The White House said that none of the information made public Friday in the “28 pages” of previously declassified material in the 9/11 report “changes the conclusion” about who is responsible for the attacks nearly 15 years ago in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon in Virginia.
The Obama administration believed it was important to release the material, even though the pages “don’t shed any new light or change the conclusions about the responsibility for the 9/11 attacks,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday minutes before Congress released the document.
Earnest argued that the material simply confirms the original findings by the independent 9/11 commission that investigated the attacks, which is that there is “no evidence” that the “Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials” individually funded al Qaeda.
“It will confirm what we’ve been saying for quite some time,” Earnest said.
He also said that in addition to the 9/11 commission’s work, the FBI in 2014 conducted additional investigations that found “no new evidence” that would change the 9/11 commission’s findings with regard to responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
Declassifying the “28 pages,” he said, is “consistent with the commitment to transparency that you’ve seen this administration impose on other areas or our national security policy that had previously been secret.”
He said that just two weeks ago, the administration released an accounting of civilian deaths from U.S. drone attacks on terrorism suspects, and last year released the results of a five-year Senate probe into the CIA’s interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists in the years following 9/11, known as the Senate’s torture report.
