*Ø* Blogmanac | Classified Section of 9/11 Report Faults Saudi Rulers
NYTimes, Washington — Senior officials of Saudi Arabia have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable groups and other organizations that may have helped finance the September 2001 attacks, a still-classified section of a Congressional report on the hijackings says, according to people who have read it.

The 28-page section of the report was deleted from the nearly 900-page declassified version released on Thursday by a joint committee of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The chapter focuses on the role foreign governments played in the hijackings, but centers almost entirely on Saudi Arabia, the people who saw the section said.

The Bush administration's refusal to allow the committee to disclose the contents of the chapter has stirred resentment in Congress, where some lawmakers have said the administration's desire to protect the ruling Saudi family had prevented the American public from learning crucial facts about the attacks. The report has been denounced by the Saudi ambassador to the United States, and some American officials questioned whether the committee had made a conclusive case linking Saudi funding to the hijackings.

The declassified section of the report discloses the testimony of several unidentified officials who criticized the Saudi government for being uncooperative in terrorism investigations, but makes no reference to Riyadh's financing of groups that supported terror.

Some people who have read the classified chapter said it represented a searing indictment of how Saudi Arabia's ruling elite have, under the guise of support for Islamic charities, distributed millions of dollars to terrorists through an informal network of Saudi nationals, including some in the United States.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States has angrily denied that his country had failed to cooperate with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in fighting terrorism and dismissed accusations that it helped finance two of the hijackers as "outrageous."

Behind the immediate issue of whether Saudi Arabia played any role in terrorism are a complex web of political, military and economic connections between the two countries. Successive Republican and Democratic administrations have aggressively sought to maintain the relationship with a huge producer of oil and an ally in the Arab world.

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Meanwhile...

What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
By Atty. John J. Loftus
In order to give Enron one last desperate chance to complete the Taliban pipeline and save itself from bankruptcy, senior levels of US intelligence were ordered to keep their eyes shut and their subordinates ignorant.

"A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron. Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban negotiations."

Copyright: John Loftus
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