he Treasury Department said yesterday that it would
decline to provide the Senate with a list of Saudi individuals and
organizations the federal government has investigated for possibly
financing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
The action was the second in two weeks to set the White House and
Congress at odds about the Saudis and federal intelligence-gathering
related to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Moreover, the move contradicted an assertion made on Thursday by a
senior Treasury official, Richard Newcomb, who told the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing on Saudi sponsorship of
terrorism that the list was not classified and that his agency would turn
it over to the Senate within 24 hours.
Yesterday evening, with senators still awaiting the list, the Treasury
Department advised the committee that it would soon send a letter
declaring the information classified and thus unavailable to the
public.
"The information requested relates to ongoing U.S. government efforts
to disrupt terrorist financing," Taylor Griffin, a department spokesman,
said yesterday. "Public disclosure at this time would frustrate those
efforts."
Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of two senators who
asked Mr. Newcomb for the list during hearings last week, said he planned
to subpoena the Treasury Department for the information if it was not
released voluntarily to the Senate.
"I'm in a fit to get classified information," Mr. Specter said in a
telephone interview. "They may be looking at a subpoena. The guy made a
commitment in an open hearing to produce it."
Treasury's about-face on the list follows the White House's decision
last week not to declassify 28 pages of a Congressional report on the 9/11
attacks that detailed possible Saudi involvement in the strikes. Mr.
Specter and others in Congress have said the moves create the impression
that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer and an important
American diplomatic partner, is being coddled in an effort to advance
disparate American economic and foreign policy goals.
"It's one thing to say that information in the 9/11 report about the
Saudis is classified for national security reasons," Mr. Specter said,
"but it's quite another when you're talking about a list of charities. I
think these guys are losing it. We did get a commitment on this list, and
even in Washington a commitment means something."
For their part, senior Treasury officials and other American
authorities investigating terrorism say that information they have
unearthed related to Saudi sponsorship of terrorism needs to be kept
secret to preserve the integrity of current federal investigations.
Some of the classified sections of the 9/11 report maintain that Saudi
charities linked to the kingdom's government helped to finance Qaeda
operatives who masterminded the terrorist attacks, said government
officials and people with knowledge of the document.
Mr. Newcomb oversees the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control,
which administers economic and trade penalties to further national
security. Since Sept. 11, the Treasury Department has assumed stewardship
of the Policy Coordinating Committee, or P.C.C., a task force that
collates terrorism information from other federal authorities including
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
National Security Council and the Departments of Defense, State, Justice
and Homeland Security. If these agencies jointly recommend that
individuals or organizations be cited as a sponsor of terrorism, Mr.
Newcomb's unit adds them to a publicly available Treasury watchlist of
entities that are blocked from doing business in or with the United
States.
The issue in dispute is whether the names of entities not added to
Treasury's list, particularly Saudi entities, can be withheld from the
public. "Rick Newcomb misspoke," said one Treasury official. "The names
themselves weren't classified but their status is. The fact that they have
been proposed for consideration by the P.C.C. makes them classified."
Mr. Newcomb, a career government official with ample Treasury
experience, was unavailable for comment yesterday. But his superiors and
other government officials say they are disgruntled, and not only with his
responses to questions during the hearing last week. The officials said
that he also told Senate staff members in briefings before the hearings
that the State Department had intervened on a number of occasions to ask
the Treasury Department not to include certain Saudi entities on its
terrorist watchlist.
The officials say they believe that his comments about the State
Department were misconstrued by Senate staff members. The State Department
did not ask him to protect the Saudis, these insiders say, but merely to
keep the Saudi entities veiled so that they would continue to be useful
targets for investigators looking into Saudi terrorism
ties.
