Saudi officials supported 9/11 hijackers, documents show

John F Lehman urges Obama administration to declassify controversial secret 28-page section of US congressional report

A former member of the 9/11 commission has claimed there is clear evidence that employees of the Saudi government provided support to the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks in the US.

John F Lehman, an investment banker in New York who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, said the Obama administration should declassify a controversial secret 28-page section of a US congressional report.



“There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” Lehman told The Guardian in an interview, suggesting that the commission may have made a mistake by not stating that explicitly in its final report. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”

The former Republican member also criticised an earlier statement by the commission’s ex-chairman Tom Kean of New Jersey and vice-chairman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, who urged the Obama administration to be cautious about releasing the full congressional report on the Saudis and 9/11 –“the 28 pages”, as they are widely known in Washington – because they contained “raw, unvetted” material that might smear innocent people.

Lehman claimed the commission was aware of at least five government officials in Saudi Arabia who were strongly suspected of being involved in the hijackers' support network. “They may not have been indicted but they were certainly implicated. There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.”



Although the commission member said he did not believe that the Saudi royal family or the country’s senior civilian leadership had any role in supporting al Qaeda or the 9/11 plot, he recalled that a focus of the criminal investigation after 9/11 was upon employees of the Saudi ministry of Islamic affairs, which had sponsored former Saudi diplomat Fahad al Thumairy for his job in Los Angeles and has long been suspected of ties to extremist groups.

Thumairy, who was later deported from the US but was never charged with a crime, was suspected of involvement in a support network for two Saudi hijackers who had lived in San Diego the year before the attacks.

“I think we were tough on the Saudis, but obviously not tough enough. I know some members of the staff felt we went much too easy on the Saudis,” The Guardian quoted another member of the commission as saying.

The commission member further revealed how behind the closed doors, members of the panel’s staff had fiercely protested the way the material about the Saudis was presented in the final report, saying it underplayed or ignored evidence that Saudi officials – especially at lower levels of the government – were part of an al Qaida support network that had been tasked to assist the hijackers after they arrived in the US.



The commissions final report was widely read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11. Its central finding that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually” was hailed by the Saudi government as effectively clearing Saudi officials of any tie to 9/11.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian.