The White House is considering whether it should declassify a still-secret section of a congressional report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks which suggests that top Saudi Arabian officials could have provided support to the hijackers.
Debate over the 28-page section was revived this week after imprisoned former al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui said in newly filed deposition transcripts that top Saudi figures donated to his group in the late 1990s, reported Reuters.
In his deposition, Moussaoui implicated some "extremely famous" Saudi officials, including a former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud, who supposedly provided funding to al-Qaida during Osama bin Laden's tenure.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the administration received a congressional request last year to declassify the pages, and said the intelligence community was reconsidering the decision to keep it classified, but did not say when that review might be completed.
In an attempt to quell any potentially misdirected hostility over current U.S.-Saudi ties, Earnest told reporters, "The United States and Saudi Arabia maintain a strong counterterrorism relationship as a key element of our broad and strategic partnership," according to Reuters.
Some U.S. officials maintain that the pages should not be published because it includes material that hasn't been properly investigated and could damage national security, while others, like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), believe Americans "need to know more about the events leading up to 9/11" before the U.S. involves itself in more wars.
"As I read it, and we all had our own experience, I had to stop every couple of pages and just sort of try to absorb and try to rearrange my understanding of history," Massie said during a press conference, reported BenSwann.com. "It challenges you to re-think everything. I think the whole country needs to go through that."
