The White House suggested Thursday that the Obama administration is preparing to declassify “more information” from a secret section of a report on the Sept. 11 attacks that some speculate might reveal that Saudi Arabia’s government played a role in that attack.
An intelligence agency is reviewing whether to declassify 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission report, which are the final summary of the commission’s findings about the events leading up to the attack.
Once that review is done, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said, “We expect that there will be some degree of declassification that provides more information.” Rhodes made the statement Thursday while traveling with Obama to Saudi Arabia, where the president and top members of his national security team are holding a summit with officials from Gulf countries.
In the lead up to President Obama’s trip to Riyadh, several U.S. officials knocked down speculation that the Saudi government played a direct role in financing or planning the 9/11 attacks. Rhodes, who served as a spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, repeated that assessment on Thursday.
Rhodes, who served as a staffer on the 9/11 Commission helping draft its recommendations, said the work of the commission provided “a definitive statement” that the Saudi government didn’t play a role in the attacks.
“We believe that provided a definitive statement about the nature of the support from Saudi Arabia and other countries in respect to al Qaeda financing,” Rhodes said. “Obviously, it did not determine that the Saudi government had an intent to support al Qaeda, so we believe that our understanding of 9/11 is well established. The U.S. government has been very clear about what we believe took place.”
Despite the classified 28 pages, Rhodes also said the 9/11 Commission was “very transparent in its findings.”
In a CBS interview earlier this week, Obama seemed to indicate that he had not read the classified 28 pages, but was familiar with their contents. But as someone who worked on the 9/11 Commission, Rhodes said he is “very familiar with their contents.”
“I’m actually more familiar with this process from my previous life and I’m actually quite confident that the 9/11 Commission spent a good amount of time wrestling with what was in those 28 pages and making sure that they were following threat and leads and data,” he said.
Earlier this week, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the report showed that there is “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior government officials” were involved with or supported the hijackers, 15 of the 19 of which were Saudis. “That is an important fact,” he added.
No one is “burying information” about Saudi government complicity in the deadly plot, Earnest said.
As Obama prepared to leave for the trip to Saudi Arabia, he faced new pressure to demonstrate that the Saudi government was not involved in planning the attacks.
Earnest hinted that Obama would veto a bipartisan Senate bill that would give 9/11 victims and their families the right to sue Saudi Arabia and any other country thought to be involved in carrying out the attacks.
The Obama administration opposes the measure, sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., over fears that it would unravel countries’ sovereign immunity, and pose larger legal consequences for individual Americans if that immunity is lost.
Saudi Arabia has threatened to sell roughly $750 billion in U.S. assets if the Cornyn-Schumer bill passes and becomes law.
In recent days, prominent Republicans, including Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have come out in opposition of the bill with Graham placing a hold on the measure to block it’s progress in the Senate.
