(a) Findings.--The Senate finds that--
(1) The President has prevented the release to the American
public of 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence
Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks
of September 2001.
(2) The contents of the redacted pages discuss sources of
foreign support for some of the September 11th hijackers
while they were in the United States.
… (5) The Senate respects the need to keep information
regarding intelligence sources and methods classified, but
the Senate also recognizes that such purposes can be
accomplished through careful selective redaction of specific
words and passages, rather than effacing the section's
contents entirely..
Senators Graham and Shelby, the former chair and cochair of the Intelligence Committee who directed the report are quoted saying the following: "I think they are classified for the wrong reason," the 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 should be declassified and become uncensored so the American people would know." Asked why the section was blacked out, Shelby said: "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations."
… There is also an issue not of micro but of macro importance: This
report makes a very compelling case, based on the information submitted
by the agencies themselves, that there was a foreign government which
was complicitous in the actions leading up to September 11, at least as
it relates to some of the terrorists who were present in one part of
the United States.
… My own hypothesis--and I will describe it as that--is that in fact
similar assistance was being provided to all or at least most of the
terrorists. The difference is that we happened, because of a set of
circumstances which are contained in these 28 censored pages, to have
an unusual window on a few of the terrorists. We did not have a similar
window on others. Therefore, it will take more effort to determine if
they were, in fact, receiving that assistance. That effort has, in my
judgment, been grossly insufficiently pursued.
… Those are very fundamental questions, and if the public had access to
these 28 pages, they would be demanding answers.
And there is the additional issue of whether we are going to inadvertently grant a significant financial benefit to a country that has been to say less than our ally in the war on terror would be a gross understatement.
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