The recent news stories, easily overlooked amid headlines about presidential campaign drama, natural disasters and Olympic gold, have been a grim reminder to those watching them: As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Americans still do not have a full accounting of the role of a supposed U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, in the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
We should. It is late, but never too late, to know the truth, no matter how rich the Saudis are in oil, how much geopolitical weight they have or how much power they have. Billions given to the son-in-law of a former and perhaps future president.
The gaps in our knowledge are due both to the Saudi government's opacity and denials, many of them discredited, and to our government's censorship of information obtained through federal investigations, a congressional inquiry, and a high-level commission. In 2021, President Biden finally ordered the declassification of many documents, fulfilling a promise to the families of 9/11 victims, but the releases were largely unpublished. drafted.
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Thanks to the families, who have not let up, for much of what we know. Their federal lawsuit against the Saudi kingdom has stretched on since 2002, even reaching the Supreme Court, and has come to rival Dickens’s Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce case in its endless proceedings. As if the survivors hadn’t suffered enough.
“What we have discovered, without help from our FBI or our own government, is that [the terrorists] “We had a significant amount of assistance, and that assistance came in the form of the Saudi government,” said Brett Eagleson, president of the families group 9/11 Justice. said journalists after a court hearing two weeks ago.
The lawsuit centers on whether Saudi individuals and groups' assistance to Two kidnappers who had lived in San Diego He was part of the Al Qaeda plot. Of the 19 attackers, 15 were Saudis, including the two from California who would take over the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden belonged to one of the richest clans in Saudi Arabia.
In the latest development in the case, the plaintiffs won a ruling in June that forced the release of materials that further implicated the Saudis — material that the FBI inexplicably failed to turn over to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission created after the attacks.
In a video from 1999 In a video first aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in late June, Saudi national Omar Al Bayoumi (a Saudi intelligence informant, the FBI confirmed, despite Saudi denials) stakes out the U.S. Capitol, narrating in Arabic as he shows entrances, security checkpoints and parking areas, presumably for his al-Qaeda handlers. The Capitol is believed to have been targeted by the hijackers of United Flight 93, who were forced by their brave captives to crash into a field in Pennsylvania.
The video “is another big brick in a huge wall of evidence that at this point indicates that the Saudi government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks,” Richard Lambert, who led the FBI’s 9/11 investigation in San Diego, told CBS.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported In another newly discovered piece of evidence: Al Bayoumi's notebook that included a sketch of an airplane and an equation calculating the rate of descent to hit a ground target. British authorities seized the evidence trove from Al Bayoumi's home in England ten days after the attacks and handed it over to the FBI.
Al Bayoumi, who later fled to Saudi Arabia and remains there, was living in California before the attacks, met the two hijackers when they arrived in Los Angeles and set them up in San Diego.
Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, told the New York Times that Congress or the Justice Department should investigate: “What happened to this material after it was turned over to the FBI?”
The revelations coincided with the release last week of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's report. book “The Art of Power.” In a chapter on September 11, he devotes seven pages to the government’s failure to fully follow through on Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration’s resistance to doing so.
Pelosi writes that a joint House-Senate investigation focused on communication failures between intelligence and law enforcement agencies that led to missed opportunities to prevent the tragedy. “But,” she adds, “there was a second major issue that we were not initially allowed to present to the public: the Saudi connection, specifically a clear trail of funding and assistance to these 9/11 terrorists provided by Saudi nationals, and particularly by Saudi diplomats and members of the royal family.”
When it comes to American intelligence, Pelosi knows. For 30 years she was part of the small congressional clique with access to the nation's secrets. What still worries her is this: “We found strong evidence of multiple troubling links to Saudi Arabia, while [Bush officials] “They were trying very hard to link 9/11 with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein.”
Congress authorized Bush to go to war, based on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Under pressure from the 9/11 families, he also established an outside commission for a broader investigation of the attacks. report In 2004, it said it had “found no evidence” of complicity by the Saudi government or senior officials, although it did not “exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaeda.”
The executive director of the 9/11 commission told the New York Times in his recent report on new evidence that the commission's conclusions 20 years ago “were dependent on the evidence available at the time.”
Exactly. That is why Congress or some outside group created by it should investigate the new leads on Saudi complicity and report back to the nation on its updated findings. Let us honor the victims, not the sacred cows of foreign policy.
@jackiekcalmes
