U.S. officials also said their investigators have become suspicious over the years about the activities of Saudi Arabia's top law enforcement officer, Interior Minister Prince Nayef ibn Abdulaziz, who has been a vocal supporter of radical Islamist causes and has stated publicly that Jews were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
There is significant evidence, they say, that Prince Nayef is one of several top Saudi officials who, through individual efforts and in their roles as government overseers, funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to suspect charities and other front organizations that ultimately may have helped finance the September 2001 attacks and other terrorist strikes.
But some U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials criticized such assessments. "There is a lot of information in there that's inflammatory but not accurate, or inferential or open to interpretation," one official familiar with the classified section said. "Some of it is based on information that is partial, fragmentary and wrong. It is certainly not conclusive."
Other officials said they believed the evidence cited in the classified section was inconclusive about whether top Saudi officials intentionally helped finance terrorism or simply demonstrated what an official described in an interview as a "stunning" ability to look the other way as money flowed to terrorist activities around the globe.
"If you look at the links, you can't prosecute them for that. There's nothing direct," said one senior law enforcement official overseeing the U.S. effort to investigate Saudi terrorist financing. "If I were their defense attorney, I'd say that they had no direct knowledge. Whether they did have [such direct] knowledge, no one knows."
However one interprets the 27 pages, all who have read them agreed on one thing: If they are made public, they will prove extremely embarrassing not only to the Saudi government but also to the U.S. government, particularly to the FBI for missing so many clues pointing to Riyadh and for not aggressively investigating them, sources said.
"If this comes out, it will blow the top off the relations with [the Saudi] government because the American people will just be outraged," said one source familiar with the report.
"People don't know how much is in there and how specific it is," the source said. "The public hasn't gotten anywhere near the meat of it."
