W. House criticised for censoring September 11 report

A leading Republican senator yesterday called on the Bush administration to release most of the classified portions of a congressional report on the September 11 attacks, saying the sections were withheld only to avoid harming relations with other countries.

Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, who helped spearhead last year's probe into the September 11, 2001 attacks, said the administration wrongly blanked out 27 pages dealing with suspected foreign support of those responsible for the attacks.

"I think they're classified for the wrong reason," Shelby said on NBC's Meet the Press programme. "My judgment is 95 per cent of that information should be declassified, become uncensored, so the American people would know."

Shelby said the section was classified because it "might be embarrassing to some international relations."

Shelby had said last week that he felt too much of the report was classified, but had not been as critical of the censorship as Democrats who said the Bush administration had "an obsession with secrecy."

Although congressional members have refused to name the suspected country, uncensored portions of the report appeared to point at Saudi Arabia.

"When the Saudis are not helping us fight the war on terrorism, when they're directly or indirectly financing that war on terrorism, we have to hold them accountable," Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said on CNN's Late Edition.

A Saudi official last week dismissed any implications in the report of a Riyadh role in the September 11 attacks as motivated by political aspirations of Democrats in the next election. The 900-page report released last week said intelligence agencies missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot in the months before the hijacked plane attacks.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, defended the exclusion of portions of the report, saying it could hinder current congressional investigations on the attacks. Goss said on NBC's Meet The Press he expected the pages to be made public after the conclusion of the investigations.