Recent news, easily missed amid headlines about presidential campaign drama, natural disasters and Olympic gold, has been a somber reminder for those who caught it: As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Americans still don’t 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’s late, but never too late, to learn the truth — no matter the Saudis’ oil wealth, geopolitical weight or billions given to a former and perhaps future president’s son-in-law.
The voids in our knowledge owe both to the Saudi government’s opacity and denials, many of them debunked, as well as to our government’s lid on information gleaned through federal investigations, a congressional inquiry and blue-ribbon commission. President Biden in 2021 finally ordered many documents declassified, fulfilling a promise to the 9/11 victims’ families, but the releases were heavily redacted.
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.
Thank the unrelenting families for much of what we know. Their federal lawsuit targeting the Saudi kingdom has ground on since 2002, even to the Supreme Court, coming to rival Dickens’ Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in its interminable proceedings. As if the survivors haven’t suffered enough.
“What we’ve uncovered, with no help from our FBI and no help from our own government, is that [the terrorists] had a significant amount of help, and that help came in the form of the Saudi government,” Brett Eagleson, president of the families group 9/11 Justice, told reporters after a court hearing two weeks ago.
The lawsuit turns on whether assistance from Saudi individuals and groups to two hijackers who had lived in San Diego was part of the Al Qaeda plot. Of the 19 attackers, 15 were Saudis, including the two in California who would commandeer the jetliner that they crashed into the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden belonged to one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest clans.
In the case’s latest development, the plaintiffs won a ruling in June that forced into public view material further implicating the Saudis. It’s material that the FBI inexplicably didn’t give the bipartisan 9/11 Commission created after the attacks.
In a 1999 video first aired by CBS’ “60 Minutes”in late June, Saudi citizen Omar Al Bayoumi — an informant to Saudi intelligence, the FBI confirmed, despite Saudi denials — surveills the U.S. Capitol, narrating in Arabic as he shows entrances, security posts and parking areas, presumably for his Al Qaeda handlers. The Capitol is believed to have been the target of the United Flight 93 hijackers, who were forced by their courageous captives to crash into a Pennsylvania field.
The video “is another very large brick in a massive wall of evidence that at this point indicates 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 on another piece of newly unsealed evidence: Al Bayoumi’s notebook that included a sketch of an airplane and an equation calculating the rate of descent to hit a target on the ground. British authorities seized the trove of evidence from Al Bayoumi’s home in England 10 days after the attacks and turned it over to the FBI.
Al Bayoumi, who subsequently fled back to Saudi Arabia and remains there, lived in California before the attacks, met the two hijackers-in-waiting when they arrived in Los Angeles and got them settled 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 stuff after it was turned over to the FBI?”
The disclosures coincided with the release last week of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s book “The Art of Power.” In a chapter about 9/11, she devotes seven pages to the government’s failure to fully follow the dots to Saudi Arabia, and the Bush administration’s resistance to doing so.
Pelosi writes that a joint House-Senate inquiry focused on communications breakdowns among intelligence and law enforcement agencies that caused them to miss opportunities to prevent the tragedy. “But,” she adds, “there was a second major theme that we were not initially allowed to present to the public: The Saudi Arabian connection, specifically a clear trail of funding and assistance to these 9/11 terrorists that was provided by Saudi citizens, and particularly by Saudi diplomats and royal family members.”
When it comes to U.S. intelligence, Pelosi knows. For 30 years she was part of the tiny clique in Congress with access to the nation’s secrets. What still troubles her is this: “We found strong evidence of multiple concerning links to Saudi Arabia, while they [Bush officials] were trying very hard to link 9/11 to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.”
Congress authorized Bush to go to war, based on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Pressured by 9/11 families, it also established an outside commission for a broader probe of the attacks. Its report in 2004 said it “found no evidence” of Saudi government or senior officials’ complicity, though it didn’t “exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda.”
The 9/11 commission’s executive director noted to the New York Times, in its recent report on new evidence, that the commission’s conclusions 20 years ago “were dependent on the evidence available at that time.”
Exactly. Which is why Congress or some outside group of its creation should investigate the new clues of Saudi complicity, and report its updated findings to the nation. Honor the victims, not foreign policy sacred cows.
