Saudi Ties to 9/11 Attacks Under Renewed Scrutiny (Updated)

A key U.S. senator called for the Saudi government to “come clean” about its ties to the 9/11 terror attacks and move to promptly settle a lawsuit brought by the families of the victims, suggesting that congressional approval of a new nuclear agreement and other measures of interest to Riyadh could hang in the balance. “I’ve made this argument face to face to Saudi officials at the highest level that they should simply do the right thing — put 9/11 behind them and do justice for the 9/11 families,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal at the Soufan Center Global Summit on Terrorism and Political Violence, an event across the street from ground zero timed to commemorate this week’s 25th anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. The Connecticut Democrat is the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “The Saudi government now wants a defense pact with the United States,” Blumenthal added. “It wants a nuclear energy agreement with us. I think I would oppose, or at least I question very seriously, whether there should be those kinds of agreements unless there is a resolution of the claims” made by the 9/11 families. Blumenthal’s direct plea to the Saudi government to settle the 9/11 lawsuit comes at a crucial moment in decades-long litigation that has produced a startling series of disclosures, including a video just released within the past week that adds weight to the case that a suspected Saudi intelligence asset, as well as several Saudi officials, were involved in providing financial and logistical support for two of the Al Qaeda hijackers inside the United States while they were plotting to commit what turned into the worst terror attack in the nation’s history. Those disclosures are slated to be front and center on Oct. 7, when the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York hears oral arguments on whether to uphold a groundbreaking lower court judge’s ruling last year giving a green light for the families’ case against the Saudi government to proceed. In rejecting a Saudi motion to dismiss the lawsuit, U.S. Judge George Daniels concluded there was a “reasonable inference” that the suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar Al-Bayoumi, and Fahad al-Thumairy, the imam of a Saudi-funded mosque in Los Angles, were “coordinating with the Saudi government” when they provided substantial assistance to the two hijackers, Khaled Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, after they flew to United States in early 2000 following an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Bayoumi has long been the mystery witness in the 9/11 case. He was a Saudi “student” in Southern California who rarely attended classes and was widely viewed in the Muslim community—and by FBI agents who investigated him—as a spy for Saudi intelligence who kept close tabs on his fellow Saudis and reported on their activities to the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Within days of the terror attacks, Bayoumi surfaced as a potentially key player when it was discovered he had met with the hijackers at a Mediterranean-style restaurant in Los Angeles and then helped them move to San Diego, where he arranged to get them an apartment, fronted them cash and threw a party for them to help assimilate them into the Muslim Community. Lawyers for the families have dislodged thousands of internal FBI documents implicating Bayoumi as a radical extremist with apparent sympathies for the hijackers, suggesting he may well have been a knowing accomplice in the plot. Just last week, lawyers for the families posted onto the court docket a damning video, taken in 1997 or 1998, showing Bayoumi participating in a “paint-ball exercise” involving urban combat scenes and target practice with some of the participants wearing military clothing and shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The posting of the video was first reported by the BBC. Ties that Bind Bayoumi can also be seen embracing a local imam, Anwar Al Awlaki, a Yemeni American who later became a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011. Bayoumi can be heard referring to Awlaki as “Sheikh Anwar.” The video is the latest in a series of disclosures that has undermined the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission, which in 2004 dismissed suggestions of any Saudi government involvement in the terror attacks and concluded that Bayoumi himself was an “unlikely candidate” for extremist ties. But among the new evidence that has been uncovered by lawyers for the 9/11 families is a separate “casing” video of the U.S. Capitol taken by Bayoumi with two other Islamic radicals as well as a trail of phone records showing Bayoumi was in frequent touch with some officials of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs at the Saudi Embassy during the time he was assisting the hijackers. Equally infuriating to the families is that, while much of the evidence implicating Bayoumi in the 9/11 plot was in the hands of the FBI within days of the attacks, it was never reviewed or shared with British authorities, who had detained the Saudi suspect in Birmingham, but were ultimately forced to let him go after seven days because the U.S. Justice Department had not filed charges against him, making him a candidate for extradition. “[I was] gobsmacked. Absolutely gobsmacked,” David Campbell, a former Scotland Yard officer, said of the moment he learned the FBI was not prepared to bring charges against Bayoumi, forcing the U.K. to let him go. The counterterrorism agent had interrogated Bayoumi and was convinced he was lying when he denied involvement in the 9/11 plot. Campbell made those remarks in a new interview with ITV News released last weekend. Campbell specifically cited two pieces of evidence — the so-called “casing” video taken by Bayoumi of the U.S. Capitol and his handwritten notes showing a drawing of an aircraft, sketched in blue ink, alongside an equation that some experts have said could be used to calculate the rate of descent of an aircraft needed to strike a target on the ground. Both the video and sketch were seized from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home, turned over to the FBI, but never shown to Campbell and other police officers questioning him. “[It’s] incredibly frustrating. If I was in possession of those two particular exhibits, I would have called it game-changing,” said Campbell in the ITV interview. “And if I had possession of that, I would have taken him (al-Bayoumi) to the absolute cleaners.” (So, too, would have U.S. prosecutors had they had access to the material, according to a former top counterterrorism prosecutor. Jeffrey Breinholt, who served as deputy director of counterterrorism at the Justice Department at the time, told the BBC that the paintballing video with Awlaki is “pretty damn significant” and a “very telling bit of evidence.” He added: “As a manager who reviewed a lot of proposed terrorism cases over the years, I can tell you that that would have jumped out. I think it would [have been grounds for] a material support charge against Bayoumi.”) “I don’t think many would even believe some of the things we’ve uncovered 25 years later,” Brett Eagleson, a leader of the 9/11 families, said of the material that has been publicly released during the discovery process of the lawsuit against the Saudis. Eagleson appeared on stage Wednesday with Blumenthal at the 9/11 conference. “We shouldn’t be finding out from the British government, for example, that the FBI knew days after 9/11 the extent to which Saudi Arabia was involved,” said Eagleson. “That ought to be front page news. That ought to be the topic of every conversation this week.” The 9/11 conference was organized by the Soufan Center, a New York-based national security think tank headed by decorated former FBI counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan. While this year’s event addressed a wide range of military and intelligence issues relating to the current threats of international terrorism, the panel with Blumenthal and Eagleson was among the highlights because it dealt directly with the widespread frustrations among 9/11 families that the full story of the terror plot has never been told. Lawyers for the Saudis have consistently rejected the notion that anybody in the Saudi government was a knowing participant in the 9/11 plot and have pointed to Bayoumi’s denials to the 9/11 Commission that he knew what the hijackers were up to. “[It’s] incredibly frustrating. If I was in possession of those two particular exhibits, I would have called it game-changing,” said Scotland Yard’s David Campbell. But Blumenthal, for one, isn’t buying it. “When a foreign government is complicit or culpable in killing Americans they should be held responsible,” he said. (Blumenthal in the past has also called for the FBI to explain its post-9/11 failure to quickly process the evidence seized from Bayoumi’s home. The bureau has consistently declined to comment.) The senator said he was not prepared to draw “a line in the sand” that cuts off all ties to the Saudis. Nor, he said at one point, was he necessarily calling on the Saudis to “formally” acknowledge “their responsibility” for 9/11; he just wants them to settle the lawsuit and pay damages that experts have estimated will run up to $1 trillion to the 9/11 families. “But I think that their treatment of the 9/11 families has to be regarded as a factor in our strategic relationship,” Blumenthal said. “These Saudi agents may not have been actually acting with the direction from the top of the Saudi government. We don’t know, but the Saudis do, and they ought to come clean to the American people.” ### I wish the Senator good luck with that one... 25 yrs later. He might be better off asking GWB. This is so important