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 The leaders of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, former Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, carried out that highly sensitive task with integrity and rigor. 
 
 Now they are weighing in again as the Obama administration prepares to make public at least some of the 28 pages from a separate, earlier investigation by a congressional panel that examined possible Saudi government involvement in the attacks. The pages have been kept secret since 2002. 
 
 In a statement issued last Friday, Mr. Kean, the commission chairman, and Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman, effectively delivered this bottom line to Americans: Be cautious in judging the material when it becomes available. 
 
 Former Senator Bob Graham, who was a co-chairman of the separate 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks, has long claimed there is evidence of complicity by institutions and people in Saudi Arabia beyond the 15 Saudi nationals who were among the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists. Such allegations are adding new tensions to an already fraught Saudi-American relationship. 
 
 But Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Kean stress that, unlike their commission, the congressional panel never had a chance to investigate any of the leads contained in the 28 pages. Those pages were based mostly on raw, unvetted material from the F.B.I. and “therefore, are comparable to preliminary law enforcement notes, which are generally covered by grand jury secrecy rules. Those rules exist to avoid implicating people in serious crimes without the benefit of follow-up investigation to determine if such suspicions are substantiated,” they wrote. 
 
 The two men said they consider this point crucial since the attacks were the worst mass murder ever in the United States. “Those responsible deserve the maximum punishment possible. Therefore, accusations of complicity in that mass murder from responsible authorities are a grave matter. Such charges should be levied with care,” they added. 
 
 Their comments do not appear to be an attempt to whitewash any Saudi role. The 9/11 report was critical of Saudi Arabia: It cited the government’s funding of schools and mosques that fanned an extreme form of Islam known as Wahhabism, as well as contributions by some wealthy Saudis to Islamic charities with links to terrorism. 
 
 During its tenure, the commission investigated all leads in the 28 pages and only one Saudi government employee was implicated in the plot, Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said. He was Fahad al Thumairy, who worked as an imam at a mosque in Los Angeles and was employed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The commission found no evidence that Mr. Thumairy, who returned to Saudi Arabia in 2003, assisted two of the hijackers when they came to Los Angeles in 2000 but “he is still a person of interest,” they wrote. 
 
 When it wrapped up its investigation in 2004, the commission concluded that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al Qaeda. In 2015, another independent panel created by Congress, the 9/11 Review Commission, found no new evidence against the Saudi government. 
 
 The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said on Monday that it was realistic to expect the administration to release at least some of the 28 classified pages by June. Whatever emerges must be weighed in the context of the work already done by Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton and their team. ||||| FILE - In this Oct. 12, 2012, file photo Bob Graham speaks in Gainesville, Fla.. The Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Oct. 12, 2012, file photo Bob Graham speaks in Gainesville, Fla.. The Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry... (Associated Press) 
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry into 9/11 that may shed light on possible Saudi connections to the attackers. 
 
 The documents, kept in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol, contain information from the joint congressional inquiry into "specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States." 
 
 Bob Graham, who was co-chairman of that bipartisan panel, and others say the documents point suspicion at the Saudis. The former Democratic senator from Florida says an administration official told him that intelligence officials will decide in the next several weeks whether to release at least parts of the documents. The disclosure would come at a time of strained U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, a long-time American ally. 
 
 "I hope that decision is to honor the American people and make it available," Graham told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "The most important unanswered question of 9/11 is, did these 19 people conduct this very sophisticated plot alone, or were they supported?" 
 
 Tim Roemer, who was a member of both the joint congressional inquiry as well as the 9/11 Commission and has read the secret chapter three times, described the 28 pages as a "preliminary police report." 
 
 "There were clues. There were allegations. There were witness reports. There was evidence about the hijackers, about people they met with — all kinds of different things that the 9/11 Commission was then tasked with reviewing and investigating," the former Democratic congressman from Indiana said Friday. 
 
 Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government says it has been "wrongfully and morbidly accused of complicity" in the attacks, is fighting extremists and working to clamp down on their funding channels. Still, the Saudis have long said that they would welcome declassification of the 28 pages because it would "allow us to respond to any allegations in a clear and credible manner." 
 
 The pages were withheld from the 838-page report on the orders of President George W. Bush, who said the release could divulge intelligence sources and methods. Still, protecting U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations also was believed to have been a factor. 
 
 Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, said Obama asked National Intelligence Director James Clapper to review the papers for possible declassification. 
 
 "When that's done we'd expect that there will be some degree of declassification that provides more information," Rhodes told reporters in Riyadh last week, where Obama met with King Salman and other Saudi leaders. The White House says the 28 pages did not come up during discussions. 
 
 Neither the congressional inquiry nor the subsequent 9/11 Commission found any evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials knowingly supported those who orchestrated the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. But Graham, the relatives of victims and some lawmakers think there is reason to further probe possible Saudi links. 
 
 Roemer said many questions remain about the roles of Fahad al Thumairy, an official at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles who allegedly helped two of the hijackers find housing and transportation after they arrived in Southern California. Al Thumairy was later denied entry into the United States in May 2003 after the State Department alleged that he might be involved in terrorist activity. Roemer also wants to know more about Omar al Bayoumi, who was strongly suspected of being a Saudi spy and was alleged to have been helpful to the hijackers. 
 
 "We did not discover ... Saudi government involvement at the highest level of the 9/11 attacks," Roemer said. But he added: "We certainly did not exonerate the Saudis. ... Saudi was a fertile ground for fundraising for al-Qaida. Some of these issues continue to be problems today. That's why we need to continue to get to the bottom of this." 
 
 An Internet site pushing to get the documents released, 28pages.org, points to another document declassified in July 2015 that outlined ways in which the commission could examine possible Saudi links. 
 
 That 47-page document lists several pages of individuals of interest and suggests questions that could be pursued. One name is suspected al-Qaida operative Ghassan al Sharbi. 
 
 Al Sharbi, who was taking flight lessons in the Phoenix area before 9/11, was captured in 2002 in the same place in Pakistan as Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida trainer who was apprehended and waterboarded dozens of times by U.S. interrogators. 
 
 The document said that after al Sharbi was captured, the FBI discovered some documents buried nearby. One was al Sharbi's pilot certificate inside an envelope from the Saudi Embassy in Washington, although it's unclear whether the license had been mailed by the embassy or if the envelope was simply being reused. 
 
 A CIA inspector-general report in June 2015 said there had been no reliable information confirming Saudi government "involvement with and financial support for terrorist prior to 9/11." But it said also that people in the CIA's Near East Division and Counterterrorism Center "speculated that dissident sympathizers within the government may have aided al-Qaida." The rest of the chapter, titled "Issues Related to Saudi Arabia," is blacked out. 
 
 A bill directing the president to release the 28-page chapter was introduced in the Senate, and nearly three dozen Republicans and Democrats in the House are backing a similar resolution. 
 
 Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., wrote Obama last week saying they don't think releasing the chapter will harm national security and could provide closure for the victims' families. 
 
 California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has read the pages and said this past week that while he wants to see them declassified to end speculation about what they say, releasing them will not quell the debate over the issue. 
 
 "As is often the case, the reality is less damaging than the uncertainty," he said. ||||| Renewed calls for the release of 28 pages of top secret documents related to the 9/11 attacks have turned attention to allegations that Saudi officials in some way supported the terrorists involved. (Adam Taylor,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post) 
 
 President Obama is scheduled to arrive in Saudi Arabia this week for what will be his fourth visit to the kingdom since taking office. The White House hopes that the trip can help strengthen relations between the two nations, but in reality things are more than a little difficult at the moment — with the Syrian civil war, a nuclear deal with Iran and falling oil prices all souring relations between the longtime allies. 
 
 However, new developments mean that one of the most controversial aspects of the trip relates to events from almost 15 years ago — Sept. 11, 2001. In the past few weeks, there has been renewed scrutiny of allegations that Saudi Arabia, in some way, supported the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which killed 2,996 people. 
 
 This is a controversy that has bubbled for years: Although Saudi Arabia and many outside observers say the case is closed on any official Saudi link to the attacks, some critics accuse both the Saudis and the U.S. government of a cover-up. The focus of speculation has repeatedly fallen on 28 pages of a congressional report that remained classified since publication in 2002. 
 
 What is the official line on the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks? 
 
 Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 15 were from Saudi Arabia. They were all affiliated with al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy and connected Saudi family. The Saudi royal family also has been accused of tolerating extremist clerics within the kingdom in exchange for domestic stability and political support. 
 
 After the attacks in 2001, these facts contributed to a widespread suspicion that Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally for 70 years, had somehow aided the plotters, possibly with financing. However, when the 9/11 Commission released its final report on the attacks in 2004, it suggested only that the Saudi government had "turned a blind eye" to charities that funded the attack but was not directly involved. 
 
 The report's conclusion has served as the official line on any allegations of a Saudi government link to the attacks: "Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding, but we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al Qaeda." 
 
 What are the 28 pages? 
 
 The source of the new speculation about the alleged Saudi role in the attacks is a report that came out in 2002, two years before the 9/11 Commission released its findings. This report was the product of a bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures that led to the attacks. 
 
 And the problem isn't so much what the publicly released version of this report said. It was what it didn't say. 
 
 Under the orders of then-President George W. Bush, 28 pages of the joint inquiry's final 838-page report were classified. They sit under lock and key in a vault. According to multiple accounts from those who have seen the pages, they contain an entire section on the alleged links between Saudi officials and the 9/11 hijackers — of particular notoriety are the alleged links between the hijackers and a Saudi network that helped them when they arrived in California. 
 
 The government gave several reasons for not releasing the 28 pages, including national security. At the time, Saudi officials were among those who called for those pages to be released. "Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide," the Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, said in 2003. "We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages." 
 
 Why are these 28 pages still so controversial? 
 
 Over the years, there have been some who have suggested that the 28 pages weren't quite as scandalous as they were often presented — in fact, as the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright has reported, the 9/11 Commission report attempted to substantiate the allegations contained in those 28 pages and apparently failed. 
 
 Yet the controversy surrounding the pages has remained; in fact, some point toward the 9/11 Commission report's cautious wording on the alleged Saudi link as evidence of a cover-up. Groups, including families of the attack victims, have repeatedly called on the government to release the 28 pages. These groups have gained the support of several members of Congress and U.S. officials — Obama is reported to have made a promise to the families of victims in 2008 and 2009. 
 
 The whole controversy has been brought back in a big way recently by a "60 Minutes" documentary that aired April 10, about a week before Obama was due in Saudi Arabia. In the segment, correspondent Steve Kroft spoke to a number of members of the 9/11 Commission, who said they wanted the 28 pages released. 
 
 "We certainly didn't pursue the entire line of inquiry in regard to Saudi Arabia," former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey (D) told CBS. 
 
 What about the Senate bill? 
 
 Last year, a judge ruled that Saudi Arabia could not be a defendant in a civil suit brought by victims' families. In his ruling, Judge George Daniels wrote that he had not seen sufficient evidence of a link to the 2001 attacks that would overcome Saudi Arabia's sovereign immunity in civil suits. 
 
 In response, a number of lawmakers — John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in the Senate and Peter King (R-N.Y.) in the House — have drafted legislation that would attempt to carve out an exception to sovereign immunity in cases that involved terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. 
 
 Although this legislation does not single out Saudi Arabia, those involved have made it clear that its purpose relates to the alleged Saudi link to 9/11. “If Saudi Arabia participated in terrorism, of course they should be able to be sued,” Schumer said in a recent statement. The White House has said that it opposes the bill, arguing that reciprocal measures taken by other countries may put Americans at risk. 
 
 So – why is this a headache for Obama? 
 
 Ahead of Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia this week, the White House has been forced to field questions about the kingdom's alleged link to 9/11 and the 28 pages in the joint inquiry report. "Obviously, there is a process that's underway at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to consider those 28 pages and determine how much, if any, of those documents can be declassified and released," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said this week, while adding that he did not know whether Obama had personally read the 28 pages. 
 
 To make matters worse, the proposed Senate legislation has sparked anger in Riyadh. According to a report published in the New York Times this weekend, Saudi Arabia has privately warned Washington that it would sell off hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets if the bill were to pass. 
 
 Real or not, this threat has added another layer of intrigue to the situation. This week the Senate bill became an issue in the 2016 presidential election, with both Democratic candidates suggesting that they supported the legislation. “Obviously, we’ve got to make anyone who participates in or supports terrorism pay a price, and we also have to be aware of any consequences that might affect Americans, either military or civilian, or our nation,” Hillary Clinton told ABC’s “This Week.” 
 
 This position clearly puts them at odds with the Obama administration, which has hinted that it may veto the bill. 
 
 The resurgent controversy comes amid tense relations between Washington and Riyadh. The Syrian conflict has brought more attention to the Wahhabism preached in many Saudi mosques, with some drawing a line between that fundamentalist strain of Islam and the extremism of the Islamic State militant group. Recent comments from Obama, suggesting that Washington's relationship with Riyadh was "complicated" and that Saudi Arabia may have to "share" the Middle East with Iran, have prompted a backlash in Saudi political circles. 
 
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– A member of the official commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks is ratcheting up pressure on the White House to make public 28 pages of a congressional report dealing with suspected Saudi involvement. In an interview with the Guardian, former Navy secretary John Lehman lays it out in blunt terms: “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he says. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.” Lehman adds that he's not implicating members of the Saudi royal family or top civilian officials, but rather lower-echelon employees, perhaps in the Saudi ministry of Islamic affairs. Last month, the leaders of the commission—former GOP Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana—cautioned against releasing the 28 pages and noted that just one Saudi official had been implicated in the plot. (That was diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy, who was deported and remains a "person of interest," notes the New York Times.) But Lehman says he knows of at least five other Saudi employees who were under suspicion. “They may not have been indicted, but they were certainly implicated,” he says. “There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.”