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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 a supposed U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, played 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 Joe Biden in 2021 ordered many documents declassified, fulfilling a promise to the 9/11 victims’ families, but the releases were heavily redacted.
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, said 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-Qaida plot. In the case’s latest development, the plaintiffs won a ruling 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 — surveils the U.S. Capitol, narrating in Arabic as he shows entrances, security posts and parking areas, presumably for his al-Qaida 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.
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?”
Congress authorized President George W. 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 probe of the attacks. That report in 2004 “found no evidence” of Saudi government complicity, though it didn’t “exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaida.”
The 9/11 commission’s executive director noted to the New York Times, in its report on new evidence, that the commission’s conclusions “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. Honor the victims, not foreign policy sacred cows.
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