By Robbyn Swan, FloridaBulldog.org. see adds to come below. also on burnett’s llast name
In New York City, at Ground Zero, a perpetual waterfall streams over a parapet engraved with the names of the 2,977 men, women, and children who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From the balustrade the water falls into two pools and disappears into a void that, by design, can never be filled. Dug deep into the footprint left by the Twin Towers, the pools, in the words of the architect who designed them, symbolize “absence made visible.”
Two official U.S. government inquiries, a slew of more limited probes and law enforcement investigations, were meant to fill the space left by so much death and destruction with the clarity of facts. Instead, they left conspicuous holes in the story.
Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman who served as vice chairman of the blue ribbon 9/11 Commission, would describe the panel’s work as merely “a first draft of history.”
When the Commission’s Report was published in 2004 it was nominated for the National Book Award and became an instant bestseller. The passage of time – and the herculean efforts of a small tribe of investigators, survivors, family members, and their lawyers – made clear that the Commission had failed to resolve the case or even determine the principal motive for the crime.
THE SEEKERS
When over a cell-phone call, Deena Burnett told her husband Tom of the attacks on the World Trade Center, he and his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 decided to act. For much of the previous year, Deena said later, Tom had been attending mass on a daily basis, troubled by a recurring dream “that had something to do with the White House” and “would impact a lot of people”.
In the spring of 2002, the government had finally allowed Deena and fellow family members to listen to the cockpit voice recording that captured the sounds of the struggle aboard Flight 93 as the passengers fought to take back control of the hijacked airliner. Tom Burnett’s voice had been prominent above the din.
Now, Tom was dead and Deena had just been informed that she and their girls were not eligible for compensation from a newly created fund for victims and families. In desperation she flew to South Carolina to meet with Ron Motley. The flamboyant attorney, who favoured courtroom appearances wearing a pair of ostrich-skin boots, had won landmark cases against Big Tobacco.
Motley was soon joined by Jodi Flowers, one of the collection of young lawyers he called his “junkyard dogs”. With Deena Burnett, the lawyers conceived a new case, one that would make those who sponsored, harboured and encouraged terrorism pay for their deeds. It would be a case whose earliest public faces would be the widow of a hero.
Over the years that followed, Deena remarried and is now known as Deena Burnett Bailey. Motley and Flowers (who replaced him as lead for the firm’s 9/11 work when Motley died in 2013) would be joined by other lawyers. Stephen Cozen of Philadelphia’s Cozen & O’Connor and James Kriendler of New York firm, Kriendler & Kriendler. Early on, Cozen was able to reach out through a friend to connect with military and intelligence officials with expertise in Islamic extremism. Kreindler brought long experience as one of the nation’s leading aircraft accident litigators, lauded for his work on behalf of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
The Congressional Joint Inquiry, the first official post-mortem on the attacks, issued its findings in late 2002. Its chairman Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) later recalled “I believed almost intuitively that the terrorists who pulled off this attack must have had an elaborate support network, abroad and in the USA…probably maintained, at least in part, by a nation-state.” Like 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the atrocity, those identified to Graham’s team as members of a possible support network were Saudi.
The Inquiry’s attempts to focus attention on those they suspected, however, were stymied. For more than twenty years, until his death in 2024, Graham channelled his frustration into uncovering the truth.
Much of what it is now possible to report about September 11 is a result of the efforts of Graham, and a tenacious core group of survivors and families. Kristen Breitweiser’s husband, Ron, was killed when the World Trade Center’s South Tower collapsed. She and the three other “Jersey Girls”who lost their husbands on 9/11, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, were indispensable in the effort to convince Congress and a reluctant President George W. Bush to establish the 9/11 Commission. Breitweiser remains a force in the decades’ long search for answers.
Other leading voices include Terry Strada, widow of Tom, who now leads 9/11 Families United; Brett Eagleson, who was only a teenager when his father Bruce died in the attacks but who now leads 9/11 Justice; and Sharon Premoli, who survived the collapse of the North Tower, and has since devoted endless hours to the campaign for accountability.
There also was Florida Bulldog’s two Freedom of Information lawsuits, litigated pro bono by Miami First Amendment attorney Thomas Julin, that led to the release of documents that, among other things, exposed the existence of the FBI’s post 2006 secret investigation of apparent Saudi involvement in the attack, Operation Encore; the release of the “28 pages,” a long withheld portion of the Joint Inquiry Report dealing with the plotters putative links to Saudi officials; the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the torture of suspected al Qaeda members in U.S. custody, and myriad 9/11 Commission files and recordings.
Sustained lobbying – opposed and outspent by opposition from both Saudi Arabia and the U.S. government – led to the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA). The legislation cleared the way for 9/11 victims to pursue the full facts about state sponsorship of the attacks, in particular by Saudi Arabia, through the U.S. legal system.
When he became President, Donald Trump had pledged in 2016, “You will find out who really knocked down the Trade Center, because they have papers in there that are very secret. You may find it’s the Saudis…” Perhaps unsurprisingly, and even before he became his party’s nominee, Trump’s campaign fell sway to Saudi lobbying to prevent the release of those “very secret” papers. It wasn’t until 2021 that Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, would order the release of thousands of pages of government files pertaining to the Saudi role.
Collectively, the new evidence provides the fullest picture yet of the September 11 plot.
BLURRING THE MATTER OF MOTIVE
In making their case against al Qaeda, official investigators detailed historical evidence of Osama Bin Laden’s hatred toward the Saudi royal family, and their American patrons. There was for bin Laden, though, another profound, long-held grievance – the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. The 9/11 Commission Report was to duck that issue.
“This was sensitive ground,” Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton later wrote. “Commissioners who argued that Al Qaeda was motivated primarily by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Report. In their view, listing U.S. support for Israel as a root cause of Al Qaeda’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.”
Bin Laden’s papers, collected from his compound after his death in 2011, were translated and published by U.S. Army War College Professor Nelly Lahoud. In The Bin Laden Papers, Lahoud shares notes of a conversation the al Qaeda leader had with his daughter, in which bin Laden claimed that he first considered attacking the US in 1986, as a way of addressing the Palestinian problem. It was, he recalled, “the reason we started our jihad.”
Middle East expert Bruce Riedel, who worked for the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, emphasised in a book written years after the official investigations, that the al Qaeda leader’s writings from the early 90s, made “it plain that Palestine, far from being a late addition to Bin Laden’s agenda, was at the center of it from the start.”
In its nearly 600 pages of closely written text and notes, the 9/11 Commission Report mentions Palestine only six times. Yet in that summer of 2001, it was the issue that threatened to derail U.S.-Saudi relations entirely. Crown Prince Abdullah was “livid” and “bitter” over deaths of Palestinians, vehemently telling Secretary of State Colin Powell just weeks before September 11, that he would never come to the United States again – unless it changed its policy toward Israel.
Palestine was a grievance that Bin Laden and the Saudi royals shared. Official investigations did Americans a disservice by not saying so.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY
The 9/11 Commission concluded that it “had found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” Yet it also concluded that al Qaeda was funded, at the rate of about $30 million per year, by the diversion of funds from Islamic charities.
Evidence accumulated in the course of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit against the Kingdom now suggests that it was senior members of the royal family who were the architects of this policy, as well as principal donors.
Among the new evidence, a German intelligence report that documents, line-by-line, tens of millions of dollars in donations by King Salman to a charity he founded and which in the 1990s funded the very al Qaeda camps where the 9/11 hijackers would receive their training. (The Saudi government denies the allegation.)
In the official narrative promoted by the Kingdom and accepted by the 9/11 Commission, when the Kingdom revoked Osama bin Laden’s Saudi passport in 1994 for making threats against the royals, he was also cut out of his share of his family’s multi-billion-dollar business. It was apparently not true. In a 2018 memoir, Amien Dean, a one-time jihadi recruited by British intelligence, revealed that bin Laden’s devout sister, Mariam, continued to fund him until at least 1998. Once, Dean himself was involved in delivering a suitcase containing $500,000 in cash. Many of those who knew Bayoumi suspected he was a Saudi spy – a suspicion later verified by the FBI.
Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence for his role in the attack, said in a prison interview in 2015 that the notion that Bin Laden’s family had severed ties with Osama was “purely cosmetic.”
By 1999, after a series of attacks on U.S. citizens, the failure to find bin Laden and eliminate him as a threat had become a running sore for the Clinton White House. The Saudis, we now know, knew exactly how to find him. Twice, they even allowed his mother and two brothers – whom the Saudis had under close surveillance at the time – to visit him in Afghanistan. The Saudis kept the information to themselves through all the official inquiries. Bin Laden’s mother was finally permitted to speak about it only in 2018.
According to separate analyses by authors Steve Coll and Nelly Lahoud, Bin Laden’s wealthy family continued to send Osama a share of its business income, perhaps $1 million a year, through the early 1990s and possibly even after 2000. A family estimate suggested he had received a total of some $27 million, though he had little or no access to the money in his years on the run after 9/11. Bin Laden’s handwritten will, composed in 2010 and found among his papers after his death, put his fortune at some $49 million.
CO-CONSPIRATORS
September 11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) was to claim “no al Qaeda operative or facilitator” was ready and waiting to help the two future hijackers on arrival. Neither Congress’ Joint Inquiry nor the 9/11 Commission believed him.
In the words of the Joint Inquiry’s chief, Bob Graham, there was “very compelling evidence that the terrorists were assisted by a foreign government, and that we were derelict in our duty to track that down.”
9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow concluded that there was “persuasive evidence of a possible support network” for the first two hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, when they arrived in San Diego. In his view, though, the Commission “did not find evidence to make the case that it involved “Saudi government agents.”
Two men in particular, however, had immediately fallen under suspicion. The first was Fahad al Thumairy, an Imam at Los Angeles King Fahd Mosque who was also a Saudi diplomat based at the consulate there, and whom some suggested might have assisted the two men on their arrival on Jan. 15, 2000. A second man, Omar al Bayoumi, had met the two men two weeks after their arrival, suggested San Diego as a more hospitable location, and assisted the hijackers in moving to the city into an apartment near his own. While he claimed to be a student, Bayoumi was in fact a “ghost employee” for a subcontractor of the Saudi Civil Aviation authority – paid, but required to do no work. Many of those who knew Bayoumi suspected he was a Saudi spy – a suspicion later verified by the FBI.
Despite these and many other problematic leads, the 9/11 Commission Report was dismissive of the case against the two men. Unable even to discover where Hazmi and Mihdhar had spent the first two weeks of their time in the U.S., the Commission’s Report nevertheless determined that “there was no evidence Thumairy had provided assistance” to them. Commission staff concluded that Bayoumi, for his part, was an “unlikely candidate for involvement with Islamist extremists.”
In 2014, the FBI 9/11 Review Commission met to formally assess “any evidence not known to the FBI” or “considered by the 9/11 Commission” and concluded there was nothing to change the Commission’s original finding on the existence of a possible support network. Instead, as more fully described in Florida Bulldog’s Tuesday story, it sought to discredit an FBI report that said agents had found “many connections” between a Saudi family in Sarasota and several of the East Coast hijackers who trained at an airport in nearby Venice. The FBI did not disclose the existence of the Sarasota investigation to the Joint Inquiry or the 9/11 Commission, according to Sen. Graham and others.
Years of research makes it possible to marshal the evidence against the two men that earlier investigations failed to find.
In December 1999, according to a witness interviewed by the FBI, Fahad Thumairy received a call from Malaysia about “the imminent arrival of two brothers” who needed “assistance.” Hazmi and Mihdhar were then in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia attending a final meeting with veteran terrorists before heading to the U.S. That same week, Thumairy began a series of phone calls with Bayoumi, the American-born cleric Anwar Aulaqi (who would go on after 9/11 to become a leading figure in al Qaeda) and a Yemeni student named Faithi Aidarus who had recently arrived in the U.S. FBI agents working on Operation Encore would characterize the list of contacts between the men as “the set up calls.”
What, though, was being set up?
Unlike their predecessors, the Encore agents did discover where Hazmi and Mihdhar had stayed during their first weeks in the U.S. At the behest of Thumairy, who described the hijackers as “very significant visitors,” they had been met at the airport by two men and taken to an apartment. It was from the apartment provided by Thumairy’s contact that the two hijackers would head to the restaurant lunch where they met Bayoumi for the first time, by “chance” Bayoumi has said.
A videotape of a 1999 trip Bayoumi made to Washington DC shows him describing landmarks like the Capitol and the Washington monument to “the esteemed Brothers” in frightening terms. The airport, Bayoumi tells his viewers, was nearby, and “all the famous sites were close together”. He pointed out security guards and private entrances and said “They say our kids are demons, but these are the demons in the White House.” Found by British police when Bayoumi was arrested by them after 9/11, the video was sent to the FBI, which never provided it to the Joint Inquiry or the 9/11 Commission.
After the “set up calls”, and the “chance” meeting that convinced the hijackers to move to San Diego, Bayoumi introduced the pair to a circle of useful contacts. He even gave a “welcome party” for them in their own home. The newly arrived Yemeni student, Aidarus, who had participated in the string of calls with Thumairy attended the party and became a friend. On March 2, 2000, the Yemeni’s phone was used in a series of calls to an al Qaeda communications hub long monitored by the CIA and NSA. It was the first contact with al Qaeda’s base after the arrival of Hazmi and Mihdhar in the U.S., but was unknown to the FBI until two years after the 9/11 Commission shut down in 2004.
Arrested in the UK 10 days after September 11, both Bayoumi and another student to whom he had introduced the hijackers were found to have materials suggesting foreknowledge of the attacks. The student’s belongings, recovered shortly after the attack, included a spiral notebook with references to “planes falling from the sky, mass killings and hijacking.” There was a spiral notebook among Bayoumi’s belongings, too. His contained what appeared to be a diagram depicting a formula for an aerial descent similar to the one performed by American Airlines Flight 77, which Hazmi and Mihdhar had been aboard, before it struck the Pentagon.
As for the long-held suspicion that Bayoumi was a spy, agents of Operation Encore concluded definitively in 2017 that he was indeed a long time Saudi intelligence asset, paid by Prince Bandar, the Kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S. The information Bayoumi gathered on persons of interest “would be forwarded to Bandar,” one report said. “Bandar would then inform the GIP [Saudi foreign intelligence] of items of interest to the GIP for further investigation/ vetting or follow up.”
There is more. Later in 2000, when the hijackers decided to move out of the apartment he had helped them find, Bayoumi introduced them to a long-time friend, Dr. Abdussattar Shaikh. Shaikh offered them a room in his own home. Shaikh, it was revealed after 9/11, was an FBI informant, codename “Muppet”. A former senior FBI counterterrorism agent claimed in a 2016 affidavit for the 9/11 Military Commissions that Shaikh was also receiving funds from the Saudi government at the time he was serving as an informant for the FBI.
“Muppet” or not, Shaikh did not at the time tell his FBI handler about his new roommates, Hazmi and Mihdhar.
‘A SOURCE ON THE INSIDE?”
Soon after 1:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, at CIA headquarters, an aide hurried to Director George Tenet with the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” the aide said, placing a page on the table where the Director could see it. “These two we know.” Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus…”
There on the Flight 77 manifest, allocated to seat 5E in First Class was Nawaf al Hazmi, near the front of the Coach section at 12B, was Khalid al Mihdhar. In the official investigations to come, the CIA would acknowledge having identified Mihdhar firmly as a terrorist suspect, having had him followed, discovered he had a valid multiple-entry visa to allow him into the U.S., and having placed him and comrades – including Hazmi – under surveillance in Malaysia for a few days in late December 1999. In spite of this, the Agency would claim, they then lost track of the two terrorists.
In the spring of 2000, at the time Bayoumi and Thumairy were settling the hijackers into life on the West Coast, officers in the CIA’s “bin Laden unit” did in fact learn that Hazmi had arrived in California. They did nothing about it. The Agency did not ask the State Department to watchlist the two terrorists at border points. They did not inform the FBI, as required by law, nor ask the Bureau to track the two men down if they were in the country – until nineteen days before 9/11. These omissions, Director Tenet testified later, were simply calamitous error.
The CIA’s failure to notify the FBI of Hazmi and Mihdhar’s movements was not, evidence suggests, a mere snafu. The Chief of the Agency’s Bin Laden Station, his deputy, and the female desk officer tasked with tracking the hijackers, intentionally blocked a cable reporting the matter to FBI Headquarters. When pressed, the case agent had been firm, “It’s not an FBI matter,” she told an FBI agent assigned to the unit, Mark Rossini, “When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.”
Newly released documents and interviews suggest a plausible, but so far unproven, reason.
In 2021, after years of requests, we obtained a copy of a long secret report prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Clinton’s National Security Adviser in January 2000. The report reveals the deficiencies of U.S. counterterrorism efforts at the turn of the Millennium. Its authors recommended that the “CIA attempt to seriously attrit the Al Q and affiliates network to the point where large-scale attacks against US by Al Q are not likely” – but makes clear that the CIA working alone was incapable of doing so. The report concluded that recent investigations revealed the existence of “widespread” “sleeper cells” within the U.S – which the FBI was not prepared to handle.
The report highlighted a longstanding concern – the Central Intelligence Agency’s lack of human intelligence sources within al Qaeda. It warned that lacking sources of its own within bin Laden’s network, the U.S. had become “overly-reliant on second party [foreign] services”.
A heavily redacted portion of Congress’ Joint Inquiry Report on September 11 shows that, in late 1999, top CIA officials had been keenly focused on the problem. At a White House meeting with a select group of top-level National Security Council members, a Counterterrorism Center [CTC] representative made clear that the Agency had “no penetrations inside OBL’s [bin Laden’s] leadership.” “We need to also recruit sources inside OBL’s organization.” a CTC member told CIA leadership, “Realize that recruiting terrorist sources is difficult…but we must make an attempt.”
Richard Clarke, then the principal Counterterrorism official on the National Security Council, later revealed being told at the time that the CIA was “trying to get sources on the inside.”
After 9/11, Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar would claim that that “Saudi security” had been “actively following the movements of the terrorists with precision.” The Prince’s frustration with what he once called “the weak-dicked” performance of Bill Clinton’s national security team, was perhaps evidenced when he said “if U.S. security had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner…we would have avoided what happened.”
“A major element of the 9/11 tragedy may remain unrevealed,” former Counter-terrorism Coordinator Clarke conjectured in 2009, “a possible failed CIA-Saudi spy mission on US soil that went bad and eventually allowed 9/11 to proceed.”
When Clarke first offered this theory, former CIA Director George Tenet pushed back sharply, writing that his former colleague had “suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration.”
Clarke, however, is not alone in his conjectures. In an interview with me, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, recalled being told by three high ranking CIA officials that an operation to recruit Mihdhar and Hazmi had taken place. “The CIA was trying desperately to ‘turn’ them, and they shouldn’t have been operating domestically,” Wilkerson told authors John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski for their book, “The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark.” “I’ve got many things I blame George Tenet for…but I do understand his motivation here. The only way he was ever going to get real evidence on al Qaeda was to turn somebody and get inside.”
A former CIA officer, who served in the Bin Laden Unit at the time, told Newsweek’s Jeff Stein that it was entirely reasonable that an intelligence analyst in the Bin Laden Unit might have tried to recruit Mihdhar or Hazmi as a source through Saudi contacts. Another former CIA officer, once based in Saudi Arabia, has gone much further. “We had been unable to penetrate al Qaeda,” the CIA man told author Joseph Trento, “The Saudis claimed they had done it successfully. Both Hazmi and Mihdhar were Saudi agents.” The reason the CIA did not ask the State Department to watchlist Mihdhar and Hazmi, was that the men “were perceived as working for a friendly intelligence service” – Saudi G.I.P…”
“If they had a rogue operation to recruit somebody, or they had the delusion they could work with Saudi intel in America, tell us,” Mark Rossini, the FBI’s liaison to the Bin Laden Unit told Duffy and Nowosielski and repeated to me, “You’re talking about 9/11. You’re talking about something that changed the world….That’s why they fear it coming out, because it would end the CIA.”
Speculation aside, we do not yet know how to interpret the presence of Saudi intelligence operatives in such close proximity to the hijackers. If they were Saudi “watchers”, they had been so close and so intertwined with their quarry, it is hard to imagine how or when the plot slipped through their fingers. Or, perhaps, the supposed “watchers” had been participants in the plot themselves all along.
Jodi Flowers, the Motley Rice attorney who has been representing 9/11 victims and families since that first meeting with Deena Burnett in 2002, told me that she has seen no evidence to support the “intelligence operation gone wrong” theory. “We don’t know to what extent [the Saudis were] tracking terrorists or whether they were sharing that information with the CIA.” Flowers told me in 2021. “What we have seen is evidence of Saudi officials aiding [Flight 77 hijackers] Hazmi and Mihdhar immediately preceding the attacks.” The Saudi government, through its legal team, have consistently denied those allegations.
THE COVER-UP: METHOD, MEANS, OPPORTUNITY
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, would say later, “it was my distinct impression that [Ambassador] Bandar knew a whole lot more than he was letting on about bin Laden’s activities and about those people, within particular the Royal Family…that probably were sympathetic to, and giving money to, Bin Laden and al Qaeda. Bandar is in my mind the one who could tell all regarding this.” To this day, though, Bandar has never faced tough questioning about those events and in 2021 he refused to sit for a deposition with attorneys for the 9/11 plaintiffs.
Again and again, 9/11 investigators would stumble over the Prince’s name – Bandar’s personal assistant’s phone number found during the search of a bin Laden safe house in Pakistan, the records of payments flowing from the accounts of Prince Bandar’s wife that found their way to the wife of Saudi intelligence asset Omar Bayoumi, and more.
From the start, the official investigations – Congress’ Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission – found themselves stymied when it came to the Saudi role. Congress’ probe was delayed when it was suggested that such efforts would interfere with the “War on Terror,” and its 2003 report was heavily redacted to obscure links to Saudi Arabia. Later, 9/11 Commission staffers assigned to investigate the Saudis found their efforts curtailed, their access to witnesses limited or non-existent. The evidence they developed was heavily edited in the Commission’s Final Report, and only after a last-minute struggle did they manage to insert some of the damning leads into its endnotes.
The Commission’s key relevant interviews – notably those of Bandar and the Kingdom’s veteran intelligence chief (Bandar’s brother-in-law) Prince Turki – long remained entirely classified. The Commission’s interview with Prince Bandar was finally released to me in 2019. It is more revealing in what it does not say than what it does. The Commission asked Bandar not a single question related to the matters raised in this story. While suggesting that at some point they might have further queries, no follow up interview ever took place.
A decade after 9/11, the National Archives would not even acknowledge that an interview with Prince Turki existed. Only after a protracted fight was the twelve-page interview finally released to me in 2023. Again, Commission members questioning of Turki was less than thorough.
COURTROOM DRAMAS
Within forty-five minutes of the first strike on the World Trade Center, still in the primary school classroom in which he had learned of the attack, George Bush spoke to the nation, promising to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”
When the “War on Terror” began, the Bush Administration faced the question of what to do with the growing number of prisoners being captured by U.S. forces. Foremost in the mind of the nation’s leaders at the time was the issue of preventing further attacks on Americans, rather than on any future legal proceedings.
The CIA proposed the creation of Agency teams to hunt down, capture and kill terrorists around the world. It would have the authority to “render” those captured to the United States or to other countries for interrogation – effectively establishing a secret prison system. It would also be authorized to assassinate targeted terrorists. Before the end of 2001, the President signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, empowering the Agency to take such measures without the prior approval of the White House or any other branch of the executive.
Those captured would be classified not as prisoners of war, but as “unlawful combatants”. This verbal sleight of hand allowed the administration to evade the knotty problem of affording detainees the protection of the Geneva Convention. Many would be shuttled to “Black Sites”, a network of CIA prisons largely in Eastern Europe, where they were subjected to a programme of “enhanced interrogation.” Internationally, jurists and human rights defenders would later call it “torture.”
In January 2002, needing a place to keep these prisoners, they began shipping them to the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By June 2003, 684 “unlawful combatants” were at the site, most of whom have long since been repatriated or resettled in other countries. In 2026, just fifteen remain.
Most Americans have forgotten the legal process meant to bring justice and closure to the victims of 9/11. For the victims, though, the cases of five of the remaining detainees remain of utmost importance. Not just ordinary suspects, the men, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Amar al-Baluchi, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, are charged with conspiring in the September 11 plot itself.
The five putative conspirators all experienced the worst of the “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Bin al-Shibh was stripped and forced to stand for extended periods with his hands chained to the ceiling, and blasted with loud music for hours on end. Bin-Attash experienced similar abuse. Al-Baluchi was slammed against walls, stripped, beaten, and shackled during interrogation, and once deprived of sleep for more than eighty hours. Al-Hawsawi was repeatedly sodomised, to the extent that in 2019 he underwent corrective surgery for a rectal prolapse. Alleged 9/11 “mastermind” Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded – subjected to simulated drowning – 183 times.
Much of what the 9/11 Commission reports about the evolution of the plot is in fact derived from KSM’s testimony under CIA “interrogation.” By his own account, he brought the idea to use commercial airliners as weapons against the U.S. to Bin Laden as early as 1996. In the Spring of 1999, according to KSM, the al Qaeda leader approved what would become known internally as “the planes operation.”
That, however, may not have been the actual sequence of events. In September 2002, according to notes for a memoir found after his death, Bin Laden claimed ownership of the idea for the operation entirely to himself.
He said he was inspired by EgyptAir Flight 990. Investigators determined co-pilot Gameel al Batouty deliberately crashed it off the coast of New England on Halloween 1999, killing 217 people. “
“I turned to the brothers who were with me at the time,” bin Laden wrote. “Why didn’t he crash it into a financial tower?….This is how the idea of 9/ 11 was conceived and developed in my head, and that is when we began the planning….”
Bin Laden said he told only two close companions and explicitly did not mention KSM, whose version of events was in the press at the time. If and when Mohammed comes to trial, it is a complication to the story with which prosecutors will have to contend.
After long years of delay, and an aborted plea deal that would have allowed the men to escape the death penalty, a judge ruled last month that the trial of four of the men could begin in June 2028.
Most reporting of that news missed a crucial point.
The legal concept of the “fruit of the poisoned tree” has hung over the case for years. Information gained under torture is ordinarily not admissible in court. When evidence of the manner in which confessions had been obtained became public back in the early 2000s, the government sent in FBI agents, as “clean teams” to try to get the men to confess again, voluntarily.
As a result of the treatment he had suffered in US custody, Ramzi Bin al Shibh has since been deemed by a judge to be incompetent to stand trial. That left four men. The four all appealed to have their so-called “clean team” confessions made inadmissible. As of September 2026, two of them, Bin Attash and Shaikh Mohammed, had succeeded. The “clean team” confessions would be inadmissible. Prosecutors have said that, so as not to further delay KSM’s trial date, they will not appeal the judge’s ruling.
“I have no confidence in this process of endless judges, pleas, no pleas, empty promises, endless postponements, CIA torture, lawyers, lawyers, and more lawyers,” survivor Sharon Premoli said about the possible 2028 trial date. “So, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Premoli and other survivors and family members have higher hopes for success in the consolidated civil suit in New York inspired by that long-ago meeting between Ron Motley and a broken-hearted widow.
In August 2025, U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels ruled against Saudi Arabia‘s motion to dismiss their case.
“Plaintiffs,” Daniels wrote, “have managed to provide this Court with reasonable evidence as to the roles played by Bayoumi, Thumairy and KSA in assisting the hijackers. KSA did not provide sufficient evidence to the contrary. 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.”
The case, In re. Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, is now before the U.S. Second Court of Appeals as Saudi Arabia looks to overturn Judge Daniels’ ruling. For survivors and families, Daniels ruling was a massive victory. A glimmer of hope that justice so long delayed will not be forever denied.
Robbyn Swan is co-author, with Anthony Summers, of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, NY: Ballantine, 2011. The book was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Swan is a regular contributor to Florida Bulldog’s coverage of 9/11.
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