Nineteen long years after the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, the families of loved ones killed on Sept. 11 are demanding the full disclosure and accounting of Saudi culpability for the crimes of that day.
I issue this call on behalf of my husband, Tom Strada, and all the innocent people killed and injured at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on all four of the flights, as well as the thousands whose health has been irreparably harmed from breathing in the Ground Zero air.
The Kingdom, an authoritarian state that murders its own citizens for political advantage, continues to dodge accountability for its role in the 9/11 attacks. And as if that is not enough, our own Department of Justice facilitates the Saudis’ dodge by continuing to harbor the Kingdom’s secrets.
In March 2018, 9/11 families served a subpoena on the FBI for information in its possession regarding the Sept. 11 attacks, one of the most investigated events of our lives. Although the FBI and DOJ have produced about 5,000 pages of documents about what it calls an “active” investigation of Saudi government agents’ involvement in supporting the first arriving 9/11 hijackers, Attorney General William Barr has refused to provide some of the most important evidence we have requested concerning the Kingdom’s involvement, making the remarkable claim that this evidence about actions of Saudi government agents nearly 20 years ago is a “state secret” of the United States. A bipartisan trio of U.S. senators noted the FBI’s anomalous handling of the subpoena in a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz citing apparent “major abnormalities.”
Americans know that Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and that Saudi Arabia was the epicenter of both terrorist financing and jihadist ideology during the two decades leading up to 9/11. Today, I want to be sure that the world knows of the direct link between the Kingdom and the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
FBI documents are unequivocal that three Saudi government agents have been “main subjects” of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, and that those agents provided “substantial assistance” to the hijackers. Two of those Saudi government agents were associated with the Kingdom’s embassy and consulate in the U.S.
Instead of acknowledging the Kingdom’s malignant role in nurturing the jihadist threat for years before 9/11 and taking responsibility for their agents' direct role in supporting the hijackers, however, the Saudis have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers and more foreign agents working hard, sometimes surreptitiously, to hide evidence that will show their involvement in 9/11. Their work is often callously hidden behind technical legal arguments, but always to evade responsibility for the malicious acts of their own employees whom they sent to the U.S., even as Saudi government actors continue to murder Americans in the name of radical Islam, most recently at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., on Dec. 6, 2019.
Enough is enough. The DOJ needs to stop cowering to the Saudis and providing them a cloak of secrecy. I want the Saudis to know that the victims' family members, and those injured, will never stop fighting for accountability and justice. America’s allies do not dodge accountability and hide evidence when their government agents conspire to kill Americans.
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-saudi-accountability-now-20200911-3iadxata2ndw5l32ctxadirgbm-story.html
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