A federal judge has rejected an effort by the government of Saudi Arabia to dismiss a lawsuit by several families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, allowing the suit to proceed to the trial phase.
There’s still a chance that the rules governing sovereign nations in lawsuits might lead to a dismissal. But Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan appears to be siding with the families on crucial pieces of evidence that suggest far more involvement by the Saudis in the attack than was previously known.
“This is a historic win for the families,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesperson for the families. Eagleson’s father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”
It was previously suspected that anti-American elements in the Saudi royal family, military, and diplomatic corps aided Osama bin Laden in planning and executing the attack. Indeed, the Saudi royals were, at that time, highly factionalized, and President George Bush didn’t want to empower the pro-terrorist faction to gain more power, complicating U.S.-Saudi relations.
The findings from a tranche of documents and videos show extensive involvement by some highly positioned royals, which contradicts the official version by the 9/11 Commission as well as the Bush administration.
The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate.
The FBI quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car.
Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city.
At the time, George W. Bush was trying to build an anti-terrorist coalition to deal with al Qaeda, and his administration believed the Saudis were the linchpin to gaining the support of key Arab states. Not offending them apparently took precedence over seeking the truth about 9/11.
The evidence that the plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved to be even more telling.
It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.
While Judge Daniels acknowledged that both sides saw different interpretations of the same evidence, he agreed with the families about several key exhibits, “including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks,” according to ProPublica.
Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.
The key to the case will be whether the attorneys for the families can convince a jury that Bayoumi, one of the most well-connected Saudis in the U.S., was more of an intelligence asset than a “fixer” who used his connections with the royal family to help Americans do business in the Kingdom.
There is a chance that the Saudis don’t want this incident to be aired in an American courtroom and will settle with the families.
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