By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Forced back into court by an act of Congress and faced with tens of billions of dollars in potential civil liability, oil-rich Saudi Arabia is asking a U.S. judge again to throw out a lawsuit brought against it by thousands of 9/11 victims.
Lawyers for the kingdom moved last week to dismiss the massive case pending in federal court in New York City, citing “baseless accusations that Saudi Arabia conspired to commit a horrific crime against its longstanding ally the United States by knowingly funding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”
The plaintiffs are survivors of the attacks, family members of the dead, businesses and insurance companies.
Saudi Arabia’s filing responded to their 100-page amended complaint brought in March against the kingdom and its official charity, the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The complaint followed Congress’s passage last year – over a veto by President Obama – of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows Americans to sue foreign states for acts of terrorism that occur on U.S. soil.
Earlier, a federal judge and a U.S. appeals court had dismissed Saudi Arabia and the Saudi High Commission from the case after determining they were protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. JASTA removed that protection.
The new court filings show the Saudis are relying heavily on the findings of the FBI’s secretive 9/11 Review Commission to discredit the plaintiffs’ claims that the kingdom is liable for the deaths, injuries and destruction caused by the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks and thousands more were injured.
The 9/11 Review Commission – also known as the Meese Commission after its most prominent member, Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese – was authorized by Congress to conduct an “external review” of the FBI’s post-9/11 performance, and to assess new evidence. As Florida Bulldog has reported, however, the commission held no public hearings, had no subpoena power and was largely spoon-fed information by the FBI. Meese and the two other commissioners were chosen and paid by the FBI.
Meese Commission discredits report
The Meese Commission issued a 127-page report in March 2015, which among other things sought to discredit an April 2002 FBI report that said agents had found “many connections” between Saudis living in Sarasota and individuals involved in the 9/11 plot and requested further action be taken.
The April 2002 report, released to Florida Bulldog by the FBI in 2013 amid ongoing Freedom of Information litigation, corroborated a September 2011 Florida Bulldog story that disclosed the existence of the FBI’s Sarasota investigation and reported the FBI had kept it secret from Congress. The story was co-reported by Irish author Anthony Summers, who obtained the initial information about the Sarasota probe.
The FBI told the Meese Commission the 2002 report “was ‘poorly written’ and wholly unsubstantiated.” The commission’s report, however, offered no explanation of the basis for that conclusion. Likewise, the commission apparently never heard directly from the agent who wrote the report, relying instead on the FBI’s characterization of what he had to say.
“The FBI told the Review Commission that the (report) was apparently based solely on unsubstantiated reports from others and there was no documentation supporting its allegations,” the commission’s report says.
No other FBI records to support or explain the commission’s work were made public.
Florida Bulldog sued the FBI and the Department of Justice in June 2016 for access to all Meese Commission transcripts, reports and the like after the bureau failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request. The lawsuit forced the FBI to review 1,858 pages of records and to release parts of 713 pages. The FBI withheld 1,145 pages.
Florida Bulldog and its attorneys believe the FBI has not acknowledged the existence of many additional pages of commission records.
Among the released records was a heavily censored Oct. 5, 2012 FBI report emblazoned with a logo that depicts the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers inside a pentagon against a backdrop of an American flag. The FBI considered the report so sensitive that even its title was classified “in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”
The 2012 FBI report
Declassified portions, however, show that at that time federal prosecutors and FBI agents in New York were zeroing in on an apparent U.S. support network for Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the five 9/11 hijackers who were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. Among other things, the report discusses how in June 2012 a team of New York investigators traveled to London “to exploit evidence seized in 2001 in New Scotland Yard’s searches of Omar al Bayoumi’s residences and offices.”
At the time of its release in December, Sean Carter, a Philadelphia attorney for the plaintiffs, called the 2012 report “a powerful and important disclosure.” Carter appended a copy to the 9/11 victims’ amended complaint when it was filed March 17.
The 91-page Saudi response memorandum filed last week by Washington, D.C. attorney Michael Kellogg attacks the 2012 FBI report as unreliable, noting that the names of its authors are redacted.
The memo says the FBI report “contains hearsay statements” about a pair of Saudis – Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy – who are identified as “main subjects” of the probe of “individuals known to have provided substantial assistance” to Hazmi and Mihdhar in Southern California following their arrival in the U.S. in January 2000.
The FBI report says Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi agent; Thumairy, a Saudi diplomat and imam at the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, and a third person whose name was kept secret on grounds of national security “provided (or directed others to provide) the hijackers with assistance in daily activities, including procuring living quarters, financial assistance, and assistance in obtaining flight lessons and driver’s licenses.” The investigation was seeking to prove the trio knew that Hazmi and Mihdhar “were here to commit an act of terrorism.”
“A statement that an investigator ‘seeks to prove’ a legal conclusion is neither an appropriate allegation nor competent evidence,” the Saudi memo says. “That is especially so here because the investigator’s attempt failed: the 9/11 Review Commission later found as of March 2015 that new evidence available to the FBI was ‘not sufficient’ to support the conclusion that plaintiffs advocate.”
But the commission did not release the 2012 report when it issued its report, nor does its report assess the 2012 disclosures except to note it said al-Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.”
Status of 2012 probe unknown
Likewise, the outcome of the 2012 investigation is not known. No other documents released by the FBI address it.
Said former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11: “If the decision was not to proceed, why? And if it was to proceed, what’s the status?”
The 28 pages refers to a long-suppressed chapter of the Joint Inquiry’s 2002 report about apparent Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers. The 28 pages were ordered released last summer by President Obama. Among other things, they showed that Saudi Prince Bandar – who on 9/11 was his country’s ambassador to the U.S. – had connections to a major al-Qaeda figure now detained in Guantanamo Bay and others suspected of helping hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar.
Document 17 is a set of 2002 work plans for staffers of the original 9/11 Commission detailing issues and outstanding questions regarding possible Saudi links to the attacks. It was declassified and released by the National Archives in 2015.
Among other things, Document 17 disclosed that when Guantanamo detainee Ghassan al-Sharbi was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002, FBI agents found a buried cache of documents that included “an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington that contained al-Sharbi’s (U.S.) flight certificate.”
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