Report says Saudis used charities to aid terrorists

WASHINGTON -- Senior officials of Saudi Arabia have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable groups and other organizations that may have helped finance the September 2001 attacks, a still classified section of a congressional report on the hijackings says, according to those who have read it.

The 28-page section of the report was deleted from the nearly 900- page declassified version released on Thursday by a joint committee of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The chapter focuses on the role that foreign governments played in the hijackings but centers almost entirely on Saudi Arabia, the people who saw the section said.

The Bush administration's refusal to allow the joint committee to disclose the contents of the chapter has stirred resentment in Congress, where some lawmakers have said that the administration's desire to protect the ruling Saudi family had prevented the American public from learning crucial facts about the attacks.

The public report concluded that the FBI and CIA had known for years that al-Qaida sought to strike inside the United States but focused their attention on the possibility of attacks overseas.

The declassified section discloses the testimony of several unidentified officials who criticized the Saudi government for being uncooperative in terrorism investigations.

Some people who read the classified chapter said it represented a searing indictment of how Saudi Arabia's ruling elite had, under the guise of support for Islamic charities, distributed millions of dollars to terrorists through an informal network of Saudi nationals.

But other officials said the stricken chapter retraced Saudi Arabia's well-documented support for Islamic charitable groups and said the report asserted without convincing evidence that Saudi officials knew that recipient groups used the money to finance terror.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, has angrily denied that his country failed to cooperate with the FBI and CIA in fighting terrorism, and he dismissed accusations that it helped finance two of the hijackers as "outrageous."

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