By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
In an enormous win for the survivors and relatives of the nearly 3,000 killed during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a New York federal judge Thursday denied Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss their multi-billion-dollar civil lawsuit accusing the Kingdom of aiding and abetting al Qaeda.
Senior U.S. District Judge George Daniels, after more than a year spent thinking about it, issued his 45-page ruling allowing the 9/11 lawsuit to proceed and plaintiffs to try and prove their case at trial.
In a nutshell, the judge decided that Saudi Arabia and its Washington-based lawyers failed to meet their “ultimate burden of persuasion.” The Kingdom has long denied any involvement in the 9/11 attacks that took down the World Trade Center and heavily damaged the Pentagon.
“Plaintiffs have managed to provide this Court with reasonable evidence as to the roles played by (Saudis Omar al) Bayoumi, (Fahad al) Thumairy, and KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in assisting the hijackers. KSA did not proffer sufficient evidence to the contrary,” Daniels wrote in concluding his order.
“Although KSA attempts to offer seemingly innocent explanations or context, they are either self-contradictory or not strong enough to overcome the inference that KSA had employed Bayoumi and Thumairy to assist the hijackers.”
Bayoumi has been identified by the FBI as a Saudi spy who befriended the first two hijackers shortly after their arrival in the U.S. Thumairy was a Saudi diplomat and imam at Los Angeles’ King Fahd Mosque. Bayoumi gained wide notoriety last year when “60 Minutes” broadcast an alleged “casing video” of the U.S. Capitol made and narrated by Bayoumi in the summer of 1999.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs obtained the video from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service who seized it when Bayoumi was detained in the city of Birmingham 10 days after the attacks. A former FBI agent has said the tape was intended to be shown to al Qaeda for the purposes of targeting the Capitol in its “planes operation.” Also found in Bayoumi’s belongings: a sketch of a plane, an equation and various calculations that an aviation expert has said are used by pilots to determine the line-of-sight distance to the horizon from an airplane.”
‘A MILESTONE’
Besides guaranteeing that unless a settlement is reached, the victims of 9/11 will get their long sought civil trial to determine Saudi Arabia’s liability, if any. Just as significant, it opens the door wide for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to use court-approved discovery methods to seek additional evidence in cities across the country.
“The ruling is a milestone in this decades-old litigation,” said plaintiff’s attorney Andrew Maloney, a partner in the New York law firm Kreindler & Kreindler. “We are now permitted to not just go to trial, but some of the things the judge said in the opinion were very, very important. Even though he didn’t rule on the facts, he’s evaluated the evidence we’ve put forth. And by the way, we have a lot more evidence since that motion was filed over a year ago.”
To date, Judge Daniels has limited discovery to events about 9/11 that occurred in Southern California, where the first two al Qaeda hijackers entered the U.S. in January 2000. The late Sen. Bob Graham, D-FL who co-led Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 prior to the presidentially appointed 9/11 Commission, stressed for years that fresh examinations were needed in other areas where al Qaeda’s 17 other suicide hijackers were known to be active, including Phoenix, AZ, northern Virginia, northern New Jersey and Southeast and Southwest Florida.
Since late 2021, after President Biden issued an executive order instructing the FBI to conduct declassification reviews of its files about Operation Encore, the so-called subfile of its initial PENTTBOM investigation that looked at possible Saudi complicity in the attacks, the bureau has released thousands of pages detailing its agents’ findings. Encore, whose existence was first reported by Florida Bulldog in 2016, ran from 2006 to 2021.
The decision also has geopolitical implications as successive U.S. presidents have sought to maintain friendly relations with Saudi Arabia – dubbed “our perfidious ally” by Graham – even as the authoritarian oil-giant has been beset by allegations of human rights abuses, repression of dissidents at home and abroad, war crimes in Yemen and the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.
A document obtained during Freedom of Information litigation against the FBI stated that as late as October 2012 federal prosectors and FBI agents in New York City were actively exploring filing charges against a suspect for providing material support to the 9/11 hijackers. That prosecution didn’t materialize. But the heavily redacted document contained the names of three of the probe’s “main subjects” – Bayoumi, Thumairy and Musaed al Jarrah. Jarrah’s name was redacted but became public later.
Jarrah in September 2001 was director of Islamic Affairs and headquartered in the Saudi embassy in Washington. The Operation Encore report said that in 2000 Jarrah had “tasked” Bayoumi and Thumairy with aiding the two future hijackers.
EX-‘STATE SECRETS’
Under the first Trump administration, the FBI’s files were labeled “state secrets” and kept from the public – for apparently no legitimate reason – by then Attorney General William Barr.
One of the most significant FBI documents to emerge following Biden’s executive order was a 130-page report written in July 2021 that laid out the numerous connections of U.S.-based “personnel and entities controlled by the Saudi Arabian government” to the al Qaeda terrorist attacks. It marked the first time that declassified Justice Department records stated that Saudi government officials knowingly provided a support network for the first two hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, who flew into Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.
Hazmi and Mihdhar were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it was crashed into the Pentagon 21 months later.
The report spelled out what it called the FBI’s “investigations and supporting documentation” regarding the religious “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.”
That network, as described in the report, was intertwined with the hijackers.
Judge Daniels’s order doesn’t mention any such network, although he did discuss as significant much of what previously appeared in the FBI’s Encore reports.
WHAT WAS THE FBI THINKING?
Now that Daniels has found the plaintiffs’ submitted evidence significant, the question arises as to why FBI leadership let Operation Encore wither, and neither continue to investigate nor follow through on the 2012 plans of its New York agents and prosecutors to seek the indictment of an apparent accomplice.
Attorney Maloney said lawyers representing the plaintiffs, with dozens of law firms in offices across the country, intend to quickly press their newly won advantage and seek discovery in places where the hijackers lived during the run up to the attacks, including the Sarasota area and Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
“We’ve only really been studying two and a half of them, and I say half because Hani Hanjour (who piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon) ended up in San Diego. But we’ve really only focused on Hazmi and Mihdhar because that’s what the court limited us to in discovery – not just from the Kingdom, but also from the FBI and CIA,” said Maloney. “They really have not cooperated fully and now we are going to take another run at the FBI and CIA to give us more material.”
Today, the only thing that stands in the way of a full-blown trial and a full airing of the new evidence – facts that are casting fresh doubt on the findings in The 9/11 Commission Report – is a settlement by Saudi Arabia that could well top $100 billion in damages. That’s B with a billion.
The Saudis – now effectively led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the CIA concluded ordered journalist Khashoggi’s murder – certainly have the funds to cover such an enormous payout, but have not seen fit to discuss settlement.
“We would certainly welcome any discussions with them, but we don’t know. There’s been no outreach,” said Maloney.
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