Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby thatsmystory » Fri Jul 08, 2016 7:59 pm

The media also has a key role in the terrible terrible errors of the intelligence community. They have basically facilitated the cover-up. When HBO aired a documentary about Alec Station the media never asked about Blee, Bikowsky, Wilshire or Casey deliberately obstructing the Cole investigation and the late August/early September search.

Hillary Clinton has a motive in continued classification considering that the protection of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar started in January 2000. Was Bill Clinton in the loop at the time? Richard Clarke claims he had no idea but there is little reason to believe him. His theory of a failed CIA recruitment effort is not convincing.

For their part 60 Minutes facilitated the CIA cover-up when they responded to Ali Soufan's allegation of obstruction with a CIA talking point that stated the charge was baseless.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby Morty » Sat Jul 09, 2016 12:07 am

(First 9/11 thread on GD today, this can go here:)

Out and about today I saw a $100k black Mercedes Benz with the number plate CIA-911, which I thought was pretty cool.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 14, 2016 4:13 pm

28 pages on alleged Saudi ties to 9/11 to be released as soon as Friday

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/14/politics/ ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 05, 2016 2:23 pm

Prince of the '28 pages': Indirect 9/11 link to Saudi royal revealed

Washington (CNN)When the United States caught its first big al Qaeda operative, six months after the 9/11 terror attacks, it found a disturbing clue: phone numbers linked to the United States.
In an overnight raid, Pakistani forces captured Abu Zubaydah, allegedly a recruiter for the terror group and a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.
Now, 14 years after Zubaydah was apprehended, newly declassified information from a 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, dubbed the “28 pages,” reveals an indirect link previously hidden from the American public between the alleged al Qaeda operative and a company associated with a key member of the Saudi royal family, former Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
Ever since 19 men — 15 of them Saudi nationals — hijacked four airplanes and changed the course of American history, the possibility of official Saudi involvement has hung over the relationship between the two countries. While the alleged association with Bandar revealed in the newly declassified pages does not provide direct evidence the prince was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, it raises new questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement.




http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/ ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 19, 2017 9:28 am

VETERANS DUPED INTO LOBBYING FOR SAUDI ARABIA
The Kingdom’s Quest to Subvert 9/11 Accountability Continues on a Whole New Front

Podcast McGlinchey JS
Photo credit: Jon Sonderman / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to Brian McGlinchey, the founder of 28pages.org. For years, McGlinchey led efforts to uncover the 28 redacted pages from the Senate Intel Report on 9/11. That section, largely declassified last year despite a Barack Obama veto, raises serious questions about the involvement of multiple Saudi officials in the 9/11 attacks.

Today, McGlinchey is focused on exposing Saudi efforts aimed at getting US veterans to speak out against a new law allowing 9/11 victims and their families to sue the Saudi government.

McGlinchey tells Schechtman stories about specific veterans who were “tricked” by the Saudis into lobbying against the law, and he details current Saudi efforts to weaken it. In particular, he reveals a Saudi payment of $90,000 — via a conservative PR firm in the US — to bring veterans to DC and lobby against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

McGlinchey points out that the PR firm in question is owned by Scott Wheeler, executive director of the Republican National Trust PAC. None of this was ever disclosed to the veterans who were recruited.


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Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. We’ve talked several times over the years, most recently with former US senator Bob Graham about the 28 redacted pages of the Senate intel report on 9/11. Those 28 pages finally saw the light of day last summer, and one of the leaders of the effort to get those pages released is our guest today, Brian McGlinchey. Now, McGlinchey is engaged in a new effort to help a group of 9/11 families, survivors, and veterans, who were, in many ways, co-opted and traveled to Washington at the expense of a conservative lobbying firm to lobby against the law enabling suit against the government of Saudi Arabia. Here to explain all of this, it is my pleasure to be joined by the head of 28Pages.org, Brian McGlinchey. Brian, thanks so much for joining us.
Brian McGlinchey: It’s great to be with you. Thank you so much, Jeff.
Jeff Schechtman: Before we talk about the current battle that’s going on, talk a little bit about your efforts with respect to getting these 28 pages released and how you got involved in that in the first place.
Brian McGlinchey: Yes, I got involved by seeing a video of a press conference on Capitol Hill that was being conducted by the legislators who were leading the effort to get those 28 pages declassified: Walter Jones, Stephen Lynch, and Thomas Massie. It was in particular the comments of Thomas Massie, a legislator whom I’d already respected, that grabbed my attention and I was intrigued, and for me, it was an issue of foreign policy, transparency, and an opportunity, perhaps, to expose hypocrisy in the narrative and the execution of the war on terror.
I’m a writer by trade, a freelance copywriter. I decided to create a website to fill a niche that was needed in that movement. You had legislative leadership, but I only created a site that would help facilitate activism by individual citizens, and also we provide reliable information, in-depth reporting on the issue to help nudge that movement along.
Jeff Schechtman: Ultimately, last summer, those 28 pages were released. They were still redacted somewhat. Talk a little bit about what you felt was accomplished by that.
Brian McGlinchey: Yeah, as you say, there were probably accumulative three pages worth of paragraphs that are still redacted. However, those 28 pages revealed some important new things, and most of them … What is most striking about the 28 pages is how frequently the name Prince Bandar comes up in these 28 pages. Bandar was the ambassador to the United States and a close friend of the George W. Bush family and the entire Bush family, really.
His name comes up time and again, and it was revealed in the 28 pages that he made direct cash payments to a man in Southern California, Osama Basnan, who is identified in the 28 pages as an extremist, who hosted a party for the Blind Sheik who helped mastermind the World Trade Center bombing, who’s a devotee of Osama bin Laden, and most importantly, was said to have bragged about how much assistance he personally provided to two of the 9/11 hijackers that crashed the aircraft into the Pentagon.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the reaction, as you understand it, from families and survivors to what was in these 28 pages.
Brian McGlinchey: I think they felt it was a very important step forward in peeling back what has been a veil that the government has continued to put over Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks, I think, out of the interest of preserving that US-Saudi relationship and shielding Saudi Arabia from scrutiny. As far as the significance, recently the 9/11 families’ lawsuit was resumed under JASTA, which we’ll probably talk about in a minute.
Jeff Schechtman: Right.
Brian McGlinchey: The updated complaint in that cites the 28 pages as new evidence as they’re making their case.
Jeff Schechtman: Explain to our listeners who don’t know what JASTA is.
Brian McGlinchey: You bet. JASTA is the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. It is a law that was years in the making. Last spring, [it] had a significant revision to address concerns that had been brought up, and then it was passed unanimously by both Houses, unanimous consent last summer, and then President Obama vetoed it, and then it was the only override of his entire tenure in office, and so it became enacted in late September. What it does, it updates the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which addresses the circumstances under which individual US citizens can sue foreign governments.
It updated that in such a way that would allow the 9/11 families to proceed with their lawsuit, naming Saudi Arabia as a defendant for its links to the attacks and to hijackers and so forth. It’s not specifically about 9/11. Saudi Arabia is not mentioned anywhere in JASTA, in that legislation. It’s an ongoing power and clarification that citizens — for acts of terror conducted on US soil — that US citizens can sue foreign governments that they believe sponsored that act.
Jeff Schechtman: Explain what the argument was, why President Obama at the time vetoed it.
Brian McGlinchey: The arguments against it, frankly, I find disingenuous. One of the principle arguments is that this would somehow jeopardize individual US military service members, individual officials, that they say that if … The big question is, okay, now that the United States has passed this law, they say, “What if everybody does? What if other countries adopt their own version of JASTA, enabling their citizens to sue, let’s say, the United States for alleged sponsorship of terrorist, and so forth?”
That’s a question about whether they would do that. Unfortunately, most of the op-ed pieces and so forth that are being sponsored by Saudi lobbyists and others, and an argument that President Obama used, himself, in a town hall, speaking to the military, they tried to say that if other countries passed laws like JASTA that individual US military service members and officials would find themselves sued in foreign courts.
Well, as I noted earlier, JASTA doesn’t authorize suits against individuals in other countries, only governments. That was underscored by the recent filing that is referred to in the 9/11 suit. Under JASTA, they updated their complaint in the court process, and there are hundreds of pages of plaintiffs, the 9/11 families and victims, so forth, and one defendant, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, not an individual.
Jeff Schechtman: Tell us a little bit about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to try and get this law overturned, originally, to prevent it from being passed, and then to try and get it overturned.
Brian McGlinchey: Saudi Arabia has one of the most formidable lobbying operations, probably, in our entire country, many, many firms, and being paid millions, and millions of dollars across the board. In the run-up, while JASTA was in the works, and then going to the legislative process, they were fully engaged in trying to thwart it. Then when it was enacted over President Obama’s veto, they kicked into overdrive. It was not game over for them. They then engaged many, many more firms to now try to go back and water it down, to amend it, change it, repeal it, whatever they can do to put those barriers back in place between the 9/11 families and the courtroom.
Jeff Schechtman: To what extent were they successful, were these efforts on the part of Saudi Arabia successful in trying to really create pressure to overturn this?
Brian McGlinchey: I don’t think they’ve been very successful at all, just based on the observed action on Capitol Hill. The two principal people in the legislature who are leading the effort to weaken this law — they would say, “Enhance it,” or “Correct it,” but to weaken it — are Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Those two in November and December, they made some poor speeches, talking about the need to change this. They talked about … They offered, again, the same flawed arguments about jeopardy to military service members during attacks, that kind of thing. There’s been no real legislative action. They never actually, to my knowledge, put forward an actual amendment. At this point, I don’t think there’s been much momentum at all in that other direction.
Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the veterans that were brought to Washington to engage in these lobbying effort, veterans who were arguably misled as to what they were coming to Washington for and who was paying for it.
Brian McGlinchey: Yes, so this is the most fascinating part of this story. So aggressive was this operation Saudi Arabian Qorvis, Qorvis MSLGroup, which is its main … I believe it is its main flagship lobbying and PR firm managing its affairs and reputation around the world. They engaged Qorvis who in turn began a program by which they would recruit veterans to oppose JASTA based on that argument that, “Hey, if other countries pass laws like JASTA, individual military service members will be sued in foreign courts. We can’t have that.” That was the principal argument that they used. They attracted veterans to this effort, and then they had a program by which they were inviting veterans to travel to Washington, all expenses paid, to lobby for this alongside fellow veterans and for the betterment of military service members and veterans.
Now, what I was able to discover through my reporting, I contacted some veterans who had actually made those trips to Washington, DC, and the fact that they were making trips was first reported by Daily Caller, then the question became, “Do these people know who’s behind this?” I contacted some veterans and hit the jackpot in that they said, “No, we did not know that this was the case until we got there and an intoxicated organizer of the event spilled the beans and said, ‘Yes, the Kingdom is paying for it.’ ” They were outraged.
The first three that I interviewed were Marine veterans, two of them are brothers, and a couple of them said, “We enlisted because of 9/11, and to find out that we had been unwittingly advancing the interest and the agenda of the government that’s been accused of helping to facilitate that attack,” … you can imagine how that would make them feel. They were initially three, and then four more veterans from that operation came forward, which, by the way, was being conducted out of the Trump International Hotel. And now, more veterans are continuing to come forward with other organizations.
Jeff Schechtman: What is your sense of how this is playing out now and what’s next in this battle?
Brian McGlinchey: Well, with JASTA the law of the land, it’s a matter of playing defense for those 9/11 families to keep that law in the books. Right now, it’s been pretty quiet. Those lobbying trips, and to give you a sense of a budget, we’re talking … under that Qorvis operation, somewhere around seven trips, and we’re talking about upwards of 40 and 50 veterans on several of those trips, staying at the Trump International Hotel with meals provided, open bars in the evening. The hotel is known for the most expensive drinks in all of Washington, so, I mean, a big-budget operation.
Jeff Schechtman: What is the attitude of the current administration towards this?
Brian McGlinchey: Well, when JASTA was at that final threshold of being passed, then-candidate Trump was asked for his opinion on it, and he slammed President Obama for vetoing it. As we’ve observed though, President Trump is not known for his consistency of beliefs and positions, and so, I’d say, there’s a great cause for concern among people who watch this issue given the fact that the Trump administration appears to be going extremely cozy with the Saudi Arabian government.
A couple examples of that are restoring arms sales, specific types of weapons that had been restricted under the Obama administration because of their misuse in Yemen, and aggressively supporting and talking about amping up the level of support that the US government is providing for that war in Yemen. I think that signals that there’s reason to be wary of the Trump administration on this issue.
Jeff Schechtman: How much litigation has been brought under JASTA up to this point?
Brian McGlinchey: Many litigants have come forward, and it’s a very complex case. They’re all combined under the heading of this case called “in re: Terrorist Attacks of September 11th, 2001”, which there are a number of firms in that, each representing groups of plaintiffs, families and so forth, and also insurers who covered damage inflicted by those attacks. These cases represent many, many clients, and now you do have additional people filing complaints down, joining the case as it has renewed momentum.
Jeff Schechtman: Tell us a little bit about your continuing efforts with 28Pages.org, and what’s the story that you want to keep out there and what you hope to accomplish at this point?
Brian McGlinchey: Well, the main theme that I’ve been reporting on recently is the Saudi lobbying. It’s funny, because at the beginning of the year, I’ve made announcements on the website that I would be widening the scope of what I was covering there, broader scrutiny of the war on terror. I only got one article into that until this Saudi lobbying story bubbled up. Now, in the absence of the big media covering this scandal, I’m continuing to try to shed light on it and bring attention to it. Importantly, a few weeks ago, a group of 9/11 families and survivors filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging broad misconduct by a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, including his failure to disclose the Saudi sponsorship of these trips and basically bringing people to Washington on false pretenses.
Jeff Schechtman: Why do you think there’s been so little mainstream coverage of this issue?
Brian McGlinchey: That’s a great question. I really don’t know quite what to say. I was quite shocked. At a time when there’s a lot of other coverage about alleged interference by foreign governments in our political processes and so forth, here, you’ve got one that’s just extremely well-documented. We had a lot of first-hand witnesses, veterans who are being victimized and made into unwitting pawns of a foreign government. This deception extends even to Members of Congress. The veterans were told in that Trump hotel operation, they were told, “If anyone asks who brought you here, just tell them you’re concerned veterans here on your own.”
For this giant-budget operation, they were missing something that’s a part of any lobbying operation, and that is leave-behind material. If you and I were going to be lobbying City Hall about any mundane little topic, we would leave behind a leaflet or a flyer or something to reinforce our position and explain what we were seeking. This multi, multi-million-dollar operation didn’t have that. I’ll tell you why: It’s that any informational material that’s left behind that’s part of a foreign government-driven lobbying operation, it’s a requirement that you have to have a conspicuous disclosure of who sponsored it.
Really, what I’m saying is that this deception carried over to members of Congress that there was this charade that was going on where they wanted Congress to have the impression that it was individual veterans who were sincerely concerned about this issue. The Members of Congress weren’t being told that they were there, essentially, on behalf, unwittingly, but acting on behalf of a foreign power. The Foreign Agents Registration Act passed in the ’30s, that’s what that’s all about. It doesn’t restrict anybody’s speech, but it does call for transparency, so everybody knows above board that this is a foreign power that’s trying to affect policy in the United States.
Jeff Schechtman: Are there any veterans organizations that have gotten involved in this issue?
Brian McGlinchey: There are none that have gotten involved on the good side. Some have been potentially misused on the other side. One of the chief organizers of the Qorvis operation that operated out of the Trump hotel used to be the second-in-command of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. However, the Military Order of the Purple Heart says that they have nothing to do with it. That was his own activity. However, some veterans seem to get the indication that they were led to believe that there was an endorsement from that organization, but their spokesperson was very clear in saying that that was his activities alone.
Jeff Schechtman: Has there been any lessening of the efforts on the part of the Saudi lobbying firms of late?
Brian McGlinchey: It appears that all these trips have halted, that they stopped. The most recent one that I’m aware of was in early March. Whether they had already run their course or budget, or that they were intending to do, or whether the coverage of this was the cause of that, I don’t know, but for now, it seems that they’re over. I do know word is getting around Capitol Hill, at least in some quarters, that these were about the Saudi operations. I think they’re going to be very wary of anybody doing it again.
Jeff Schechtman: Brian McGlinchey, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Brian McGlinchey: It was great to be with you. Thank you very much.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/05/19/veter ... di-arabia/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby SonicG » Tue May 30, 2017 9:11 pm

Trump will blowing the SA-911 connection wide open real soon now...

Tillerson Present as Exxon Signed Major Deal with Saudi Arabia During Trump Visit

During his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump announced an array of economic agreements between the U.S. and the Middle Eastern kingdom, saying it would usher in “jobs, jobs, jobs” for both oil-producing powerhouses.

While the $350 billion, 10-year arms deal garnered most headlines, a lesser-noticed agreement was also signed between ExxonMobil and the state-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) to study a proposed co-owned natural gas refinery in the Gulf of Mexico. Under the deal, signed at the Saudi-U.S. CEO Forum, the two companies would “conduct a detailed study of the proposed Gulf Coast Growth Ventures project in Texas and begin planning for front-end engineering and design work” for the 1,300-acre, $10 billion plant set to be located near Corpus Christi, Texas, according to an ExxonMobil press release.

In addition, ExxonMobil's press release for the agreement mentions that Darren Woods, the company's CEO, was in the room for the signing of the pact alongside ExxonMobil Saudi Arabia CEO Philippe Ducom and SABIC executives. Missing from that release: After the forum ended, Woods went to the Al-Yamamah Palace for an agreement-signing ceremony attended by both President Trump and recently retired ExxonMobil CEO and current U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

DeSmog discovered they were all present at the palace via the Saudi Press Agency's English-language press Twitter account, which released a series of photos of Woods and Tillerson shaking hands with SABIC CEO Yousef Al-Benyan and Saudi Defense Minister Prince Mohammad bin Salman, respectively. President Trump is seen seated in the background of the photos of both Woods and Tillerson, which were taken in the same room.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/05/30/r ... visit-deal


And where is the Crown Prince now?

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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 14, 2017 4:45 pm

One Man’s Quest to Prove Saudi Arabia Bankrolled 9/11
This New York lawyer says he has found a link between Saudi officials and the hijackers. The U.S. government refuses to do anything about it.
By CALEB HANNAN April 07, 2017


When Jim Kreindler got to his midtown Manhattan office on Friday, July 15, 2016, he had a surprise waiting for him. Twice in the previous eight years, Kreindler had been in the room as then-President Barack Obama promised Kreindler’s clients he would declassify a batch of documents that had taken on near mythic importance to those seeking the full truth of who had helped plan and fund the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now, Kreindler learned, “the 28 pages” as they were known, were open for inspection and it was up to his team to find something of value. It wasn’t long before they did—a single, vague line about a Somali charity in Southern California.

That obscure reference would soon become part of the backbone of an argument that Kreindler and his firm have been making for a long time: Without financial and logistical support from members of the government of Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 attacks would have never taken place.


Proving the link between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers has been Kreindler’s nearly sole focus since the moment, several days after the Twin Towers fell, when grieving families began to file into the lobby of the burly, boisterous 61-year-old’s firm. That firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, was started by his grandfather and brought to prominence by his father, Lee, who the families knew was the man who had won a $3 billion judgment against Libya for the bomb that in 1988 destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. They were hoping he could find the culprit here, too. But, just over a year after the attacks, Lee was dead from a stroke. The case, and some 850 clients, became Jim’s to manage.

Lawyer Jim Kreindler. Courtesy of Jim Kreindler
Lawyer Jim Kreindler. Courtesy of Jim Kreindler
On that July morning, the case had slogged on for nearly a decade and a half. Some judges found it too large and unwieldy to understand. Sometimes it seemed as though Kreindler’s own government were actively working against the firm; agencies denied Freedom of Information Act requests and shared information with the Saudis as often as with his team. “I’ve stopped calling what our government has done a cover-up,” says former Senator Bob Graham, the co-chair of Congress’s 9/11 Joint Inquiry and the most prominent voice alleging a connection between the Saudis and the hijackers. “Cover-up suggests a passive activity. What they’re doing now I call aggressive deception.”

Saudi Arabia was Kreindler’s focus because many, including well-placed people like Graham, had long suspected that it had played a role in the plot, a charge the Saudis had always vociferously denied. Suspicions were fueled, however, by what the U.S. government had chosen not to reveal after the attacks. The post-9/11 Joint Inquiry, the first U.S. investigation led by the House and Senate intelligence committees, had exposed nearly 1,000 pages of documentation and evidence to public scrutiny. But upon its release in 2002, President George W. Bush ordered a small portion—the 28 pages—to remain classified. They were allegedly full of unpursued leads that hinted at a relationship between the 19 hijackers—15 of whom were Saudi nationals—and people possibly linked to the Saudi government. Then came the later 9/11 Commission, whose own members protested drastic, last-minute edits that seemed to absolve the Saudi government of any responsibility.

Kreindler’s team knew they were unlikely to ever find a smoking gun, a document that they jokingly referred to as “a thank-you note from Osama bin Laden to the Saudi King.” But even before the release of the 28 pages, they thought that they had amassed enough circumstantial evidence to meet the standards of a civil suit, where the burden of proof is considerably lower than in criminal court. Over the course of 15 years, Kreindler’s firm had named hundreds of defendants, ranging from wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen to even wealthier charities. In that time, the firm had compiled a tremendous amount of revealing information on its defendants—from the inner workings of secretive Swiss bank accounts to internal audits of massive corporations. So much information, in fact, that its lawyers often wondered whether the people they were suing knew what they were handing over. Legally, the firm knew it would be difficult to win a case against Saudi Arabia—the country had never been considered a state supporter of terrorism, which was the minimum standard needed for a lawsuit. Still, the firm kept tabs on the most interesting evidence suggesting a connection between the Saudi government and the plotters, especially a support network in Southern California. Yet there was skepticism that Kreindler’s team could ever turn its immense amount of data into a winning case. A newspaper editor once derisively described the firm’s evidence as being burdened by the presence of “Too many Mohameds.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir leaves after holding a press conference in Washington, DC, on July 15, 2016, following the release of 28 pages of a 9/11 congressional report. | Getty
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir leaves after holding a press conference in Washington, DC, on July 15, 2016, following the release of 28 pages of a 9/11 congressional report. | Getty
But on March 20, 2017, for the first time in the case’s long history, the firm named the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as its lead defendant. This was made possible because the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, a bill that allows U.S. nationals to sue countries even if those countries have not been deemed a state sponsor of terrorism, had passed in September and survived Obama’s veto.

The new filing—which seeks $10 million per death, the same as in the Lockerbie suit—is chock full of obscure names of private citizens and massive charities. Some of the names would be familiar to anyone who has waded into the minutiae of the Joint Inquiry and the lengthy, bestselling 9/11 Commission report. But the new filing also contains a narrative about a trail of money that Kreindler’s team believes will help further implicate the Saudis. That trail is still centered in Southern California, but it involves people whom the firm says no one has connected before. One of the key players: a lanky former teacher’s aide in San Diego.

***

Early on the morning of January 22, 2004, Omar Abdi Mohamed sat across from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Senior Agent Steve Schultz looking untroubled. Mohamed, 42, 6’2’’ and rail thin, may have believed he had been called in to talk about his pending citizenship, for which he had applied four years earlier. But the real reason for the interview was more serious. Mohamed was one of roughly 25 men in the San Diego area who had been targeted by a Joint Terrorism Task Force established in the wake of 9/11. The goal was to use immigration laws to charge, convict and deport people suspected of having terrorist ties. Mohamed may have thought Agent Schultz to be harmless. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Omar Abdi Mohamed
Omar Abdi Mohamed
According to a government transcript, as the interview began Mohamed sketched out some of the details of his life. His first wife had been killed during a civil war in their home country of Somalia, and their son, now a teenager, lived in the same refugee camp in Kenya where Mohamed’s parents had settled. Mohamed had arrived in the United States in 1995 on a religious worker’s visa. He had come to work and study under the tutelage of an imam at a local mosque. Not long after he arrived he got a job as an instructor’s aide in the San Diego City School system, where he helped young Somalis adjust to American culture. Mohamed had arrived in America with his second wife and their two kids. They now had four more. He was fluent in Arabic, well-versed in English, and knew some Swahili. He had a master’s in health care management and dreams of opening an African food market, and he had started two separate nonprofits aimed at assisting his fellow countrymen. One was something like an after-school program designed to keep kids from joining the gangs that had become a problem among second-generation immigrants. The other was called the Western Somali Relief Agency. It was meant to help the hundreds of thousands of Somalis still struggling from the after-effects of a famine. Mohamed, it seemed, was a man doing his best to raise a family and benefit his community.

Agent Schultz knew all this. He and Mohamed had gone over much of the same territory in another interview two years earlier. For this interview, though, Schultz wanted to start somewhere different. “The things that I was concerned about are the travel that you listed here,” he told Mohamed, according to transcripts. “Have you done any travel since the last time that we interviewed you?”

Mohamed said he had recently come back from Australia. Then he did something that, according to the complaint, had become routine when speaking to federal officials: He told part of the truth. In their previous interview, Mohamed had told Schultz that he had cousins in Sydney whom he visited often. What he had failed to mention was his real reason for the visit—the birth of his second child with his third wife, a native Australian.

In his initial conversation with Schultz, Mohamed had said he had seven children— the teenager in Kenya and the six who lived with him and their mother in a one-story stucco home with a white picket fence. Mohamed had neglected to tell Schultz that the Australian woman had just given birth to their first child. Now he left out another detail. That most recent trip to Australia had been planned so Mohamed could visit his newest child, his ninth in total. His failure to give the government a proper accounting of his offspring would eventually be one of the details that led to Mohamed’s deportation. But Schultz had more pressing matters on his mind.

Mohamed had claimed previously that the Western Somali Relief Agency brought in almost nothing in donations. “It didn’t make it,” he had told Schultz. Money was so tight, he said, that if he and his organization had been given a box of blankets they wouldn’t have been able to afford postage for shipping.

By now, according to the agent’s later grand jury testimony, Schultz knew this to be untrue. As he and Mohamed were speaking, Schultz’s colleagues were rifling through that stucco home and finding deposit slips that told a very different story. Far from destitute, the Western Somali Relief Agency had received more than $370,000 in donations in less than three years. The vast majority of that money had come from the suburban Chicago branch of an international nonprofit called Global Relief, according to the indictment that the government would ultimately file against Mohamed. In the two years between Mohamed’s first interview and his second, Global Relief had been designated by the United States Treasury Department as a supporter of terrorism due to its alleged connections to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, according to Schultz’s grand jury testimony. What’s more, the agents discovered checks that showed Mohamed quickly moved the cash he had received from Global Relief to a money transfer service that operated throughout the Middle East. For a nonprofit allegedly created to provide humanitarian assistance, the series of events looked suspicious. So did the fact that Mohamed refused to tell the truth.

Schultz also knew something else. Mohamed had claimed that his one and only job was as a teacher’s aide. But ICE officials had just discovered that was also untrue. Even before his arrival in the United States, Mohamed had been employed as a “propagator” for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, an agency long suspected of ties to extremists. For nearly a decade, Mohamed had received $1,750 a month to provide written reports on the local Islamic community. Even Mohamed’s listed reason for obtaining a religious worker’s visa, that he was to assist a San Diego imam, had been untrue. That same imam had told Schultz that Mohamed didn’t actually do any work. The mosque where he was supposedly first employed was just a small apartment. The story had been a ruse meant to help him gain entry into the United States.

Roughly 45 minutes into their conversation, Schultz asked Mohamed to stand up. He told him he was under arrest for immigration fraud. Mohamed pleaded with the agent. “I didn’t hide anything,” he said as he was being handcuffed. “I swear to God you have the wrong information.” Within two years, Mohamed would be gone from the country for good.

***

This might have been the last anyone ever heard of Mohamed if it hadn’t been for a member of Kreindler’s team who noticed that one vague line in the “28 pages.” It was a reference to a Somali nonprofit that, according to an FBI agent, “may allow the Saudi government to provide al Qaeda with funding through covert or indirect means.” They knew of only one Somali nonprofit with Saudi ties in San Diego—Mohamed’s Western Somali Relief.

In their 15 years on the case, Kreindler’s team hadn’t persuaded the U.S. government to provide them much of anything useful. And it certainly hadn’t had any success with the government’s Saudi counterparts. But they had spent more than a decade legally compelling some of the largest charities in the Middle East to hand over documents. Many individuals within the U.S. government knew these charities had provided financial and logistical support for the people and groups American officials labeled as terrorists. This trove of documents had grown into a database made up of terabytes worth of information—the firm’s well-organized haystack. And after Kreindler started looking more closely at Omar Abdi Mohamed, the firm found a needle.

During his 2004 interview with ICE, Mohamed said he once had been visited by an official from the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the same department from which he was receiving a monthly check. Mohamed gave the man’s name as “Khaleid”, though the last name he offered was garbled. The ICE agent helpfully provided him with one: Sowailem. Khaleid Sowailem was, at the time, the head of Da’Wah, a department within the ministry whose stated goal is proselytizing. It’s a mission the Saudis accomplish by spending more than anyone in the world to build, staff and support madrassas and mosques to spread Wahhabism, the ultraconservative form of Islam unique to the kingdom and embraced by Osama bin Laden. It’s the main reason why one analyst once described Saudi Arabia as “both the arsonist and the firefighter” when it comes to global terrorism. It only made sense, then, that a man like Mohamed, a “propagator,” would be of interest to Sowaleim, the bureaucrat in charge of propagation.

Former Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida, speaks during a news conference on the “Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Victims and Survivors Act of 2015” with Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky in Washington, D.C. in June 2015. | Getty
Former Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida, speaks during a news conference on the “Transparency for the Families of 9/11 Victims and Survivors Act of 2015” with Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky in Washington, D.C. in June 2015. | Getty
Bob Graham had long suspected that men like Sowailem working in the Ministry of Islamic Affairs were the strongest link between the hijackers and the Saudis. “I came to the conclusion that there was a support network by trying to assess how the 19 hijackers could pull it off with their significant limitations,” Graham told me recently. “Most couldn't speak English, most had never been in the United States, and most were not well educated. How could they carry out such a complex task?” Graham’s suspicions were heightened by the connections between the ministry and two men in what had come to be known as the San Diego cell.

The first man was Fahad al-Thumairy, an imam at the King Fahad mosque in Los Angeles who was known for his virulently anti-American views. Thumairy was also an employee of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The second was Omar al-Bayoumi, a garrulous man who many in San Diego’s Islamic community assumed to be a spy, since he could often be found walking around with a video recorder, taping everyone he encountered. Bayoumi was also paid by the Saudis—he had been employed in a series of ghost jobs since the ‘70s, according to the complaint. He was also the man who had made a claim that many U.S. investigators still find too coincidental to be true.

Clockwise from top left: Fahad al-Thumairy; Omar al-Bayoumi; Khalid al-Mihdhar; Nawaf al-Hazmi.
Clockwise from top left: Fahad al-Thumairy; Omar al-Bayoumi; Khalid al-Mihdhar; Nawaf al-Hazmi.
In a post-9/11 interview with the FBI, Bayoumi had said that he was dining in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles in early 2000 when he happened to strike up a conversation with two complete strangers with familiar accents. A friendship developed, based off that single encounter. Bayoumi helped the strangers find apartments in San Diego; threw them a large welcome party; co-signed their leases and provided them money for rent; let them borrow his cellphone; even introduced them to people who helped them obtain drivers licenses and contact flight schools. Those two men were hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the first plotters to enter the United States, whose lives would end when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

The FBI has long believed that Bayoumi’s chance encounter came immediately after meeting with Thumairy. Shortly after that meeting, Bayoumi’s $3,000-a-month Saudi salary was bumped up to $7,000. To people like Graham, the implication was clear: Thumairy, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs employee, had tasked Bayoumi with helping the hijackers settle into a foreign country, and his Saudi employers had provided him with extra cash to do so.

Kreindler’s team knew all of this, as did any student of 9/11. What they didn’t know was whether there was any link to Mohamed, or to the man whom ICE agents had identified as his boss. So Kreindler’s team took Sowailem’s name and plugged it into their database. They got a hit. Years before, Kreindler had received hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from a Saudi-funded charity called World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which according to the complaint, was linked to Al Qaeda. There, at the top of a single page, it found a note from Khaleid Sowailem written on official letterhead from the ministry. On that note was Sowailem’s phone number at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. They then plugged that number into the database and, again, out came a hit—this time, one that linked back to the men Kreindler and the rest of the world had already heard of.

The FBI released a group of photos on March 30, 2017, showing the aftermath of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon. | AP
The FBI released a group of photos on March 30, 2017, showing the aftermath of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon. | AP
According to heavily redacted FBI records gathered after 9/11, in the three months after Bayoumi allegedly randomly ran into and befriended the two hijackers, he also made nearly 100 calls to Saudi officials in the U.S. Thirty of those calls went to the number that Kreindler had uncovered as Sowailem’s direct line. What’s more, Kreindler’s team knew that in December 2003 the U.S. State Department had quietly revoked the diplomatic credentials of two dozen Saudi personnel. Kreindler knew that the State Department published complete lists of diplomats every quarter. They checked the last listing in 2003—Sowailem’s name was on it. They then checked the first listing in 2004—Sowailem’s name was gone.

***

In its new filing, Kreindler contends not only that Omar Abdi Mohamed was receiving and passing on hundreds of thousands of dollars from another charity, Global Relief, known to support Al Qaeda, but that the money itself was used to fund the attack. Here’s Kreindler’s theory:

Sometime late in 1998, a Somali Al Qaeda operative named Mohamed Sulaiman Barre established a branch of Dahabshiil in Karachi, Pakistan. (Dahabshiil is like an Islamic Western Union. A Somali-owned, Dubai- and London-based money transfer service.) Barre, who would later be held and interviewed repeatedly at Guantanamo Bay, operated the branch out of his apartment and internet cafes. He never had it registered, either, which meant that a branch supposedly intended to receive and send money to and from the whole world only had the capacity to accept it.

Also in Karachi at the same time was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. KSM, as U.S. officials later called him, was the point man for getting money to the 19 hijackers. He did this in a number of different ways, including by sending $100,000 via courier to his nephew in Dubai, who would later wire it to the hijackers in the U.S. (In the interim, KSM’s nephew hid the cash in a laundry bag stored under his bed.)

According to court documents filed in the case against him, starting in December 1998 and continuing until May 2001 Omar Abdi Mohamed wrote 65 checks—some as small as $370; others as large as $60,000—to Dahabshiil. The total amount, some $370,000, is roughly the same as what the 9/11 Commission estimated as the cost of the plot. When John Pistole, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, testified in 2003 before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, he acknowledged a “continuing investigation” into the “origin of the funding of 9/11 back to financial accounts in Pakistan.” When Pakistan’s CIA-equivalent raided Barre’s apartment in November 2001, its agents found that the Dahabshiil employee’s address book was full of aliases and phone numbers for senior Al Qaeda officials. They also interrupted Barre as he shredded documents.

To the people at Kreindler, there’s something else suspicious about Mohamed’s money transfers. It’s not just that he lied about them to the government. Or lied about the fact that he conducted them while working for the Saudis. It’s also the timing. The transfers came just months after two massive truck bombs went off almost simultaneously in front of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One of the statements issued by 9/11 Commission staff shows that in the aftermath of those bombings, Vice President Al Gore made a trip to Riyadh with the express purpose of getting the Saudis to give American investigators more access to people who could shed light on Al Qaeda’s financial backing—people who were already in Saudi custody. The Saudis, the 9/11 Commission staff wrote, were “reluctant or unable to provide much help … the United States never obtained this access.”

Kreindler’s theory holds that in the wake of the embassy bombings and increased pressure from then-President Bill Clinton’s administration for the Saudis to provide investigative assistance, Al Qaeda was either encouraged or decided independently to make its money harder to trace. Kreindler’s complaint and other government documents, including the indictment against Omar Abdi Mohamed, trace a circuitous route that would take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chicago office of the Al Qaeda-linked charity Global Relief on to San Diego and Omar Abdi Mohamed’s Western Somali Relief Agency, then through the money transfer service Dahabshiil to Karachi, Pakistan, where a waiting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent it to his nephew in Dubai, who put it into the pockets of the 19 men who would travel to the United States.

Getty
Getty
Kreindler’s team knows the chain they’ve put together is missing a link. They have no direct evidence that when Mohamed wrote checks to Dahabshiil from his charity’s bank accounts that they ended up in the Karachi branch. Yet they do have Barre, the Al Qaeda operative who set it up, telling U.S. investigators specifically that he received money from Somalis in the U.S. Kreindler also has the knowledge that the U.S. Department of Defense has extensive records seized at the time of Barre’s arrest that they’ve yet to share with them or anyone else. They, of course, would like to see those records.

In the aftermath of the “28 pages” release, the Saudis once again proclaimed their innocence and asserted that the details within were vindicating. (Neither Michael Kellogg, the lawyer representing the Saudis in the lawsuit, nor the Saudi Embassy would answer questions for this story.) And there is always the possibility that a very small number of officials in one branch of government, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, went rogue without the knowledge or blessing of the kingdom’s royal family. But Kreindler has experienced that scenario before with Libya, where then-Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi paid the settlement even as he denied ordering the bombing. Even if that happens, Kreindler believes he and his clients still win.

There’s also another element that ties the 9/11 case back to Libya. “Our secret sauce,” says Kreindler, “is sharing all the information we have with Justice and State and then getting to the point where plaintiffs’ demand for compensation becomes part of U.S. policy.” In short, Kreindler thinks he can win by being transparent and accommodating with a series of administrations that have shown no willingness to offer their own transparency or accommodation.

***

Omar Abdi Mohamed’s second wife and their six children still live in San Diego today. When reached by phone, one of them, now an adult, says her father is living happily in Nairobi, Kenya, with his third wife, the Australian, and the children they have together. That adult daughter, who didn’t want to be named, says the family isn’t sure whether her father has plans to return to the United States, though she thinks he may have recently reached out to an immigration attorney. What Mohamed’s daughter does finally know is that the case she had always assumed was a mere religiously motivated witch hunt actually had the weight of evidence behind it. It’s fair to characterize her reaction to this new information as shock. She promised to pass along my contact information to Mohamed at his new home in Nairobi. She said she thought there was a chance he would call. So far he hasn’t.

Similar attempts to reach ICE’s Schultz and the FBI agent who helped investigate Mohamed were also unsuccessful. During Mohamed’s immigration trial, the government successfully persuaded a judge to suppress the evidence it had gathered against him, citing matters of national security. In late March, Jim Kreindler’s firm received a formal notice from the Justice Department that its request to review that evidence would be denied.

What happens next in Kreindler’s case against Saudi Arabia is unclear. JASTA allowed him and his firm to name the country as a defendant, but the bill has come under serious attack since its passage. (Congress overrode Obama’s veto, the first of his two terms.) Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham have spent a considerable amount of time arguing against it, and continue to argue to water it down, saying that if other countries pass similar laws the nation hurt most by the trend may be our own. Then there is the Saudi lobbying apparatus, which at one point last fall numbered more than 10 firms and millions of dollars in fees per month. Just recently, the Daily Caller reported that U.S. military veterans were allegedly being offered what they thought were merely free trips to Washington, D.C., that were actually a Saudi-backed attempt by a lobbying firm to use former service members to argue against JASTA.

Least known of all is what might happen now that Donald Trump is president. During the campaign, Trump described Obama’s veto of JASTA as “shameful” and “one of the low points of his presidency.” Once in office, however, Trump has seemingly reverted to the status quo. He recently held a series of high-level meetings with Saudi deputies that the country’s delegates described optimistically as a “historic turning point” in the two allies’ relationship. Trump’s administration is now said to be weighing even greater involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which the Saudis see as a proxy battle with Iran, its primary Middle East antagonist. The Trump State Department has also approved a resumption of sales of precision-guided weapons to the Saudis, a measure that was suspended late in the Obama administration.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that Kreindler’s firm will receive anything like the sort of treatment it got from the U.S. government during its two decades-long case against Libya. Back then, the firm worked hand in glove with high-ranking officials in the State Department in order to resolve the Lockerbie case—paying victims’ families their settlement money was one of the conditions Qadhafi had to satisfy in order to have key economic sanctions finally lifted. In lieu of that level of support, Kreindler has identified a series of smaller measures Trump could take that would still help his case and, just as important, paint a fuller picture of the years and months of stateside planning prior to 9/11. Key among those are FBI reports that might shed light on who, if anyone, was helping the terrorists in the many other American cities in which they lived. As Bob Graham points out, the only reason the evidence in San Diego is compelling is because we actually know it, a result of some good detective work by a member of his Joint Inquiry staff. “I believe if we knew all the facts,” Graham says, “We would find that there were people similar to al-Bayoumi and Mohamed in southeast Florida, Virginia and New Jersey.”

That we don’t have definitive answers is a testament to the enduring secrecy that persists almost 16 years later. It’s also a testament to the patience of people like Kreindler, whose team has been working that whole time to get what it needs to prove its case, and who believes that no matter who is in office, there will only be one conclusion.

“If the president does nothing, we’ll still prevail,” he says. “The only question is how much longer it will take.”


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... yer-214996
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby 8bitagent » Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:37 am

Thank you for posting this SLAD. Been saying it for 10 years on here, the fake "Muslim" charities in the 90s/early 2000s were one of the rosetta stone smoking guns of how the powers that be were able to funnel money to the 9/11 operation.
Last edited by 8bitagent on Sun Jun 18, 2017 3:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby Elvis » Sun Jun 18, 2017 3:22 am

8bitagent » Sat Jun 17, 2017 11:37 pm wrote:Thank you for posting this SLAD. Been saying it for 10 years on here, the fake "Muslim" charties in the 90s/early 2000s were one of the rosetta stone smoking guns of how the powers that be were able to funnel money to the 9/11 operation.


And let's not forget that Douglas Feith and others in the Bush-Cheney Gang erected some of those "Muslim charities."
Fakity-fake-fake-fake.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:29 pm

Fake Muslim charities run by fake Muslims.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:21 am

'Will the 9/11 Case Finally Go to Trial?': Andrew Cockburn on New Evidence Linking Saudis to Attacks
Saudi Arabia is already trying to change the law so that they can’t be sued.
By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now! September 15, 2017, 1:53 PM GMT

Former Exxon CEO and current U.S. Sec. of State, Rex Tillerson, shakes hands with Saudi Defense Minister, Prince Mohammad bin Salman during Trump's recent visit.
Photo Credit: Saudi Press Agency via Twitter

As the nation marks the 16th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, questions still swirl about the role of Saudi Arabia in the attacks. The 9/11 attack was carried out by 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia. Sixteen years after the attacks, 9/11 families and survivors are continuing their efforts to take Saudi Arabia to trial. Just this week, the New York Post reported new evidence presented in the case alleging the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., funded a "dry run" of 9/11 two years before the attacks. The families’ lawyers say the new allegations offer "a pattern of both financial and operational support" by the Saudi government. We speak with Andrew Cockburn, whose latest piece is headlined "Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?"

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As the nation marks the 16th anniversary this week of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, questions still swirl about the role of Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia. Sixteen years later, 9/11 families and survivors are continuing their efforts to take Saudi Arabia to trial. Just this week, the New York Post reported new evidence presented in the case alleging the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., paid for two Saudi nationals who were living in the U.S. undercover to fly from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., quote, "in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks," unquote. The families’ lawyers say the new allegations offer, quote, "a pattern of both financial and operational support" by the Saudi government.

We go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Andrew Cockburn. His latest piece in Harper’s is headlined "Crime and Punishment: Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?"

Welcome, Andrew. Can you please lay out that case?

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, the case, it’s a consolidation of various lawsuits that were brought in almost immediately after the attacks. And it alleges that the hijackers received material support and backing, and both financial and organizational, from agents of the Saudi government, acting in their capacity as agents of the Saudi government, and therefore, that the Saudi government is itself liable for the attacks on 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about who the plaintiffs are.

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, they’re a whole bunch of people, 6,500, roughly, in all. They are the, first of all, bereaved families, widows, parents, children, orphaned or not orphaned, but bereaved families, whose husbands, sons, mothers were killed in the attacks. Also includes survivors, people who were—you know, who were in the attacks but managed to at least escape with their lives, even if they were injured. And it also includes insurance companies, who had to pay out millions and billions of dollars in claims, but are now seeking to get some of that money back from the people they allege actually caused the attacks.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew, last year, I interviewed former Senator Bob Graham, the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co-chair of the joint congressional inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is what he said.

BOB GRAHAM: Immediately after 9/11, the government began to look for suspects who had helped these hijackers, and they focused on Iraq. They even had a concocted story that a representative of Saddam Hussein had met with al-Qaeda operatives in Prague, in the Czech Republic. That turned out to be false. My feeling is that what happened is they wanted to go to war with Iraq, had wanted to, particularly people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and it was embarrassing to find out that the information that was becoming available seemed to more point to Saudi Arabia as having been the country that aided the 9/11, rather than Iraq. And so, the response to that is, let’s suppress the information about Saudi Arabia’s involvement, so that we don’t confuse the people in the Congress as we push hard to get authorization for war in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the former U.S. Senator Bob Graham. Talk more about what he’s saying, Andrew Cockburn.

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, that’s right. I mean, in a way, there’s one thing that the Bush administration and Senator Graham agreed on, which was that the—for the hijacking, for the 9/11 operation to succeed, they had to have had the support of—the structured support of a nation-state, I mean, the elaborate—in terms of money, in terms of contacts, in terms of—you know, these were a bunch of, basically, sort of hicks, who—most of them, who arrived in this country, didn’t speak English, didn’t know people. And they were all taken care of and found places to live and given money and, you know, steered to flying lessons. You know, it was a very sophisticated or well-organized operation. And that had to have been—in Graham’s view, and, it seems, in mine, too, had to have been done by a state. Now, the Bush administration tried to say it was Iraq. In fact, they so wanted it to be Iraq, or wanted people to believe it was Iraq, that prisoners—interrogators at Guantánamo were under instructions to torture detainees in Guantánamo into admitting, falsely, this link between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackings.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why was Iraq the focus after—I mean, if you polled most people in the United States, they would not know that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Why was it in the interest, do you believe, of the state to do this?

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, first of all, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is so sacrosanct in the eyes of the—if you want to call it, the sort of ruling apparatus in this country. And it runs very, very deep. You know, there’s all sorts of aspects to it—most vividly, obviously, the huge financial benefits that flow at least to the U.S. defense industry, the U.S. military-industrial complex, in terms of arms contracts, consultancy contracts for retired general officers. You know, there’s just a very close sort of symbiotic relationship between the two. The whole relationship of the oil companies to Saudi Arabia, you know, things that you wouldn’t think of. For example, every American—I’ve been informed that every time an American military flight flies over Saudi Arabia, which they really have to do to get to the big bases in the Gulf, they have to ask permission from the Saudis, which the Saudis, just to jerk our chain, occasionally refuse. There were subsidies on the price of oil for a long time. There was allegedly support in the worldwide network of mosques. So, you know, this was the idea that we would—even though they had just attacked us, that we would sort of suddenly turn on the Saudis, I think, just couldn’t—didn’t compute.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you—

ANDREW COCKBURN: Go on.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Michael Jacobson, who he was and what he uncovered, Andrew?

ANDREW COCKBURN: He’s absolutely key. Let me say, Jacobson was an investigator on the Senate, the intelligence—the joint inquiry by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which was chaired by Bob Graham, that was set up right after the attacks. Jacobson was an investigator in that. And really early on, he noticed an odd discrepancy, an odd mention in FBI files here in Washington, that seemed to say—that said that one of the hijackers had been in contact with an FBIinformant. And he thought, "This is quite interesting." And he wanted—he put in to go to San Diego. This is a hijacker, sorry, I should say, who had been living in San Diego. He pushed to go to San Diego to look into the files in the local FBI office. Interestingly, the then-head of the FBI, Mr. Mueller, Robert Mueller, now investigating the Trump—allegations about Donald Trump, pushed—moved heaven and earth to stop Jacobson going to San Diego. Nevertheless, the committee insisted he do so. And he went there and found most of what we know about the Saudi connection.

He found that in the files they had—there was plenty of information about a Saudi agent, Mr. al-Bayoumi, who everyone in the FBI, certainly, out there believed was a Saudi agent, who had been in close contact with the hijackers, who had found them a place to live in San Diego, had opened a bank account for them, had helped them—well, introduced them to people who helped them get flying lessons, helped them to get driver’s licenses—had basically been their case officer, it seemed. This was all turned up in—I mean, I could go on. You know, there’s other people. There were checks that went from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that went, more or less—I mean, indirectly, but in a pretty straightforward procedure—to the hijacker, or to Mr. Bayoumi, for looking after the hijackers. Mr. Bayoumi himself worked for a company owned by the Saudi Ministry of Defense, but never showed up to work.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew, we just have 20 seconds, but the subtitle of your piece, "Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?" Will it?

ANDREW COCKBURN: Yes. I mean, despite the best efforts of the U.S. government and court system. It’s moving remorselessly toward that. We’ve had the complaint. We’ve had the motion to dismiss, that will be answered. Looks like sometime next year we’ll actually get an actual trial going. And the Saudis, I might say, are freaked out about this. They’re making every effort to derail this thing, to try and get the law changed so that they can’t be sued.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we will continue to follow it. Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s magazine. We’ll link to your piece, "Crime and Punishment."

And that does it for today’s broadcast. My co-host Juan González’s continuing speaking tour, you can check our website at Democracy Now! He’ll be in Tempe on Thursday, and Austin, as well.



Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of The Silenced Majority, a New York Times best-seller.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... saudis-911



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZtXlqv97B0


Crime and Punishment

Will the 9/11 case finally go to trial?
By Andrew Cockburn

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Meeting with the leaders of NATO countries in May, President Trump chastised them sternly for their shortcomings as allies. He took the time, however, to make respectful reference to the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whom he had just visited at the start of his first overseas trip as president. “I spent much time with King Salman,” he told the glum-looking cluster of Europeans, calling him “a wise man who wants to see things get much better rapidly.”

Some might find this fulsome description surprising, given widespread reports that Salman, who took the throne in January 2015, suffers from dementia. Generally seen wearing a puzzled look, the king has been known to wander off in the middle of conversations, as he reportedly did once while talking with President Obama. When speaking in public, he depends on fast-typing aides whose prompts appear on a discreetly concealed monitor.


Illustrations by Darrel Rees. Source photographs: King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud © Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa/Alamy; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, September 20, 2001 © David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images; President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, August 27, 2002 © Eric Draper/The White House/The New York Times

Whatever wisdom Trump absorbed from his elderly royal friend, the primary purpose of his trip to Riyadh, according to a former senior U.S. official briefed on the proceedings, was cash — both in arms sales and investments in crumbling American infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, and tunnels. The Trump Administration is “desperate for Saudi money, especially infrastructure investments in the Rust Belt,” the former official told me. An influx of Saudi dollars could generate jobs and thus redound to Trump’s political benefit. As a cynical douceur, the Saudis, derided by Trump during his campaign as “people that kill women and treat women horribly,” joined the United Arab Emirates in pledging $100 million for a women’s-empowerment initiative spearheaded by Ivanka Trump. A joyful president took part in the traditional sword dance and then helped launch a Saudi center for “combating extremism.”

This was not the first time the Saudis had dangled the prospect of massive investments to leverage U.S. support. “Mohammad bin Salman made the same pitch to the Obama people,” the former official told me. “ ‘We’re going to invest all this money here, you’re going to be our great economic partner, etc.’ Because the Trump Administration doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, they were really seduced by this.”

The president certainly viewed the visit as a huge success. “We made and saved the U.S.A. many billions of dollars and millions of jobs,” he tweeted as he left Saudi Arabia. The White House soon trumpeted $110 billion in weapons sales and billions more in infrastructure investments, with the total purportedly rising to $350 billion.

Yet amid the sword dances and flattery, a shadow lingered over the occasion: 9/11. After years of glacial legal progress, the momentous charge that our Saudi allies enabled and supported the most devastating act of mass murder on American soil may now be coming to a resolution. Thanks to a combination of court decisions, congressional action, and the disclosure of long-sequestered government records, it appears increasingly likely that our supposed friend and peerless weapons customer will finally face its accusers in court.

ver the years, successive administrations have made strenuous efforts to suppress discussion of Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks, deploying everything from abusive security classification to the judiciary to a presidential veto. Now, at last, we stand a chance of discovering what really happened, largely because of a court case.

In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, which grew out of a suit filed in 2002 on behalf of bereaved family members and other victims of the attacks, includes a charge of direct Saudi government involvement in 9/11. It also claims that Riyadh directly funded the creation, growth, and operations of Al Qaeda worldwide. The Saudis, though scorning the accusation, have been striving ever more desperately to prevent the case from advancing through the legal system. To that end, they have employed to date no fewer than fifteen high-powered Washington lobbying firms.

The task is growing more urgent because the kingdom, long confident of essentially unlimited wealth, is facing money problems. Oil prices are in a slump and likely to stay there. The war in Yemen, launched in 2015 by Salman’s appointed heir, Mohammed bin Salman, drags on, costing an estimated $200 million a day, with no end in sight. To alleviate his cash-flow problems, the young prince is set on raising as much as $2 trillion by floating the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, on international stock markets. That is part of the reason the 9/11 lawsuit poses such a threat — it raises the possibility that much-needed cash from the stock sale might never find its way to Riyadh. “They’re afraid they’re going to get a default judgment against them, and some of their domestic assets will be seized,” the former senior official explained to me.

To Sharon Premoli, one of the more than 6,500 plaintiffs in the lawsuit, that is precisely the goal. On September 11, she had been at her desk at a financial services software company, on the eightieth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building thirteen floors above her. Fleeing the area, she had almost reached safety when the South Tower came crashing down, propelling her into a plateglass window. Coming to, she found herself lying on top of a dead body. Like many other survivors, she has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the legal issues around the case, not to mention the world of terrorism and Saudi connections thereto. A multibillion-dollar award “would certainly stop the Saudis from financing terrorism,” she told me. “That’s the whole point of this. It is all about money. If you can cut that off, that would make a serious impact on the dissemination of this rabid ideology around the world.”


Source photographs: Anwar al-Awlaki © Tracy Woodward/The Washington Post/Getty Images; Abdussattar Shaikh’s San Diego home © Dave Gatley/The New York Times; hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center © Spencer Platt/Getty Images; the San Diego skyline © Ian Dagnall/Alamy; hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi; Colony Hotel, Delray Beach, Florida © Ian Dagnall/Alamy

Premoli was more fortunate than Peter Owens, a forty-two-year-old bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, twenty-four floors above her, who had no chance of escape. He left behind a wife and three children. “It’s kind of sad to look forward to the anniversary,” Kathy Owens told me recently. Each September gives her hope that the recurring news peg will inspire journalists to explore the case. “We started a war because of 9/11 — more than one war — and the wars are still going on,” she said. “Every war we start now, we say it’s because of 9/11. It manages so much of our lives. They keep fighting the war on terror, but we are giving the Saudis a pass, despite all of this evidence.”

There has always been evidence — in abundance. The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 began work in February 2002. Congressional investigators soon uncovered numerous failures by the FBI and CIA. The degree of cumulative incompetence was breathtaking. Most egregiously, the CIA had been well aware that two known Al Qaeda operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were en route to the United States, but the agency had refused to tell the FBI. The FBI, meanwhile, had multiple reports in its San Diego office on locally based Saudis suspected of terrorist associations, but failed to take action.

San Diego looms large in the recorded history of 9/11, though not because it was the focal point of the plot. While preparing for the operation, the future hijackers had been dispersed around the country, in such places as New Jersey and Florida. The reason we know so much about the West Coast activities of the hijackers is largely because of Michael Jacobson, a burly former FBI lawyer and counterterrorism analyst who worked as an investigator for the Joint Inquiry. Reviewing files at FBI headquarters, he came across a stray reference to a bureau informant in San Diego who had known one of the hijackers. Intrigued, he decided to follow up in the San Diego field office. Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.

Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details, notably the hijackers’ close relationship with Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi living in San Diego with a no-show job at a local company with connections to the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The FBI had investigated his possible connections to Saudi intelligence. A couple of weeks after the two hijackers flew into Los Angeles from Malaysia, in February 2000, he had driven up to the city and met with Fahad al-Thumairy, a cleric employed by his country’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs who worked out of the Saudi Consulate. Thumairy, reported to be an adherent of extreme Wahhabi ideology — he was later denied a U.S. visa on grounds of jihadi connections — was also an imam of the King Fahad mosque in Los Angeles County, which the hijackers had visited soon after their arrival.

After meeting with Thumairy, Bayoumi had driven across town to a Middle Eastern restaurant where he “accidentally” encountered and introduced himself to Hazmi and Mihdhar. He invited them to move to San Diego, found them an apartment, paid their first month’s rent, helped them open a bank account, and introduced them to members of the local Saudi community, including his close friend Osama Bassnan.

During the time Bayoumi was catering to the hijackers’ needs, his salary as a ghost employee of the aviation company got a 700 percent boost; it was cut when they left town. That was not his only source of extra funds: After Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego, Bassnan’s wife began signing over to Bayoumi’s wife the checks she received from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The total value reportedly came to nearly $150,000.

Jacobson also found evidence, noted but seemingly ignored by the bureau, that Hazmi had worked for a San Diego businessman who had himself been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation. Even more amazingly, the two hijackers had been close with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh. Hazmi had actually lived in his house after Mihdhar left town. Shaikh failed to mention his young Saudi friends’ last names in regular reports to his FBI case officer, or that they were taking flying lessons. Understandably, the investigators had a lot of questions for this man. Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location “for his own safety.” Today, Graham believes that Mueller was acting under orders from the White House.

Another intriguing document unearthed by the investigators in San Diego was a memo from July 2, 2002, discussing alleged financial connections between the September 11 hijackers, Saudi government officials, and members of the Saudi royal family. It stated that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi Government.”

Back in 2002, Graham himself was already coming to the conclusion that the 9/11 attacks could not have been the work of a stand-alone terrorist cell. As he later wrote, “I believed almost intuitively that the terrorists who pulled off this attack must have had an elaborate support network, abroad and in the U.S.A.,” with expenses far exceeding the official estimate of $250,000. “For that reason,” he continued, “as well as because of the benefits that come with the confidentiality of diplomatic cover, this infrastructure of support was probably maintained, at least in part, by a nation-state.”

I asked Graham whether he believed that a careful search of the FBI files in Florida and elsewhere would yield similarly explosive disclosures. He told me that the inquiry would have doubtless discovered whom the hijackers were associating with in those places, and where that money came from. Fifteen years on, Graham still regretted not having pursued the possibility of revelatory FBI files in those other locations “aggressively.” Instead, he lamented, the inquiry ended up “with San Diego being the microscope through which we’ve been looking at this whole plot.”

1 Several years later, Awlaki would become notorious as a recruiter of terrorists; he was deemed so dangerous that President Obama ordered his execution by drone in Yemen, in 2011.
Even the comparatively comprehensive accounts of the San Diego phase of the plot may be missing some telling leads. FBI records detailed the close connections between Bayoumi, the hijackers, and a local imam, Anwar al-Awlaki.1 Awlaki apparently served as the hijackers’ spiritual mentor. He soon moved to Northern Virginia, and when Hazmi and another hijacker arrived in the neighborhood in April 2001 to begin their final preparations, he served in that capacity again, and also found them an apartment. Many investigators, including Graham, concluded that Awlaki was not only aware of the developing plot but very much a part of it.

But before that, Awlaki reportedly served as a senior official of a “charity” — viewed by the FBI as a terrorist fund-raising operation — founded by Abdul Majid al-Zindani, a Saudi-backed cleric in Yemen. Zindani had been the spiritual mentor of Osama bin Laden himself. He also founded a powerful Yemeni political party and headed Iman University in Sanaa, often described as a jihadi recruiting hub. Both of these enterprises were supported by Saudi money.

In 2004, the U.S. government listed Zindani as a “specially designated global terrorist” and a supporter of Al Qaeda. This in no way interfered with his travels to Saudi Arabia, however. As recently as this February, Zindani was observed in the company of prominent clerics in Mecca. Among those who have drawn attention to this in published reports is Michael Jacobson, who after service with the 9/11 inquiries returned to counterterrorism analysis with the U.S. Treasury. Currently, he is at the State Department. When I called him to discuss Zindani’s relationship with the Saudis, he quickly replied, “I can’t talk about that,” and ended the conversation with the words, “Good luck.”

fter a mere ten months, in December 2002, the Joint Inquiry team presented its report to the CIA for declassification. The agency demanded numerous cuts, only a few of which, in Graham’s view, were justified. But one section had been censored in its entirety: a twenty-eight-page summary, written by Jacobson, of the evidence relating to Saudi government support for the hijackers. It was the only area on which the Bush White House absolutely refused to relent. “The president’s loyalty apparently lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety,” Graham told me bitterly. To highlight the degree of censorship, he made sure that the published version of the report included the blacked-out pages, much to the irritation of the intelligence community.

The report concluded that the FBI, in light of its lamentable performance, deserved to be drastically reformed. But many questions remained unanswered. The 9/11 families, now emerging as a powerful lobby, called for a more sweeping probe. In November 2002, Congress had authorized another bipartisan panel, a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The initial choice of chairperson for the new probe, Henry Kissinger, drew outrage from 9/11 families, particularly a formidable foursome of well-informed widows known as the Jersey Girls, who questioned his impartiality given his suspected professional ties to prominent Saudis. Rather than divulge his Saudi client list, Kissinger quit. Ultimately, the White House selected in his place two retired politicians — Tom Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, who had represented Indiana in the House. Neither, especially Hamilton, showed much inclination to challenge the Bush Administration’s preferred version of events.

For the post of executive director, Kean and Hamilton appointed Philip Zelikow, a historian and national security scholar with strong connections to the Bush Administration. (He had served on the Bush transition team and prepared an important policy paper for his friend Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.) A forceful personality, Zelikow maintained strict day-to-day control of the investigation. According to The Commission, by the former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, Dana Lesemann, a Justice Department lawyer who had worked on the prior congressional investigation before transferring to the commission staff, asked for Zelikow’s permission to review the redacted twenty-eight pages. In Shenon’s account, he refused. Bucking his orders, she obtained them anyway, whereupon she was promptly fired.2

2 Speaking to Harper’s Magazine, Zelikow denied the account and said that Lesemann, who had a security clearance, had been fired for “violating her security agreement.” He declined to elaborate further, citing what he called a “privacy issue.” Lesemann died in March 2017.
Despite these obstacles, commission staffers did energetically pursue leads uncovered by the original probe. They were therefore frustrated when telling indications of a Saudi connection were largely excluded or downplayed in the main text of the final report. The staffers were, however, able to smuggle much of what they had uncovered into endnotes at the back of the document — an act of small-print, guerrilla-style resistance. For example, Jacobson and a colleague flew to Riyadh to interview Fahad al-Thumairy, the cleric from the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles subsequently banned from the United States as a suspected terrorist. During the interview, with Saudi officials in attendance, Thumairy denied any connection to the plot — in fact, he disclaimed ever having met Bayoumi or the hijackers. The investigators concluded that he was “lying” and “dangerous.” The main text of the report mentions both the allegations and his denials, without coming to any particular conclusion. But lengthy endnotes specify the numerous phone calls between Thumairy and Bayoumi over several years, as well as evidence that Thumairy’s occasional chauffeur had driven Hazmi and Mihdhar, at Thumairy’s request, on sightseeing trips to Sea World and other spots.

The main conclusion from the final report was that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” The Saudi authorities were so pleased by this verdict that they posted the quote on the website of their Washington embassy. The published version of the report was a bestseller, nominated for a National Book Award, and hailed by the novelist John Updike as the greatest masterpiece written by a committee since the King James Bible.

o far as the U.S. government and most of the media were concerned, there was no need for further investigation. But the Bush Administration didn’t reject the notion that a nation-state had been behind the attacks. They merely offered up a different nominee for the role: Iraq. In the absence of any evidence to back this up, interrogators at Guantánamo were tasked, according to a 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, to torture detainees into admitting to such a link.

The 9/11 families, however, had no interest in letting the kingdom off the hook. Nor did their lawyers. These included Ron Motley, of the South Carolina firm Motley Rice. He had recently scored the largest civil settlement in history — some $246 billion from America’s tobacco companies — and was eager for a fresh challenge. Also enlisted in the multiple suits were Jim Kreindler, the New York aviation lawyer who had won more than $2 billion from Muammar Qaddafi in the Pan Am Flight 103 case, and Stephen Cozen of Cozen O’Connor, specialists in recovering money for insurance companies.

The 9/11 suit as it now stands is a compilation of many such suits. It cites evidence of direct support for the attacks by Saudi officials such as Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Bassnan. It also lays out the case for the intimate involvement of the Saudi government in the creation and expansion of Al Qaeda. Whereas the 9/11 Commission Report began its narrative with Osama bin Laden, In re Terrorist Attacks goes back to the foundation of the Al Saud family’s rule and its alliance with the puritanical and intolerant Wahhabi sect. In the 1970s, and then again in the early 1990s, violent challenges to the family’s legitimacy, fostered by its corruption and backsliding from the fundamentalist creed, persuaded the ruling princes to appease the clerics by giving them further leeway, and massive amounts of money, to export their extremist agenda.

For example, according to internal Al Qaeda documents seized by U.S. forces in 2002, a man named Abdullah Omar Naseef was simultaneously the head of one such Saudi “charity,” the Muslim World League, and a member of the Majlis al-Shura, the kingdom’s consultative assembly, which is entirely appointed by the government. Naseef not only met with bin Laden and leaders of Al Qaeda at the time of its founding but reportedly agreed that the league’s offices would be used as a platform for the new organization. He then proceeded to appoint senior Al Qaeda figures to run league offices in such key outposts as Pakistan and the Philippines, the latter position being entrusted to bin Laden’s brother-in-law. Another group, the International Islamic Relief Organization, is meanwhile said to have funded terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, from which the 9/11 hijackers graduated, and in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, for the evident use of terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Should there have been any doubt about the connection between these Wahhabi missionary groups and the Saudi government, they were dispelled by the groups themselves. In documents filed between 2002 and 2005, some formally declared themselves to be organs of the state. They could thus shelter behind the principal Saudi defensive fortification in the case: the immunity enjoyed by foreign countries against being sued in U.S. courts, granted by the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.

For years, this appeared to be a sound strategy, in large part because of the 9/11 Commission’s concluding blanket absolution of the Saudi government. In 2005, U.S. District Judge Richard Casey dismissed the case against the kingdom itself and many of the individual defendants, on the grounds that they were covered by sovereign immunity.

Casey’s judgment was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2008, prompting an appeal to the Supreme Court in 2009, just as Barack Obama entered the White House. Candidate Obama had talked derisively about Bush’s “buddying up to the Saudi royal family and then begging them for oil.” President Obama’s Justice Department almost immediately informed the Supreme Court that the Saudis were in no way liable. Shortly thereafter, Obama flew to Riyadh, where he was royally entertained and duly bedecked with the gold chain and medal of the Order of King Abdulaziz, an honor also conferred on Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Trump. “Goodness gracious,” he exclaimed when presented with the costly bauble, “that’s something there!”

“The mystery to me is Obama,” remarked Graham. He could, he said, understand Bush’s rationale for covering up the Saudi connection in order to bolster the case for war with Iraq. But Obama’s refusal to address the issue, which included a multi-year reluctance to release the twenty-eight pages, mystified him. Meeting with officials on Obama’s National Security Council, he found them “very non-forthcoming. ‘You’ve got all the files,’ ” he told them. “ ‘Go back and verify what I’ve just said and see if you hold the same opinion about the Saudis that you have just stated.’ Either they didn’t want to find out the facts, or if they found them out, they ignored them.”

imilarly uninterested in the facts, at least as Graham saw them, was the 9/11 Review Commission authorized by Congress in 2014 to examine the progress of reforms recommended by the original commission, and recheck its conclusions on the attacks. Three commissioners were appointed to the task by the FBI director, James Comey: Reagan’s former attorney general, Edwin Meese; the former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer; and Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and former RAND official. This inquiry, working with the “full cooperation” of the FBI, upheld the conclusions of the original commission in full. No one from this commission contacted Graham.

In reality, the Obama Administration was well aware that Saudi Arabia was a supporter of terrorism, though it kept the information to itself. Only through WikiLeaks did we learn of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s classified cable, circulated to department officials in December 2009, stating as fact that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Saudi Arabia was of course also a significant source of funding to the U.S. defense industry. Two years after the classified cable, Clinton aide Jake Sullivan emailed her the “good news” that the kingdom had just signed a $30 billion order for Boeing F-15 fighters. “Not a bad Christmas present,” observed someone else on the same email thread.

However, while the administration and the intelligence agencies maintained the tradition of protecting the Saudis, the long-stalled legal case against the kingdom was coming back to life. One major stumbling block remained: the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act. Faced with this legal bulwark, the families and their lawyers resolved to get Congress to change the law. The resulting legislation, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), was crafted to blow away the Saudis’ immunity from prosecution.

Kathy Owens was among the widows and other plaintiffs crowding the corridors of Congress in May 2016 to push for the bill. For the first decade after the attack, she had paid little attention to the lawsuit, adding her name only at her father’s urging. Then she happened to pick up a magazine excerpt from Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s book on 9/11, The Eleventh Day. “It woke me up,” she told me. “What? There was Saudi involvement and possibly our government was onto it, and nothing was being done about it, and things were being kept secret?” Learning about JASTA from a website run by Sharon Premoli, Owens started making trips to Washington.

The government warned that the proposed law could inspire similar legislation abroad, allowing foreigners to sue America, and Americans (though JASTA did not apply to individuals). The president’s press secretary pushed this argument, as did State Department officials. Prominent former national security experts dispatched warnings to Congress. Even the Dutch parliament weighed in, apparently swayed by the State Department’s pronouncements.

“It was a bogeyman they threw out in every setting,” one of the senior lawyers involved in the lawsuit told me, explaining that the government had been raising the same objection on previous occasions. Yet “we haven’t seen any floodgate of claims against the United States.” In the view of this attorney, who has spent most of his life since 9/11 working on the case, the Obama Administration was merely “feigning” concern. “They’re not dumb. They had to understand that these arguments didn’t hold water.”
here was one foreign state threatening to strike back at the United States if JASTA became law. Visiting Washington in March 2016, before Congress began voting on the measure, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir explicitly warned that his government might sell its portfolio of “$750 billion” in U.S. Treasury bonds, thereby crashing the market in government securities, should JASTA become law. (The figure was a wild exaggeration — U.S. Treasury figures showed that the real amount was $117 billion.)

Even with all the threats and warnings, the House passed the bill that September, whereupon Obama announced he would veto it, which he duly did. The battle resumed with greater intensity as both sides prepared another vote. “President Obama, you can’t hide! We’ll get Congress to override,” protesters chanted outside the White House.

Despite frantic efforts by the administration, and ranks of lobbyists for the Saudis, the Senate crushed Obama’s veto, 97 to 1. It was the first and only time Obama suffered such an indignity. Reportedly, he was “furious.” Meanwhile, bipartisan pressure to release the censored twenty-eight pages in Graham’s original report had been building for some time, led by congressmen such as the Democrat Stephen Lynch and the Republican Walter Jones. Jones, once a fervent hawk, had turned sharply dovish, through guilt, as he told me, over voting for the Iraq war on the basis of “lies.” (He writes a letter of condolence to the family of every single casualty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Jones, Lynch, and others on both sides of the aisle held regular press conferences about the twenty-eight pages “to keep a drumbeat going to give the 9/11 families the complete truth.”

With the exception of that committed group, Owens was not impressed by what she found on Capitol Hill. Most of the senators and representatives she met didn’t seem to care who was behind 9/11. “They just didn’t want to be seen as voting against the 9/11 families. So they would vote yes for it, and then try to sabotage it behind the scenes. . . . Washington is an ugly place.” Encouraging this assessment was her discovery that at the very moment they were voting almost unanimously for the bill, a significant number of senators from both parties were quietly circulating and signing a letter citing “concerns” regarding JASTA’s “potential unintended consequences” to “the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” In effect, they were suggesting that the law they had just been seen enthusiastically supporting be weakened.

Front and center in this sorry initiative were Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who, following the override, introduced amendments purportedly designed to “fix” JASTA. One of the 9/11 lawyers coolly appraised this tactic as “demonstrably the brainchild of Saudi lawyers here in Washington. They don’t fix JASTA, they’re designed to gut JASTA.” The lawyer speculated that the Saudis’ lobbyists hadn’t told their clients that “even if amendments like that were to be enacted, this litigation would continue.” The lobbyists’ interests, he suggested, lay in keeping the fight going as long as possible. “I think that you’ve got dozens of retainers out there that people would like to extend into the very distant future.”

eanwhile, after JASTA became law, dozens of veterans across the country received invitations to a “cool trip.” At no cost to themselves, they would fly to Washington, stay at the luxurious Trump Hotel — and tell Congress how the law endangered them and others who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan by potentially opening them to lawsuits. The entire operation was sponsored by the Saudi government. However, according to multiple accounts by veterans who made the trip, they were not informed beforehand of the Saudi involvement as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They discovered the connection only by accident. Scott Bartels, who served two tours in Iraq, described his experience to me. “We were told that a veterans’ advocacy group [had] brought us there to propose a fix to JASTA,” he said. “If anyone in Congress asked us what group we were from, or who we were associated with, then we were to simply say we were an independent group of concerned veterans here on our own, because JASTA posed a threat to veterans.”

Jason Johns, a lobbyist for Qorvis, which brought Bartels and some 140 others to Washington, denied that the veterans were ever misinformed as to who was paying the tab. He also insisted to me that his failure to mention the Saudis in various written materials distributed to the veterans did not violate the law. (Justice Department guidelines specifically stipulate that all such material must state the name of the “foreign principal.”)3

3 Three of Johns’s colleagues in the veterans-against-JASTA effort echoed his argument that no laws had been broken. It was, in any case, a highly profitable enterprise for the organizers. Johns himself received $100,000, while the Trump Hotel billed Qorvis $270,000 for lodging, refreshments, and parking. In total, Saudi payments to their lobbyists during the JASTA fight ran to at least $1.3 million a month.
At the same time, another legal barrier, erected years before by George W. Bush, had already crumbled. Yielding to mounting pressure, Congress finally released the infamous twenty-eight pages in July 2016, albeit with many passages still censored. At long last, the discoveries unearthed by Jacobson and his colleagues in San Diego could be incorporated in the lawsuit. Though salient details, such as Omar Bayoumi’s role in assisting the hijackers, had previously been bruited about, many new ones came to light, such as the actions of Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi cleric and government employee who had suddenly moved to Hazmi and Mihdhar’s hotel the night before the attacks. Hussayen was “deceptive” about his relationship with the attackers when interviewed by the FBI and feigned a seizure to evade further questioning. Taken to the hospital, he escaped and fled the country. The world also learned about Mohammed al-Qudhaeein, another Saudi government agent whose “profile is similar to that of al-Bayoumi.” While on his way to a party at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Qudhaeein researched ways to get into an American Airlines cockpit. (Thanks to a tip from a friendly government archivist, Kathy Owens meanwhile unearthed another long-censored document that had been quietly declassified. It reveals an Al Qaeda member’s flight certificate enclosed in a Saudi Embassy envelope.)

Even before the release of these documents, some with a vested interest in the official story had already begun circling the wagons. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton penned an op-ed in USA Today misleadingly asserting that the twenty-eight pages consisted merely of “raw, unvetted material,” and stated that 9/11 Commission staff had access to the classified pages and pursued the leads before absolving the Saudi government. In their motion to dismiss the lawsuit, filed on August 1, 2017, Saudi Arabia’s D.C. lawyers, Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, hewed to much the same posture. Employing the assertive bluster common to such documents, they derided the relevance of the missing pages, invoked the findings of the 9/11 Commission as gospel, scorned assertions regarding Saudi government collusion with Al Qaeda, and challenged the very notion that JASTA would allow the lawsuit against the Saudi government to proceed. Naturally, they demanded that the suit be dismissed.

Ironically, the newly released pages also resonated among a group of lawyers very far removed from the JASTA plaintiffs, but no less embroiled in the story of the attacks. In a courtroom in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, attorneys employed by the Defense Department were defending five of the original 9/11 conspirators, who were facing charges in a military court. Now these attorneys demanded that portions of the twenty-eight pages still being withheld by the government — a total of three pages — be made available to the defense. (The military judge rejected the motion in an order that was, naturally, withheld from the public at large.) Edwin Perry, who is defending Walid bin Attash, pointed out that his client and the other defendants were being held wholly responsible for the attacks. If there was information, he argued, that identified “other individuals more responsible,” then the government should make it known.

It seems a reasonable request.
https://harpers.org/archive/2017/10/cri ... hment-4/7/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby 8bitagent » Sun Sep 17, 2017 4:11 am

Good post SLAD. In 14 years of being aware of "9/11 Truth", as most the conspiracy theorist truther crowd as devolved back from "intel false flags" to "THE MOOSLIMS DID IT!" with terror cases, I have to say I personally find the new evidence some of the most damning that has come out since the 2002 joint senate inquiry. If there is even a kernel of truth to the DC Saudi embassy running test flights with Saudi agents from Phoenix to DC, thats huge. Even right wing blowhard actor James Woods back in 2001 was saying he saw from Phoenix to New York flights middle eastern men doing rehearsed drills that later seemed like what the 9/11 hijackers did. And no surprise, in the recent New York Post article, Anwar al-Awlaki seems connected to it all
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 17, 2017 1:58 pm

Elvis » Sun Jun 18, 2017 2:22 am wrote:
8bitagent » Sat Jun 17, 2017 11:37 pm wrote:Thank you for posting this SLAD. Been saying it for 10 years on here, the fake "Muslim" charties in the 90s/early 2000s were one of the rosetta stone smoking guns of how the powers that be were able to funnel money to the 9/11 operation.


And let's not forget that Douglas Feith and others in the Bush-Cheney Gang erected some of those "Muslim charities."
Fakity-fake-fake-fake.


seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sun Apr-06-08 05:32 PM
Response to Original message
1. My Feith Facts


Secrets: Classified Info: Springing a Leak
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Behind the AIPAC Probe, Neocons Seen Battling Rivals
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

War of words over espionage probe
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Dual Loyalties The Bush Neocons and Israel
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Israeli spy nest in the U.S. - Ashcroft says: ’Don’t arrest them!’
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Ashcroft Nixes Arrests in Israeli Spy Probe
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Secrets: Classified Info: Springing a Leak
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

FBI probes Jewish sway on Bush government
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Spy Case Renews Debate Over Pro-Israel Lobby's Ties to Pentagon Cons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Israel's Mole Inside the Pentagon
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Pro-Israel Lobby Has Strong VoiceAIPAC Is Embroiled in Investigation
of Pe
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Defense, Cheney Iran Specialists Questioned in (Israeli Spy) Probe
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Leak Inquiry Includes Iran Experts in Administration (WaPo)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

White House Learned of Spy Probe in 2001
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

LAT: Israel Has Long Spied on US,Say Officials(but CIA, Mossad "intimate")
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Wider FBI Probe Of Pentagon Leaks Includes Chalabi - WaPo
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Serving Two Flags The Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Israeli political advisor may have received U.S. secrets
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Pentagon leaks connected to battle over Iran policy (this is big!)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Pentagon Office in Spying Case Was Focus of Iran Debate
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Alleged Pentagon Leak to Iraqi Is Under Investigation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Spy probe scans neo-cons' Israel ties (long article from Asia Times)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

AIPAC hires lawyers
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

IAEA: No proof of secret Iran plan
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

WP: Spy Probe Expands/Linked to NSC Probe
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

Pentagon Office in Spying Case Was Focus of Iran Debate
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...

U.S. Spy Probe Focuses on Two Lobbyists -Guardian
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...


working links here
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 89x3115424
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 03, 2017 6:12 pm

Saudi Arabia government ‘funded dry run' for 9/11, legal documents claim
Two Saudi nationals and government employees tested flight deck security on internal flight

Rachael Revesz @RachaelRevesz Sunday 10 September 2017 10:05 BST308 comments

Allegations in lawsuit based on almost 5,000 pages of evidence including FBI reports, says lawyer Robert Giroux/Getty Images
The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC may have funded a “dry run” of the 9/11 attacks, according to evidence submitted to an ongoing lawsuit against the Saudi government.

As reported by the New York Post, the embassy might have used two of its employees for the so-called dry run before a dozen hijackers flew two planes into the Twin Towers, killing nearly 3,000 people in 2001.

The complaint, filed on behalf of 1,400 family members of the victims, stated that the Saudi Government paid two nationals, posing as students in the US, to take a flight from Phoenix to Washington and test out flight deck security before 9/11.


READ MORE
Largest 9/11 lawsuit yet filed against Saudi Arabia in New York

Sean Carter, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, "We've long asserted that there were longstanding and close relationships between al Qaeda and the religious components of the Saudi government."

The Saudi government has long denied any links to the terrorists and lawyers representing the government have filed motions to dismiss the claims. The plaintiffs must respond to the motion by November.

The case can then go to trial thanks to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act which was voted into law by Congress last September, despite a veto from former President Barack Obama and lobbying from the Saudi government. The law allows survivors and relatives of victims to sue foreign governments in US federal courts.

According to the documents and as reported by the New York Post, the class action lawsuit argued that “a pattern of both financial and operational support” from the Saudi government helped the hijackers in the months before the attacks.

FBI release unseen image of Pentagon on 9/11

FBI documents, submitted as evidence, claimed that the two Saudi nationals who came to the US, Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi, were in fact members of “the Kingdom's network of agents” in the country. The documents claimed the men trained in Afghanistan with a number of other al-Qaeda operatives that participated in the attacks.

Qudhaeein was allegedly employed at the Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and Shalawi was a “longtime employee of the Saudi government” in Washington DC.

In November 1999 they boarded an America West flight to Washington, and tried to access the cockpit several times, asking the flight attendants “technical questions” and making the staff “suspicious”.

The 12 never-before-seen photos show George W. Bush’s response to 9/11

Qudhaeein reportedly asked staff where the bathroom was and was pointed in the right direction; instead he tried to enter the cockpit. The pilots made an emergency landing in Ohio and the two men were released after an initial interrogation from the FBI.

Their plane tickets were reportedly paid for by the Saudi Embassy, according to Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in 9/11.

Macron grimaces as Donald Trump attacks Nato during 9/11 memorial speech
The two men also reportedly attended a symposium in Washington, organised by the Saudi embassy in association with the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, which employed late al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki as a lecturer. He later helped the hijackers to get housing and ID when they arrived in early 2000.

READ MORE

May rejects appeal from 9/11 survivors to release Saudi terror report
Saudi Arabia asks US federal judge to drop lawsuit over 9/11 attacks
Read letter from 9/11 survivors urging May to release Saudi report


The Post reported that the Saudi nationals lived in Arizona and had frequent communication with Saudi officials.

Mr Carter said the allegations in the class action lawsuit were based on almost 5,000 pages of evidence.

A total of 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. Hundreds of thousands of US documents regarding Saudi Arabia remain secret.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 38791.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Investigating Saudi Government 9/11 Connection

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 14, 2018 7:30 am

FBI Declassification Underway in 9/11 Saudi Suit

ADAM KLASFELD
October 12, 2018

MANHATTAN (CN) – Pulled into a legal battle 15 years in the making, lawyers for the U.S. government apprised the court Friday of its efforts to declassify documents that could link Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.


A memorial lies in the footprint of one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, destroyed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (William Dotinga/CNS)
“The 9/11 families have waited for years for this moment,” Steven Pounian, an attorney for the survivors, said Friday at a hearing in New York.

The breakthrough was made possible this past March when Saudi Arabia lost its bid to avert a lawsuit calling it liable for the deadly attacks 17 years ago on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As part of that case, U.S. District Judge George Daniels granted the families limited discovery to explore Saudi Arabia’s connections to Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy — a reputed intelligence officer and former consular official, respectively, whose alleged ties to hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi are detailed in a 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report, which the U.S. government declassified two years ago.

With the lawsuit against Saudi Arabia picking up steam, the government will be forced to reveal more information about the men.

“Our office asked the FBI to conduct a declassification and privilege review,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Normand said.

Normand revealed that the government is processing three tranches of documents, including of FBI witness interviews known as 302s.

Although the Saudi government’s attorney Michael Kellogg downplayed these files as “hearsay,” Pounian asserted that they will help tie al-Thumairy to a circle of people in the Los Angeles area linking the kingdom to the hijackers.

“Those documents are going to go, we expect, to the heart of that,” said Pounian, a partner at the firm Kreindler & Kreindler,

The attorney claimed that the Saudi government has not been making their job easy in turning over what he described as an unsorted, unindexed and incomplete document dump entirely in Arabic.

Denying that, Kellogg, the kingdom’s attorney, said: “We did not dump the documents willy-nilly on the plaintiffs.”

Four separate law firms have been sorting out the bounty, and Pounian requested another month before seeking to compel seven more Saudi-tied witnesses that he believes to have found in Thumairy and Bayoumi’s orbit.

“We have been engaged this summer in an investigation, a private investigation, ourselves, very intense,” the attorney said.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn granted that 30-day extension, but she indicated that she may not be as accommodating next time.

“I think the families would like to have closure,” Netburn said.

Attorneys for the families must submit a brief with their discovery demands by Oct. 26.

“My primary goal is to move this case forward,” the judge added.

A longtime irritant on the U.S.-Saudi relationship, the 9/11 liability suit turned a corner after the families persuaded Congress to enact the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, narrowing the kingdom’s sovereign immunity.

When that law passed two years ago, over the objections of then-President Barack Obama, the Saudi government responded with an ultimately empty threat to sell up to $750 billion in U.S. Treasury securities.

Tensions flared up again in the lead-up to today’s hearing over the disappearance of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, who was last seen entering the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and is presumed dead. Anonymous Turkish authorities have told news outlets that a Saudi assassination squad deployed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tortured, killed and dismembered the journalist.

International backlash is proving furious. Top executives from Viacom, Uber, HP, Android and the Los Angeles Times rebuked the Crown Prince by dropping out of the so-called “Davos in the Desert,” as the White House faces questions over President Donald Trump’s refusal to put financial pressure on the kingdom.
https://www.courthousenews.com/fbi-decl ... audi-suit/





BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16197&p=166563&hilit=saudi+lawsuit#p166563


Large Part Of 9/11 Answered In New Article
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19518&p=203141&hilit=saudi+lawsuit#p203141


28 pages alleged Saudi ties to 9/11 to be released Friday
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39873
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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