The White House stressed Tuesday that the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks determined that Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had no culpability, just hours before Obama was set to depart for that country.
Investigators were “quite clear about the evidence that they found and didn’t find,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday. The report stated that there was “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,” Earnest said.
No one is “burying information” about Saudi government complicity in the deadly plot, Earnest added.
The commission “took an unvarnished look” and found no proof that the government helped the plotters and attackers, he said. “That’s relevant to this current discussion about whether there’s an ulterior motive” to possibly not declassifying the report’s final 28 pages, Earnest said.
The issue of potential Saudi government involvement in the attacks has come to the forefront again, 12 years after the commission’s report was made public, because National Intelligence Director James Clapper is weighing whether to declassify the publication’s final 28 pages.
The White House had been cagey about whether Obama has read the classified documents. Obama himself dispelled the mystery during a CBS interview Monday night.
“I have a sense of what’s in there,” Obama told CBS. “But this has been a process which we generally deal with through the intelligence community and Jim Clapper, our director of National Intelligence, has been going through to make sure that whatever is released is not gonna compromise some major national security interest of the United States.”
“My understanding is that he’s about to complete that process,” Obama concluded.
Since the issue cropped up again, the White House has reiterated that Obama is keeping arm’s-length distance so as not to be seen as influencing Clapper’s decision, which is supposed to be made absent any political considerations.
Members of the commission, such as former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., have reiterated that there is nothing in the classified pages that will point the finger at Saudi Arabia. And the Saudi government has said it supports making the pages public.
The timing is particularly sensitive because a bipartisan bill that the Obama administration opposes that would allow 9/11 victims and relatives to sue Saudi Arabia is working its way through Congress.
