Administration Cover-up

If there is a cover-up scandal in the Bush administration, it is not about the prudent overcaution in assessing the Iraqi WMD threat, it is about the imprudent undercaution in acknowledging the Saudi terrorism threat.

The Bush administration should make public the facts about Saudi Arabia's complicity with terrorists rather than worry about offending the kingdom, lawmakers said yesterday.
One senator said 95 percent of the classified pages of last week's congressional report on the work of intelligence agencies before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were kept secret only to keep from embarrassing a foreign government.

"I think they're classified for the wrong reason," Sen. Richard Shelby, former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly. ... My judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know."

Asked why the section was blacked out, the Alabama Republican said: "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations."

In unclassified pages of the report, released Thursday, several unidentified government officials complained of a lack of Saudi cooperation. "According to a U.S. government official, it was clear from about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters related to Osama bin Laden," the report says.

The Saudi issue is one on which this administration and its predecessors have a great deal of explaining to do.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 28, 2003 10:33 AM