Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. What does that fact signify? According to senior U.S. officials, little or nothing. From the outset, they treated the national identity of the terrorists as incidental, connoting nothing of importance. Imagine if 15 Iraqis had perpetrated the attacks... In its final report, the 9/11 Commission said it found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually" had funded Al Qaeda. This artfully crafted passage was ... designed to preserve the existing U.S.-Saudi relationship from critical scrutiny. The effort never fully succeeded, skeptics suspecting that there might be more to the story. Today those doubts find expression in demands to declassify 28 pages of a congressional investigation said to detail Saudi relations with and support for the Al Qaeda terrorist network before September 2001. Whether the 28 pages sustain or refute suspicions of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks will remain impossible to say absent ... executive action. Yet implicit in this dispute is an issue of even greater moment: Who ultimately exercises jurisdiction over truth? The foreign policy establishment insists that the 28 pages remain secret; not only might the document challenge the state's preferred Sept. 11 narrative, but the demands for its declassification also call into question the establishment's very authority to control that narrative.