Nearly 20 years after 9/11, lawsuit against Saudi Arabia hits key moment
As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks approaches, victims’ relatives are pressing the courts to answer what they see as lingering questions about the Saudi government’s role in the attacks.
A lawsuit that accuses Saudi Arabia of being complicit took
a major step forward this year with the questioning under oath of former Saudi
officials, but those depositions remain under seal and the U.S. has withheld a
trove of other documents as too sensitive for disclosure.
The information vacuum has exasperated families who for
years have tried to make the case that the Saudi government facilitated the
attacks. Past investigations have outlined ties between Saudi nationals and
some of the airplane hijackers, but have not established the government was
directly involved.
“The legal team and the FBI, investigative agencies, can
know about the details of my dad’s death and thousands of other family members’
deaths, but the people who it’s most relevant to can’t know,” said Brett
Eagleson, whose father, Bruce, was among the World Trade Center victims. “It’s
adding salt to an open wound for all the 9/11 family members.”
Lawyers for the victims plan to ask a judge to lift a
protective order so their clients can access secret government documents as
well as testimony from key subjects interviewed over the last year. Though the
plaintiffs’ lawyers are unable to discuss what they’ve learned from
depositions, they insist the information they’ve gathered advances their
premise of Saudi complicity.
“We’re in a situation where only now, through the documents
we have gotten and what our investigators have discovered and the testimony
we’ve taken, only now is this iceberg that’s been underwater” floating to the
surface, said attorney James Kreindler.
The Saudi government has denied any connection to the
attacks. But the question has long vexed investigators and is at the heart of a
long-running lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of thousands of victims. The issue
gained traction not only because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi — as was
Osama bin Laden, the mastermind — but also because of suspicions they must have
had help navigating Western society given their minimal experience in the U.S.
Public documents released in the last two decades, including
by the 9/11 Commission, have detailed numerous Saudi entanglements but have not
proven government complicity.
They show how the first hijackers to arrive in the U.S.,
Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were met and assisted by a Saudi national
in 2000. That man, Omar al-Bayoumi, who helped them find and lease an apartment
in San Diego, had ties to the Saudi government, investigators have said. Just
before Bayoumi met the hijackers, he met with Fahad al-Thumairy, at the time an
accredited diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles who investigators say
led an extremist faction at his mosque. Bayoumi and Thumairy left the U.S.
weeks before the attacks.
The 9/11 Commission, which assembled the most prominent
accounting of the run-up to the attacks, laid out those connections but found
Bayoumi to be an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” with Islamic
extremists. It said that while it was logical to regard Thumairy as a possible
contact for the hijackers, investigators didn’t find evidence he actually
assisted them. He has denied it.
More broadly, the commission in 2004 said it found no
evidence the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials had funded al-Qaida,
though it noted Saudi-linked charities could have diverted money to the group.
In 2016, the final chapter of a congressional report on the
attacks was declassified. The document named people who knew the hijackers
after they arrived in the U.S. and helped them get apartments, open bank
accounts and connect with mosques. It said some hijackers had connections to,
and received support from, people who may be connected to the Saudi government,
and that information from FBI sources suggested at least two of them may have
been intelligence officers.
But it didn’t reach a conclusion on complicity, saying while
it was possible the interactions could reveal proof of Saudi government support
for terrorism, there were also possibly more innocuous explanations for the
associations.
The FBI conducted its own investigation, Operation Encore,
with some agents drawing a tighter link.
One former agent, Stephen Moore, stated in a 2017
declaration that al-Qaida wouldn’t have sent Hazmi and Mihdhar to the U.S.
“without a support structure in place.” The document said the FBI believed
Bayoumi was a “clandestine agent” and that Thumairy knew the hijackers “were on
a complex pre-planned mission.” He said he had concluded that “diplomatic and
intelligence personnel of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia knowingly provided
material support to the two 9/11 hijackers.”
Families of the 9/11 victims are hoping to prove similar
allegations. They believe the entire story has not been revealed because of the
U.S. government’s reluctance for a full accounting. Any new evidence they might
surface could be politically explosive given Saudi Arabia’s role as a Middle
East partner.
A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not
return a message seeking comment. Lawyers for the Saudi government declined to
comment.
Andrew Maloney, another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said
that besides getting compensation for families, they hope Saudi Arabia will
accept responsibility and commit to root out terrorism.
“If they did all three of those things, that would be a huge
victory,” he said.
The suit gained steam with a judge’s 2018 ruling permitting
plaintiffs’ lawyers to do a limited fact-finding investigation.
Bayoumi and Thumairy were questioned in recent weeks, as was
Musaed al Jarrah, a former Saudi embassy official whose name Yahoo News said
was inadvertently revealed in an FBI filing last year that suggested he was
suspected of having directed support for the hijackers.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has given lawyers
once-secret documents but under a protective order. Some information remains
concealed entirely after the department invoked a “state secrets” privilege to
block certain material seen as potentially jeopardizing national security.
“Sooner or later, this trial is going to become mainstream,
and there’s going to be a tremendous amount of public pressure, and they can’t
keep things secret forever,” Eagleson said.
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