By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Twenty-five years after the deadliest terrorist attack in history, Americans still lack answers to key questions about the events surrounding that horrific day.
Some of the most troubling questions in recent years concern the actions and decisions of the U.S. government, including its handling of evidence pointing to the involvement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
The unanswered questions fall into three broad areas: what the FBI knew, what evidence was kept from public view, and why no one tied to that evidence was charged or extradited. Together, they raise a larger question: whether the government fully investigated possible Saudi support for the hijackers or chose to both limit the inquiry and what Americans were allowed to know.
Among the questions are these:
- Why did some inside the FBI find the bureau’s original 9/11 investigation, PENTTBOM, so inadequate that agents secretly opened Operation Encore in 2007 to examine possible Saudi government involvement?
- Why, according to former Florida U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, were Encore and a separate FBI 9/11 probe in Sarasota both first disclosed by Florida Bulldog, kept so tightly concealed that even Congress wasn’t told they existed? And why did the FBI publicly deny finding a Sarasota connection to 9/11 when an internal report later described the Sarasota subjects as having “many connections” to people associated with the attacks?
- Why was Encore effectively shut down in 2016 despite significant evidence gathered about Saudi officials in Southern California and at least one official at the Saudi embassy in Washington – evidence that, at minimum, warranted further investigation?
- Why has the FBI repeatedly resisted, redacted or refused to make public relevant records sought by lawyers for the 9/11 families or by Florida Bulldog during lengthy Freedom of Information litigation?
- Why have U.S. administrations of both parties repeatedly shielded Saudi Arabia regarding 9/11? Most recently, why was important evidence originally seized by Scotland Yard when it arrested alleged Saudi spy Omar al Bayoumi 10 days after September 11, 2001, withheld for decades from the 9/11 families?
- Why did the Justice Department not request Bayoumi’s extradition from the United Kingdom, either as a material witness or as a suspect in the murders of 2,983 men, women and children? And in the absence of an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia, why did the U.S. apparently not even ask the Kingdom through diplomatic channels to turn over Saudi nationals implicated in the 9/11 plot?
Those questions have new urgency as Saudi Arabia asks a federal appeals court to overturn Manhattan U.S. District Judge George Daniels’s August 2025 order allowing hundreds of consolidated 9/11 lawsuits against the Kingdom to proceed toward trial.
The plaintiffs in each of those underlying cases allege that the defendants, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, provided material support to Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four passenger jets and flew them into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and, after passengers fought back, a bucolic field near Shanksville, PA.
Oral arguments before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City are set for Oct. 7. Whoever loses will likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
SAUDI ARABIA’S QUAGMIRE
Saudi Arabia’s court filings assert that, in all, the plaintiffs have accused 747 defendants of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, including 172 businesses, 34 charities, 460 individuals and five countries, most notably the Kingdom itself. Many defendants have settled, and some have gotten their cases dismissed, but America’s most powerful Arab ally in the Middle East remains in a quagmire of politically explosive and potentially catastrophic allegations that threaten to upend that alliance as thousands of plaintiffs push for both answers and upward of $100 billion in damages.
The case is being prosecuted under an exception to the legal rule of sovereign immunity that generally protects foreign countries and their agencies from being sued in U.S. courts. That exception, carved out by the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which Congress passed in 2016 over President Obama’s veto, applies to terrorism that causes injury on U.S. soil.
In its appellate court filings, Saudi Arabia contends that as a sovereign nation it remains immune because various requirements of JASTA, including that it acted in 9/11 through its agents or employees, have not been proven. Likewise, the Kingdom strenuously denies, as it has for decades, the plaintiffs’ allegations that it “gave any support to Al Qaeda or to the 9/11 attacks.”
Saudi Arabia’s appeal asks the court to view the case not as a matter of unresolved culpability, but as a record that has repeatedly failed to prove Saudi responsibility. The Kingdom’s filings contend the official record supports dismissal, arguing that the 9/11 Commission, the FBI’s PENTTBOM probe, the 9/11 Review Commission and the bureau’s May 2021 close-out memo for Operation Encore all found no wrongdoing by the Kingdom or its officials.
“Helping Al Qaeda attack the United States would have been antithetical to Saudi Arabia’s interests. The two countries are longstanding allies that made united efforts to stop Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden years before the 9/11 attacks,” its appellate brief says.
The FBI’s last public words on 9/11, however, challenge the Kingdom’s argument. They are contained in a 130-page, July 23, 2021 report that lays out Encore 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.”
Why the FBI publicly issued conflicting conclusions about Saudi Arabia’s culpability on a matter of such consequence is not known. The bureau’s public affairs office in Washington has ignored Florida Bulldog’s requests for comment. The contradiction suggests a possible rift between field agents who developed the evidence and bureau higher-ups who chose to discount it for reasons unknown.
There were three main subjects of Operation Encore, whose existence was disclosed to Florida Bulldog in December 2016 by the Justice Department amid Freedom of Information litigation: Bayoumi, whom the FBI has said was a Saudi spy; Los Angeles imam and Saudi consular official Fahad al Thumairy; and Thumairy’s boss at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Musaed al Jarrah, a diplomat based at the Saudi embassy in Washington.
The names are in an October 2012 FBI report, mentioned in an asterisk in the 9/11 Review Commission’s report, that provided an internal “update” on the status of Operation Encore, which was then in its fifth year. The report says Jarrah “tasked” Thumairy and Bayoumi with “assisting” the first two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihhdhar, after they entered the country via Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000. Both were later aboard American Airlines Flight 77, when it crashed into the Pentagon.
Much in the October 2012 Encore update was redacted, including Jarrah’s name and the code name Operation Encore. That information only became public later.
In September 2021, shortly after Encore was officially closed, President Biden ordered the FBI to conduct a declassification review of Operation Encore records, referred to in FBI lingo as PENTTBOM’s “subfile.” Thousands of pages were released and are now publicly available in the FBI’s online “vault.” Additional Encore documents, including some with fewer redactions, were provided only to plaintiffs’ lawyers who previously agreed to the bureau’s confidentiality terms.
ENCORE CASTS DOUBT ON 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
What the Encore documents show is that the bureau’s agents uncovered a significant web of logistical and financial support for Hazmi and Mihdhar provided by U.S.-based Saudi nationals and clerics. Those findings call into serious question the narrative throughline of the 9/11 Commission Report that no evidence was found that Saudi Arabia or its senior officials were involved in 9/11.
Likewise, the declassified Encore reports upended the commission’s assessments of both Omar Bayoumi, who helped Hazmi and Mihdhar settle in America yet whom it dismissed as “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamic extremists,” and Fahad Thumairy, who despite commission investigators’ doubts about his honesty, nevertheless concluded there was “no evidence” Thumairy had aided the two future hijackers.
Turns out there is now evidence to explain that lack of evidence two decades ago. And it points to the FBI’s repeated efforts to shield Saudi Arabia from evidence of complicity.
Judge Daniels, with the benefit of Encore’s findings as well as subsequent document development and witness depositions by plaintiffs’ lawyers, cited records seized by police in the United Kingdom when they arrested Bayoumi 10 days after 9/11. That evidence was sent to the FBI, which kept it secret from Congress and the 9/11 Commission, but it was obtained in late 2023 by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
“The evidence does not support the conclusion that Bayoumi was just an innocent participant without any prior planning or constant coordination with his employer,” he wrote.
“Although there is less evidence concerning al Thumairy, the credible evidence supports the conclusion that Thumairy was working together with Bayoumi to assist the hijackers,” the judge wrote. He noted, for example, that while Thumairy denied meeting with the hijackers at the Los Angeles mosque where he served as the principal cleric, “FBI agents possessed a photo of Thumairy and the hijackers taken in front of the King Fahad mosque. Plainly speaking, this does not create an image of an unwitting participant…”
The photo has not been made public.
The focus on events in Southern California is the result of Judge Daniels’ decision in 2018 to limit the plaintiffs’ discovery, or evidence gathering, to “whether and to what extent Thumairy, Bayoumi and their agents took actions in 2000, at the direction of more senior Saudi officials, to provide assistance to” hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar.
At that time, Musaed al Jarrah’s name was still secret. The judge’s 45-page order only mentions him briefly. Jarrah’s name became public in May 2020 when it was inadvertently included in a declaration filed by Jill Sanborn, the assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
ProPublica reported in 2021 that the head of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, Carlos Fernandez, and federal prosecutors decided to reassign the Encore team, effectively shutting the operation down. That was in 2016. Encore was officially closed in May 2021.
No criminal charges were ever filed. That was despite the October 5, 2012, report, which says federal prosecutors were then exploring potential charges of “providing material support to the 9/11 hijackers, as well as lesser crimes” against a suspect whose name is redacted. No further information about the suspect, or about what happened, has yet surfaced.
Also not known is why the FBI and the Department of Justice have repeatedly resisted, refused or sharply limited the release of records and information about events leading up to 9/11.
THE FBI AND THE OVERCLASSIFICATION OF 9/11 RECORDS
Taken together, the Encore and Sarasota records point to a broader question that shadows the appeal: not only what investigators found, but what the government chose to withhold.
Perhaps the most sweeping suppression that’s occurred is the result of an FBI protective order sanctioned by the court in 2018. Under it, the bureau can disclose sensitive, classified files to plaintiffs’ attorneys while forbidding them from releasing the information to their clients or the public. Hundreds, if not thousands, of 9/11 records have been treated that way.
But in public court filings as recently as last week, evidence again has emerged that the FBI has engaged in the liberal overclassification of its 9/11 records, veiling them from sight. That was first made clear in the wake of President Biden’s 2021 executive order requiring a sweeping declassification review of records about Operation Encore.
Previously, Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr had declared under oath that Encore’s records, including information contained in the October 2012 FBI update, were “state secrets,” asserting their disclosure would harm national security. FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Michael McGarrity filed a sworn statement in September 2019 supporting Barr.
“It is my judgment that disclosure of the information subject to the Attorney General’s privilege assertion described herein reasonably could be expected to cause significant harm to national security,” McGarrity wrote.
In 2022, after many Encore documents had been made public, often with minimal redactions, it was apparent that while they included embarrassing information, their disclosure was no threat to national security.
That scenario was repeated last week with the court filing of numerous documents marked as having been previously withheld due to the protective order. They included things like certificates Bayoumi had earned from George Washington University declaring he had completed several continuing education courses in 1999-2000.
The Sarasota episode broadens the pattern and suggests that disputed or withheld evidence concerning possible Saudi links to 9/11 was not limited to Encore and Southern California.
THE SARASOTA CONNECTION
The late Sen. Graham, a Democrat who served two terms as Florida’s governor, was upset when first informed about the FBI investigation of a Saudi family who hurriedly departed their Sarasota-area home in the gated community of Prestancia two weeks before the attacks. Two years later, after being shown a declassified FBI report obtained by Florida Bulldog that tied the family “to individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01,” Graham accused the FBI of having impeded Congress’s Joint Inquiry by withholding that information.
The April 2002 FBI report stated that Abdulaziz and Anoud al Hijji, whose home was owned by Mrs. al Hijji’s father, Esam Ghazzawi — an adviser to then-King Fahd’s nephew, Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud — had “many connections” to individuals involved in the 9/11 plot. Prince Fahd died in July 2001.
Two knowledgeable sources told Florida Bulldog in 2011 that an FBI analysis of gatehouse visitor logs and photographs of license tags showed that vehicles driven by several future hijackers had visited the al Hijji home, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, who was at the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 when it slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
Al Hijji, reached in London in February 2012, called 9/11 “a crime against the USA and all humankind” and said he was “saddened and oppressed by these false allegations.”
The FBI, besides hiding the existence of its Sarasota investigation from both Congress and the 9/11 Commission, lied about its findings when the investigation became public. A bureau spokesman told Florida Bulldog flatly that agents had found no connection to the 9/11 plot. The “many connections” report came out later during FOIA litigation.
Sen. Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was flabbergasted again by the FBI’s 2016 disclosure of the existence of Operation Encore and by the fact that it had been secretly reinvestigating 9/11 for nearly 10 years.
“This has never been disclosed before and it’s to the contrary of almost everything the FBI has produced so far that has indicated that 9/11 is history,” Graham said. “It’s interesting that it took them 11 years to get there, and a FOIA to get this information to the public.”
Encore quickly became central to the 9/11 families’ lawsuit against Saudi Arabia. Three months after Florida Bulldog published a copy of the October 2012 report embedded in a story about what it had to say, lawyers for the plaintiffs filed a consolidated amended complaint, calling it a “significant” new piece of evidence that documented the bureau’s continuing criminal investigation of Saudi government employees who had provided “substantial assistance” to the al Qaeda hijackers.
Both the FBI and the 9/11 Review Commission, the three-member panel authorized by Congress in 2014 but controlled by FBI Director James Comey and well-paid by the FBI, sought to discredit the “many connections” report by calling it “poorly written and wholly unsubstantiated.” At the time, it was the latest example of the FBI’s efforts to whitewash evidence of Saudi government involvement in 9/11 — something FBI leadership has seemed to see as a continuing duty.
Ex-Sen. Graham got similar treatment in 2011 when he and his wife, Adele, were traveling to Washington for Thanksgiving. They flew into Dulles International Airport where they were unexpectedly met by FBI agents who took them to an airport office where the former senator said he met with Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce. Graham said Joyce was unhappy that he was asking questions about Sarasota. Joyce told Graham the matter had been fully investigated and there was nothing to it. He told Graham to drop it. “You need to get a life,” Graham recalled Joyce saying. Graham said Joyce also told him that he had instructed the agent who wrote the “many connections” report, Gregory Sheffield, not to talk to Graham.
SCOTLAND YARD EXPOSES FBI’S STUNNING FAILURE
Such protection appears to have been a hallmark of U.S. government policy towards the Kingdom when it comes to 9/11, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It began under the presidency of George W. Bush when the bureau often refused to cooperate with the Joint Inquiry, at one point prompting Graham to hire private investigators.
The Bush administration suppressed the “28 pages” of the Joint Inquiry’s report linking the president’s friend, the KSA’s U.S. Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to a controversial al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah. Under President Obama, who declassified those pages, it was learned that when Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002, he had the unlisted phone number of an offshore company, ASPCOL, that managed Bandar’s residence near Aspen, CO.
FBI agents in Denver were assigned to investigate but decided to wait until obtaining guidance from headquarters. Florida Bulldog found no indication the investigation was ever restarted.
In late 2023, it was learned that the bureau had withheld from plaintiffs’ attorneys important evidence originally obtained and transmitted to the FBI by London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), also known as Scotland Yard, in the weeks after 9/11.
That evidence, requested from and released by the MPS directly to the lawyers, was seized when detectives arrested Bayoumi at his Birmingham residence 10 days after 9/11. It included a yellow-lined notepad with a crude sketch of an airplane and an equation pilots use to calculate a plane’s rate of descent to the horizon, a computer containing a coded message discussing a potential test of airport security prior to 9/11 and the now notorious “casing” video of the U.S. Capitol.
Neither the Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission nor the FBI agents who worked Encore from 2007 until 2016 were informed of the existence of that evidence.
The importance of that stunning failure by FBI headquarters — whether accidental or calculated to satisfy some still-hidden purpose — is driven home by what Judge Daniels wrote last year when he denied Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss and set the case on a path to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge singled out Bayoumi’s confiscated notebook sketch, which ultimately landed in an FBI file in Washington where it remained unseen, unused and unknown to authorities working on the nation’s biggest murder case.
“Most tellingly,” Daniels wrote, “the drawing of an airplane with equations related to the height and distance of a plane’s flight path, for which [Bayoumi] could not come up with any reasonable explanation facially connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.”
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