Last month's release of a joint congressional committee's report on its investigation of the federal government's failure to detect or prevent 9/11 is not, we are told, even close to the final word on the subject. Even the classified version of the 800-page report contains numerous gaps, some of which will be filled by the greater access to existing intelligence and future documents or interrogations that will be available to former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean's newer, independent commission.

But some of those gaps are intentional, sections of the report redacted by the White House or CIA due to sensitive matters of intelligence, foreign policy, or national security. And of those passages, none is more glaring or important than the 28-page section that deals with support the 9/11 hijackers received from foreign governments -- mostly, according to inside sources, from officials in the government of Saudi Arabia.

While Kean's commission reports that cooperation with the Bush Administration has so far been good, congressional investigators were repeatedly stonewalled in their efforts to obtain information. The composition of Kean's Bush- appointed task force was heavily politicized from the outset -- when the post that went to Kean was originally awarded to former Secretary of State and well-connected war criminal Henry Kissinger. Bush has been remarkably willing to politicize 9/11 -- that's why we now own Iraq -- and he's also been spinning the question of responsibility for 9/11 since the day of the attacks. That spinning has been consistently away from Saudi Arabia. While U.S. support of the repressive Saudi royals has always been a delicate issue, it is more so for Dubya than for any other administration in history. Two words suggest why: "9/11" and "Carlyle."

The Carlyle Group, for those not up on your Internet conspiracy theories, is the oil industry consortium with extensive ties to the Saudi government and to the Bush family -- extensive enough that former president George H.W. Bush was a Carlyle employee in September 2001. For two years, this has been the stuff of conspiracist nirvana; enough has been e-mailed regarding Carlyle, Bush, and 9/11 to wash the world's entire supply of hogs.

The missing Saudi connection is only one detail in a far larger story, of intelligence agencies with more information than capacity for processing it or sharing it, a stunning amount of data that at the end of the day still needed to be interpreted by human beings. Most of the attention on the congressional report has focused on whether the attacks could have been prevented with better procedures and wiser interpretation of intelligence. But the question of sponsorship is enormous -- particularly since so much of the Bush Administration's aggressive "War on Terror" foreign policy has been based on claims, or inferences, of who the dark forces behind 9/11 actually were.

"Neither CIA nor FBI officials were able to address definitively the extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the United States," the report notes. Even more remarkably, "Only recently, and in part due to the joint inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their efforts to address these issues..."

In other words, we know that a guy named bin Laden has been running a murderous terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. On this basis, the United States first attacked and overthrew the government of Afghanistan -- ostensibly because it had "harbored" bin Laden -- and then attacked and overthrew the government of Iraq, on the basis, apparently, that both Saddam and bin Laden were Muslim.

But where did bin Laden get his money, his resources, his recruits? Since 9/11, the CIA and FBI, not to mention a small army of other agencies, have been working overtime on terror-related issues, with all the money in the world. But according to this last passage, until recently they didn't much care about the issue of foreign sponsorship. We had our bad guys -- the Taliban and Saddam. We didn't need any others.

Or, perhaps, we didn't want them. When it comes to sponsorship, the Al-Qaeda trail is a limited access freeway, and most of its exits are in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden himself is not only Saudi, but a scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest and most prominent families, with its wealth endlessly intertwined with that of Saudi Arabia's ruling royal family. The vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. And now, 28 redacted pages of a joint congressional report reportedly implicates Saudi officials in the financing of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 plot.

This comes in the context of a Saudi government that is every bit as brutally repressive as the Taliban or Saddam, every bit as horrible in its treatment of women as the Taliban ever were. But the Saudis have oil, and for decades Washington has looked the other way when the topic of Saudi Arabia's miserable human rights record has been broached. Not only that, but Washington continues to sell the oil-rich royal family the latest in military weaponry, even though Saudi rhetoric toward Israel remains unremittingly hostile -- normally a disqualifying trait in an American military ally.

Oil speaks volumes. Especially to the Bush family, which is how the Bush connection to the Carlyle Group, and Carlyle's connection to the nepotistic thugs running Saudi Arabia, become relevant. The question is not corruption or conspiracy, but a comfortable relationship among business colleagues willing to overlook differences on other issues -- like brutal repression, or one party putting money into an attack that killed 3,000 people in the heart of the other party's country.

Is Bush protecting his Saudi friends -- or his father's friends? The congressional report does little to disprove this notion, and the White House isn't talking. The Bush Administration is still refusing to divulge how much the President was told before 9/11 about the nature or extent of the threat to U.S. security posed by Al-Qaeda. Conspiracists would love, on entirely circumstantial fare, to turn this into a "the President knew" or even "the President planned" fable. But a far more likely scenario is that information unfavorable to the Saudi government or its business interests (basically, the same people) was dismissed or kept away from the President for the same reason information casting doubt on Iraqi weapons or Al-Qaeda links was filtered out -- because the politicians at the top didn't want to hear it.

None of this, of course, filtered into media stories when -- a week after the report was released -- a flurry of attention was finally paid to the missing 28 pages and the Saudi connection. Nothing of "oil" or the Bush White House's own personal business experiences with the Saudi regime was mentioned, and in a few days, the matter disappeared again. It won't stay quiet forever.

If nothing else, the White House's lack of concern over the unseemly appearance of the Bush family connection to Saudi interests is consistent with this president's approach to governing. From the onset, Dubya's rule has been characterized by putting officials in charge of entire industries when they have extensive financial and business ties to that industry. The appearance of corruption -- and subsequent regulatory moves that vastly enrich the industries in question -- seems not to matter.

Now, we have a purported Saudi connection to the 9/11 plot, a White House redacting details of that connection, and the same oil-soaked presidency having business and social connections to the Saudis that go right to the top. At minimum, the thousands that died on 9/11, and the many thousands more that have died since in Afghanistan and Iraq, beg the question: why is George W. Bush handling Saudi Arabia so gently?