The Families of 9/11 Victims Have One More Chance for Justice

It was strange to walk down Broadway in Manhattan on Thursday, September 11. It would not have been strange had it been raining the way it rained the day before. It was strange because the day was so beautiful. The sky was so blue, and the breezes so soft. It was strange because so many of the other pedestrians stopped to look up at the vast blue of the sky for no particular reason except, perhaps, to remember another glorious September morning when the depthless blue of the sky turned lethal.

Two weeks ago, a judge ruled in favor of some of the 9/11 families in their long-standing lawsuit against Saudi Arabia for its alleged complicity with the hijackers. From ProPublica:

More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaida terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial. The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed.

This may be the last chance for justice, for the plaintiffs and for the country. The families of the victims were the collateral damage from a historic event, but ultimately they also were the collateral damage of a criminal act. There were accessories to that crime before and after the fact. This suit has the potential to heal the survivors, the country, and history itself simply with the truth.

Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the September 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

The lawsuit has been stymied at various points by American administrations, including those of presidents Obama and Trump. As it turns out, British intelligence has been far more helpful at demolishing the Saudi alibis, especially as regards to one Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi graduate student who was involved with two of the hijackers in San Diego and who, British intelligence believes, was all over the fringes of the events of 9/11.

The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful. It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.

In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.

The suit will, at the moment, proceed to trial. And on this brilliant blue September day in New York, this will do, as always, for a memorial, until some kind of rough justice descends.