associate of al-Bayoumi and lived in an apartment nearby al-Hazmi and al-Midhar.
Members of the royal family, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, left, who is one of the men allegedly responsible for funding Bin Laden.
A telephone number found in the phone book of al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, was for an Aspen, Colo., corporation that managed the “affairs of the Colorado residence of the Saudi Ambassador Bandar”, the documents show. This includes a section that details how a phone number found in a book owned by Abu Zubayda – who was captured by Central Intelligence Agency officials in Pakistan during early 2002 – was linked to a corporation in Aspen, Colo., which is responsible for managing the affairs of Saudi Prince Bandar’s Colorado residence. The findings from a 2002 congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks were unveiled by the House Intelligence Committee today after a longtime push to make them public. The 28 pages have been kept secret for so many years that their significance seems to have been magnified over time. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation data, the firm “manages the affairs of the Colorado residence of Prince Bandar (bin Sultan)”, who served as Saudi ambassador to Washington at the time. Worth noting, shortly after the report was filed by James Rosen, Al-Waleed announced his company-Kingdom Holding Company-was dumping most of its stake in Murdoch’s News Corp., down from 6.6% to 1%.
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They said the commission and its staff spent 18 months investigating “all the leads contained in the 28 pages, and many more”.
