By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
For the last month and a half, a torrent of unsettling, even maddening information about what led up to 9/11 has flowed out of a federal courthouse in New York City. It does not make Saudi Arabia look good. It does not make the FBI look good, either.
And there’s more to come.
The releases, several thousand pages, came as the presiding judge in the case that pits the 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia partially lifted the heavy veil of secrecy that’s long hung over much of the case as he considers whether to grant Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss the case. On the 23rd anniversary of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, both the public and the plaintiffs themselves now have available evidence that’s never been seen before.
What’s gotten the most attention so far is the alleged “casing video” of the U.S. Capitol, made and narrated in the summer of 1999 by Omar al Bayoumi, a man identified by the FBI as a Saudi spy. Florida Bulldog first reported on the video’s existence in February. TV’s “60 Minutes’’ obtained a copy in June, ran parts of it on the CBS Evening News, and indicated it will have another report during its season premiere on Sunday.
Bayoumi has long been a focus of the FBI. He aided the first two hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, when they entered the U.S. in 2000 – finding them rental housing in San Diego, helping them make an initial payment, co-signing the lease as their guarantor and hosting a video-taped welcome party for them attended by alleged Saudi government agents.
The videos and other material, including Bayoumi’s phone book and a document in Bayoumi’s handwriting with a sketch of a plane, an equation and various calculations, were seized by London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) when they arrested Bayoumi and searched his Birmingham home 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001.
DID THE FBI BURY THE ‘CASING’ VIDEO?
The FBI, or at least some ranking individuals in the FBI, had access to the casing tape decades ago when the MPS gave it to the FBI. But the 9/11 Commission Report makes no mention of it, nor do records from Operation Encore, the FBI’s once-secret follow-up 9/11 probe that examined Saudi complicity. Was the casing tape intentionally buried? Or was the FBI incompetent and failed to review or analyze it?
In December 2023, the MPS gave a copy of the 1:06 minute “casing video” to the 9/11 plaintiffs’ lawyers. About half of it focused on the Capitol, including security there. At one point, while viewing several people climbing on scaffolding set up nearby on the National Mall, Bayoumi says, “They say that our kids are demons. However, these are the demons of the White House.”
An analysis by former FBI Agent Bassem Youssef, an ex-chief of the bureau’s Communications Analysis Unit, determined the footage was intended to be shown to al Qaeda for the purposes of targeting the Capitol in its “planes operation.”
Another expert witness, veteran pilot Barry Schiff, stated Bayoumi’s equation “is used in aviation to determine the line-of-sight distance to the horizon from an airplane” and that he used it as a pilot “to know at what altitude [he would] be able to see [an] airport from a certain distance.”
Schiff said Bayoumi’s “sketch, equation and calculations… are consistent with preparations made as part of the planning for the 9/11 attacks and were made to assist the 9/11 hijackers in carrying out those attacks.”
In court filings and during a July 31 hearing to an overflowing courtroom, defense lawyers argued that the Saudi government played no role in al Qaeda’s horrific jetliner suicide attacks that killed 2,977 men, women and children at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, PA.
SAUDIS: NO HIDDEN SUPPORT NETWORK FOR HIJACKERS
To make their case, they offered the kingdom’s take on the lone question posed by Senior U.S. District Judge George Daniels six years ago in limiting pre-trial fact-finding to events in Southern California: Whether and to what extent did Bayoumi and Fahad al Thumairy, a Saudi diplomat and religious leader at the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, take actions in 2000 “at the direction of more senior Saudi officials to provide assistance” to Hazmi and Mihdhar or any other 9/11 hijackers?
Hazmi and Mihdhar were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Saudi Arabia’s answer to the judge’s question, chiefly citing as evidence Bayoumi and Thumairy’s denials and the motives of Saudi officials “who had no reason to support al Qaeda,” is that neither man wittingly assisted nor directed anyone else to assist the hijackers in their murderous mission.
The fact-finding, or discovery phase of the case, went on for four years. The Saudi motion provides the numbers: the kingdom released nearly 10,000 pages of internal documents; the FBI 13,500 pages, plus another 4,000 pages coughed up after President Biden ordered it to conduct a declassification review of its Operation Encore records.
Atop that the Saudis disclosed that the plaintiffs took testimony or declarations from 18 current and former Saudi officials or employees, including ministers and ambassadors, and 19 “third-party” witnesses.
“Despite all that, no fact witness and no contemporary documents supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that there was a hidden support network for the 9/11 attacks in Southern California – much less a Saudi government one,” the kingdom’s attorneys said.
9/11 COMMISSION FINDINGS OBSOLETE?
But plaintiffs’ attorneys, fortified by those many pages and the records and videos seized by the MPS – also known as Scotland Yard – have constructed a compelling narrative that became public with the unsealing of their 565-page averment of facts and evidence. The averment and related briefs are supported by about 1,000 exhibits that remain sealed.
The picture it paints appears to make obsolete the most important findings of the 9/11 Commission, which in its 2004 report said it found no evidence that Saudi Arabia or its senior officials were involved in 9/11.
The averment, peppered with redactions that nevertheless do not impair understanding, begins with the flat assertion that “U.S. federal law enforcement agencies determined that Saudi Arabia’s government established and supported a Sunni-Wahhabi extremist network inside the U.S. that provided material support to the 9/11 hijackers.”
To back it up, the averment cites facts compiled in a 2004 CIA/FBI Joint Assessment, by the 9/11 Commission, in numerous reports from the FBI’s two 9/11 investigations, PENTTBOM and Operation Encore, videos and other evidence obtained from the MPS and, notably, the FBI’s last public words on 9/11 contained in a 130-page report dated July 23, 2021.
That report spells out in detail agents’ findings about a jihadist “militant network that was created, funded, directed and supported by the KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] and its affiliated organizations and diplomatic personnel within the U.S.”
The Saudi’s first lengthy court filing in support of its motion to dismiss doesn’t mention the July 23 report. Later, after the plaintiffs cited it extensively, the defense questioned its authenticity, citing instead to another FBI report written two months earlier, in May 2021, that officially closed Operation Encore. That report said “Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Al-Jarrah did not knowingly conspire to assist the AQ hijackers” and the Saudi government committed no wrongdoing.
FBI’S SPLIT PERSONALITY ON SAUDI ARABIA
Why the FBI has publicly issued dueling conclusions about Saudi Arabia’s culpability on a matter of such importance is unknown, and the FBI’s public affairs office in Washington did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s request for comment. However, it indicates a serious internal rift between street level agents that developed the evidence and bureau higher-ups that chose to discount it. Judge Daniels will soon choose between those competing opinions.
Still, the extensive detail contained in the July 2021 report, fleshed out by what’s recently come to light, is more compelling.
The plaintiffs’ averment observes that “prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi government’s religious leadership supported al Qaeda, and Saudi Arabia made an implicit or explicit agreement with Osama bin Laden to allow al Qaeda to operate overseas, so long as they did not conduct attacks inside the Kingdom.”
It further details “Saudi Arabia’s network of Sunni extremism inside the U.S.,” including a legion of Wahhabist clerics, or “propagators,” and identifies the Saudi embassy in Washington as “the nerve center” for operations led by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs (MOIA). It is that religious motivation that undergirds the rest of the narrative.
The embassy’s director of Islamic Affairs back then was Musaed al Jarrah, who is described in the July 2021 FBI report as “one of the key figures of the 9/11 investigation as it pertains to Saudi Arabian government involvement.”
Jarrah is named in the very first Operation Encore report to become public – an October 2012 report produced to Florida Bulldog amid Freedom of Information litigation in 2016. It says that in 2000 Jarrah “tasked” Bayoumi and Thumairy with helping the hijackers. The Saudis deny it.
To make that happen, court papers in the 9/11 lawsuit say, the kingdom “knowingly engaged in a long running illegal scheme to violate U.S. and international law and diplomatic policy to establish its extremist network of MOIA officials inside the U.S.” They did it “to secure false diplomatic and consular level status to provide its MOIA officials with the cover they needed to reside and carry out their mission in the U.S.” Those religious officials, including Thumairy, would not have been extended diplomatic privileges “had their actual jobs and status been disclosed,” the averment says.
STRONG NEW EVIDENCE
Among the strongest new evidence to publicly emerge involves phone call patterns at crucial times among Bayoumi, Thumairy, the Saudi embassy, the kingdom’s Los Angeles consulate, cleric Anwar Awlaki (also spelled Aulaqi) and others the plaintiffs contend were involved in supporting the 9/11plot.
(Awlaki was an American-born cleric of Yemeni parentage whose sermons in Southern California, and later Falls Church, VA, were said by the FBI to have been attended by Hazmi, Mihdhar and other 9/11 hijackers. Awlaki, who later gained notoriety as a recruiter and spiritual advisor for al Qaeda, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September 2011.)
Phone call patterns from November 1999 to February 2000, and again in the weeks before Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000 are evidence of “collaboration to support” for them. Plaintiff’s expert, ex-FBI Agent Youssef, found “spikes in calling activity involving Bayoumi, Thumairy and the Saudi Embassy just before and immediately after” their arrival, according to the averment.
Hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar didn’t speak English and had never been to a Western country before they flew to Los Angeles. So such arrangements were necessary for the success of the mission, according to former FBI counterterrorism agent Youssef.
In his lengthy report, quoted in the averment but not yet fully public, Youssef states, “The calls among these Saudi government officials are directly related to key events associated with the operational support for the 9/11 hijackers, including the late 1999 visit of MOIA Propagators Abdullah al Jaithen and Majed al Mersal to Los Angeles and San Diego.”
Youssef said Jaithen and Mersal were an “advance team” dispatched by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs “to provide a secure in-person communications link between the support network in California and Al Qaeda to ensure that the final arrangements were in place in California shortly before sending Hazmi and Mihdhar to Los Angeles.”
The FBI’s findings about the calls “echoed” Youssef’s findings. “Analysis of al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy’s call activity indicates that the assistance provided to the hijackers likely involved a network of people including al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy, Anwar al Aulaqi and an individual at the Saudi Embassy,” the averment says, quoting an FBI report.
“Telephone numbers assigned to the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where Musaed al-Jarrah was the director of the Islamic Affairs Department, had significant contact with al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi while the hijackers were in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. There is evidence that al-Jarrah had possible links to al Qaeda and tasked al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi with assisting the hijackers,” the FBI wrote.
There’s much for Judge Daniels to digest before he announces his decision. And when that will come is anybody’s guess.
Whoever loses will almost surely appeal. But if Daniels rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, a door will open to further fact-finding about what went on in other areas frequented by the hijackers. Those areas include southeast and southwest Florida, Phoenix, AZ, northern Virginia, northern New Jersey and Portland, ME.
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