NOT DEFINITIVE

The 9/11 Commission has issued another definitive statement meant to close down another debate. The difference is that while their position on the collaborative ties between al Queda and Saddam is a position that the press sees as one in conflict with the Bush administration (and therefore their single paragraph is taken as definitive, final, absolute, and anything the administration says is a defensive effort to challenge a final conclusion) on this one their conclusion is seen as putting them in agrrement with the Bush administration.

They state that there was no official financing from the Saudis of al Queda. Certainly the headline is as definitive as those from the other day, "No Saudi Payment to Qaeda Is Found."

I do believe we're talking about the once famous "28 pages" that the Bush administration caught such flack for not declassifying (at some level an easy strategy, since if you know what's in those pages, and, say, know they can't be declassified, if you're careful in how you phrase your attacks, you can use innuendo to demand the administration do something you know they can't do and then make them look bad for not doing it.)

The staff of the Sept. 11 commission has put forward what amounts to a major revision of a widely held perception in Washington that top Saudi officials gave money to Al Qaeda.

The new account, based on 19 months of staff work, asserts flatly that there is "no evidence" that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials financed the group, which is led by Osama bin Laden.

In 2002, a joint Congressional committee was reported to have concluded the opposite in a classified study that was then the most extensive on the issue.

Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and co-chairman of the committee that issued the report, said at the time, "In my judgment there is compelling evidence that a foreign government provided direct support through officials and agents of that government to some of the Sept. 11 hijackers."

Although he did not name the Saudi government, those familiar with the committee's report at the time said it focused on Saudi Arabia.

But here's where it gets interesting. Does the Times treat this as settled, as definitive, just because the Commission staff report said so? They certainly did that on the issue of al Queda/Saddam.

The intensity of feelings in Washington about Saudi Arabia and the difficulty of tracking the flow of money mean that the issue will almost certainly remain contentious.

At a minimum, the emphatic tone of the staff report and the extent of work on which it was apparently based pose a major challenge to the view that Saudi Arabia and its royal family somehow financed the Sept. 11 attacks.

So when the staff report put the Commission at odds with the administration, it was definitive, despite being a mere paragraph long. Here, it's "emphatic in tone" and there "poses a major challenge."

One way or the other, by the way, this article points to something that was in the staff report the other day that I just thought damn odd, although it didn't seem worth mentioning at the time. The reporter here writes, although it appears on the jump page:

The new staff report by the commission also asserts that a 1996 terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, understood to have been carried out by a Saudi Shiite group operating with help from Iran, may also have involved support from Al Qaeda. On Friday, however, senior intelligence officials said they knew of no evidence to support such a claim.

The report said the panel had seen "strong but indirect evidence" that Mr. bin Laden's organization "did in fact, play some as yet unknown role" in the attacks on the complex, in which 24 people were killed, including 19 American airmen. But United States officials have publicly stated that the attack was carried out by members of a pro-Iranian group known as Saudi Hezbollah, and the United States government has made those charges in federal court.

I realize they're getting access, presumably to everyone and everything. But shouldn't that mean that they're getting a consensus view? Why is it, then, that all these years later it turns out that the best consensus view turns out to be a position that's never appeared anywhere else? It's common for pundits listing terrorist incidents in the '90s to attribute this to al Queda, but I've never seen a specialist or academic who believed al Queda was a player in this one.

What does that say about the Commission staff's methodology?

By the same token:

The report said that Mr. bin Laden had first set his sights on attacks on the United States in 1992. But it casts doubt on the idea that he and his organization played any role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center or the thwarted 1995 plot in Manila to blow up a dozen American airliners.

You might give them the '93 attack only because there might be a question as to whether Ramzi Yousef was allied with them that early. (Although in that case, you'd better be able to explain where his funding, passport, and contacts to the Blind Sheikh come from.) But OpPlan Bojinka? No sale. That was KSM's baby.

But, you see where I'm going here. When they wanted these staff reports to be portrayed as the definitive and final result of the compendium of all research, the final word, they did so. Now they want it to be just another statement in an ongoing debate, and so it is.