Saudi complicity with terrorists covered up, lawmakers allege

? The Bush administration should make public the facts about Saudi Arabia’s complicity with terrorists rather than worry about offending the kingdom, lawmakers said Sunday.

One senator said 95 percent of the classified pages of a congressional report released last week into the work of intelligence agencies before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was kept secret only to keep from embarrassing a foreign government.

“I think they’re classified for the wrong reason,” Sen. Richard Shelby, 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 could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know,” said Shelby, R-Ala.

Asked why the section was blacked out, Shelby said: “I think it might be embarrassing to international relations.”

In unclassified pages of the report, released Thursday, several unidentified government officials complained of a lack of Saudi cooperation.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, who killed close to 3,000 people in New York, suburban Washington and Pennsylvania, were Saudis.

The current committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., agreed on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that too much was removed but said he expected more to be revealed.

“I think at some future date it will be made public,” Roberts said. “I was upset with the process, and I was upset with the amount of material that was redacted.”

Only Roberts’ counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who formerly worked for the CIA, said the administration was justified in its deletions.

He said on NBC the joint committee recommended a full investigation of foreign involvement, and “we do not want to contaminate that investigation.”

Goss said he expected pages to be revealed after the investigation ended.