THERE COMES A TIME in the history of every oppressive state when the need for change is suddenly and widely understood to be imperative. Inevitably, an incident occurs that illuminates the government's misrule and undermines the legitimacy of the regime. For the government of Saudi Arabia, such an incident occurred on September 11, 2001. Indeed, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by 19 terrorists, 15 of them Saudi subjects, did as much to subvert the authority of the Saudi monarchy at home as it did to warn the world of the menace of Wahhabism, the totalitarian form of Islam that inspires al Qaeda and is the Saudi kingdom's state religion.

The same event, of course, also made obvious the need for the United States to alter its cozy relationship with the Saudi monarchy. In that sense, the withholding of 28 pages (among other redacted material) from the 800-plus-page report on 9/11 released last month by the congressional intelligence committees is a throwback to the days when protecting Saudi sensitivities at all costs was standard in Washington. Exactly how the U.S.-Saudi relationship is to be disentangled and straightened out is not yet clear. That this must be done--for the security of Americans, as well as for the liberation of the 23 million people in Saudi Arabia from the dark night of Wahhabism--is no longer in doubt.

Seen in the context of this impending transformation, the suppression of the 28 pages--which apparently trace Saudi funding and other support for the terror network--is a minor episode. Events that are already in the public record tell an indelible story.

These start with September 11 itself. Again: The hijackers were not Palestinians or Chechens or any other aggrieved Muslim minority. Most of them--like their chief, Osama bin Laden--were Saudis. Rudely awakened by this blow, Americans who cared to follow news from the kingdom have been able to learn a great deal.

In early 2002, there was the revelation that the Saudi government openly funds "martyrdom"--including suicide bombings--in the Palestinian confrontation with Israel; it did so to the tune of $400 million in 2001 alone, according to the official Saudi embassy website.

Six months after 9/11 came an incident revealing of the purely domestic effects of Saudi tyranny: A fire in a girls' school in Mecca left 14 dead, when members of the Wahhabi religious militia, the mutawwiyya, forced the victims back into the burning building because they were insufficiently covered. The school was located in an apartment building that should not have been used for educational purposes. Anger swept the kingdom, and Crown Prince Abdullah, widely considered the "good" member of the royal elite, who listens to the people, ordered girls' education removed from the jurisdiction of the clerics and handed over to direct state supervision. He was opposed in this by Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, the powerful minister of the interior, who has blamed 9/11 on Jewish agents. Soon Wahhabi imams were declaring from the pulpit that the dead girls were noble martyrs who had died to protect their virtue.

Scandal struck again in November 2002 and touched Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington (and nephew of Prince Nayef). It was learned that money had gone from her purse to the pockets of two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, by way of two Saudi intermediaries, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan.

The Riyadh bombings of May 12, 2003, which killed almost two dozen innocent people, nine of them Americans, seemed to provide the ultimate warning to the Saudi rulers. Yet inside Saudi Arabia, it is widely believed that the bombing was directed from within the ruling circles, to let the United States as well as locals know that demands for substantial change would not be tolerated. In the Riyadh bombings, as in 9/11, the crises of Saudi foreign relations and of Saudi domestic rule merged.

Meanwhile, international investigation of terrorist financing was confirming the role of Saudi-backed Islamic charities in such activities, including in the United States. Saudi authorities repeatedly affirmed their commitment to the war on terror, but failed to deliver on promises to shut down terror-funding charities and apprehend rich supporters of al Qaeda. They claimed to have dismissed 1,000 extremist clerics from their state positions, but sources within the kingdom point out that tens of thousands more remain in the mosques, and those who were fired were old men ready to retire. To be sure, Saudi dissenters also say that virtually all of the terrorist suspects killed in recent actions by the regime were imams. Confirmation of this is hard to come by as the regime seldom releases these people's identities.