THE blacking out of 28 pages on Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks isn't the only hole in Congress' report on the terrorist atrocity: The rest of the report skirts issues and evidence that point directly to the desert oil kingdom.

Consider the case of 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The document notes that U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies failed to adequately deal with knowledge they had of these two Saudis. But it actually continues the intelligence failure, by overlooking their importance in the plot.

The two men first landed in San Diego after a terrorist summit in Malaysia. Among the U.S. failures that followed:

*Some time before 9/11, the National Security Agency had information linking al-Hazmi to Osama bin Laden but failed to hand the CIA what it knew about him and al-Mihdhar.

*The CIA learned that al-Hazmi, whom it had identified as a "terrorist," had come to the United States but did not inform the FBI.

*Al-Mihdhar's entry into America as Nawaf al-Hazmi's traveling companion was overlooked.

*Later, the men traveled back and forth, in and out of the country, unimpeded. They were not placed on government watch lists until two weeks before 9/11.

*An attempt to open a serious investigation of al-Mihdhar was blocked by maintenance of a "wall" between intelligence and criminal cases. The FBI was trying to find and interview Al-Mihdhar on the day of the hijackings.

The report tends to exonerate the U.S. agencies, yet closer attention to who these men were and what they were engaged in might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, the report seems to willfully understate the importance of the bungled investigation of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. They were, in wording nearly lost in the report's bureaucratic fog, "principal hijackers," and the first to arrive in America, at the start of 2000.

FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that "al-Mihdhar's role in the 9/11 plot between June 2000 and July 2001 . . . may well have been that of coordinator and organizer of the movements of the non-pilot hijackers. This is supported by his apparent lengthy stay in Saudi Arabia and his arriving back in the United States only after the arrival of all the hijackers."

In an understated manner, the report discloses even more fascinating information: While in San Diego, the pair had extensive contacts with an unidentified FBI informant and were befriended by Omar al-Bayoumi--a Saudi subject who has returned to, and remains in, the kingdom. Al-Bayoumi has terrorist connections, and has been associated with a bin Laden follower named Osama Bassnan.

The report overlooks one important fact about al-Bayoumi: Last year, he and Bassnan were named in the U.S. media as the conduits for "charitable donations" to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi from Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to America, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz.

Why no mention whatever of Princess Haifa in the report's narrative on al-Bayoumi, Bassnan, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi? The same claim of "national security" that justified blacking out the Saudi chapter?