Moussaoui Bombshell Update

It is Presidents Day today, the last holiday before the long, exhausting march to Memorial Day. In December due to a hamstring injury and a nagging back issue I took most of the month off from exercise. The subsequent loss in conditioning was significant, really catching me off guard. I've been trying to claw my way back since the beginning of the New Year.

With the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Goat, this Thursday, I'm feeling as if I have made some headway. Upper-body strength is returning and my run times are dropping. The Bay to Breakers is three months off, and I think, if I stick with it, I could be in decent enough shape to complete the race with a little bit of dignity.

In any event, today's holiday is going to be spent catching up on reading and taking care of chores. But before I get to that I wanted to comment on the state of play the Moussaoui bombshell is receiving in the nation's press.

As you will recall The New York Times' spook specialist Scott Shane published a story at the beginning of the month detailing new allegations by the 20th 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was involved in planning terror attacks on the United States.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission, published an opinion piece in the New York Daily News, "Moussaoui, Saudis & the full 9/11 truth: Release the 28-page classified section of a congressional intelligence committee report," a few days after Shane's story calling for Obama to declassify the 28 pages of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" that Senator Bob Graham says point to a Saudi role in the attacks.

The day before Kerrey's piece appeared in the Daily News, Shane and Gray Lady colleague Ben Hubbard published a walk-back story which floated the argument that the House of Saud's support for Al Qaeda was a pre-9/11 historical artifact. The Shane-Hubbard article was built out of quotes from establishment academics who expressed skepticism about Moussaoui's claims.

That has been it as far as Moussaoui coverage in the NYT with the exception of a strange story published last week by James Risen fresh from the witness stand in the Jeffrey Sterling whistleblower case. I say strange because in "Terrorist Claims Return Sept. 11 Suit to Spotlight," Risen never once mentions the name of the lead law firm, Cozen O'Connor, in the 9/11 litigation against KSA; he mentions the Cozen O'Connor partner, Sean Carter, who is point-man for the suit, but not the law firm itself. Bizarre, an omission that I would think had to be intentional:

Last week, though, the case drew headlines when lawyers for the families disclosed that Zacarias Moussaoui, a former Qaeda operative now in federal prison, had told them that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family had been major donors to the terrorist organization in the late 1990s. 

While those claims were quickly challenged by some foreign policy experts and rejected by Saudi officials, the assertions helped bring the once-simmering issue of possible Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks back into public view and renewed awareness of the lawsuit, which has occupied the federal court docket for almost the entire 21st century. 

“When I began this, I would never have guessed that I would have spent so much of my legal career on one case,” said Sean Carter, a lawyer for plaintiffs in the case. “There are times when it is exhausting, but everyone is committed to see it through.”

Risen traces the origin of the claim against al-Saud to a larger than life, now deceased Southern attorney name Ron Motley:

[Sean Carter] and other lawyers continue to steer the Motley lawsuit and a series of others that have been consolidated into one giant legal action in federal court in Manhattan. 

Over the years, the case has suffered so many delays and false starts, endured so many ups and downs, that it has sometimes been compared to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the endless legal drama at the heart of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” The case has also provoked strange questions about whether some investigators hired by the lawyers for the victims’ families were also working for the American government on unrelated intelligence operations at the same time. Those questions led to a secret investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into the relationship between the investigators and the F.B.I.

When they began their legal campaign against the Saudis in the heated aftermath of Sept. 11, Mr. Motley and other lawyers adopted a shotgun approach, naming hundreds of institutions and individuals as defendants. Today, some lawyers involved in the case acknowledge that that approach was a mistake, because it led to wasted years of procedural fights as many of the defendants sought to be removed from the case. 

“Turn the clock back 13 years, I would have preferred a more focused case,” said Jim Kreindler, one of the lawyers for the Sept. 11 families. “But we stayed alive.”

Many of the original defendants succeeded in getting dismissed from the case — including the Saudi government and members of the royal family, who argued that they were protected by the doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity, which grants recognized nations immunity from the reach of American courts.

But after the government and royal family members were dismissed in 2005, lawyers for the plaintiffs appealed, beginning a lengthy legal war to get them brought back in. Finally, in 2013, an appeals court reversed its own decision and ruled that the victims’ families could pursue their case against the Saudi government.

The ruling did not extend to the individual members of the Saudi royal family who had been dismissed, but it still gave the lawsuit new life and a new focus, with far fewer defendants.

“We started with five or six hundred defendants, including governments of several countries — it was painted with a broad brush in the beginning,” Mr. Kreindler said. “Now it is primarily focused on the government of Saudi Arabia.”

But the Saudi government is fighting back, and is scrambling once again to be removed from the case. The Moussaoui statements were filed with the court by the lawyers for the 9/11 families as part of a larger response to the Saudi government’s latest motion for dismissal.

Mr. Kreindler estimated that the continuing fight over whether the Saudi government should stay in the lawsuit could take yet another three years, as the issue winds its way once more through the legal system. He predicted it could end up before the Supreme Court, which has already dealt with the case three times, twice declining to hear appeals from the plaintiffs and once declining to hear an appeal from the defendants, according to lawyers involved in the case.

The lawyers for the families now hope Congress will short-circuit the process by passing legislation that would prevent the doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity from protecting countries that provide support to terrorism.

After several lawsuits were consolidated in Federal District Court in New York in 2003, the giant case was given to Judge Richard Conway Casey, the nation’s first blind federal trial judge, and after his death in 2007, the case was transferred to Judge George Daniels. In 2010, lawyers for the Sept. 11 families filed to have Judge Daniels removed from the case because he was too slow, but the effort failed.

By far the most mysterious episode in the case revolves around some of the investigators Mr. Motley brought in to investigate Saudi Arabia. Working through a small investigative firm called Rosetta Research and Consulting, which was formed to work on the case, some of the investigators also became involved in operations with the F.B.I. and later the Drug Enforcement Administration. Most notably, they were involved in an operation to lure an Afghan drug lord to the United States. In 2005, they persuaded the Afghan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, to go to New York, where he was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration. He has since been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The role of the investigators from the Sept. 11 lawsuit in the Noorzai operation was baffling and embarrassing to many top officials in the government, and the connections between the investigators and the F.B.I. prompted an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which never made its findings public. Mr. Motley and his firm, Motley Rice, ultimately cut their ties, and Rosetta collapsed.

Today, the lawyers for the Sept. 11 families have seen so many changes of fortune that they are careful not to describe Mr. Moussaoui’s statements as a breakthrough. But in carefully chosen words of optimism, the lawyers do describe the new statements as adding to the evidence they need to make their case.

Risen does at least clarify that the Saudi royals have been dismissed from the case, something of which I wasn't aware. But there is really no distinction between the Saudi royals and the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They are one and the same. The distinction between the two is merely a legal fiction.

Risen's introduction of the whole Rosetta Research and Consulting Noorzai operation is interesting but beside the point. It adds a tangent, a Hitchcockian McGuffin that takes the reader away from the main story at the heart of Cozen O'Connor, which Chris Mondics of the Philadelphia Inquirer once again ably puts forth in Sunday's "City firm presses 9/11 case: Cozen suit, alleging a high Saudi role, has moved in fits and starts for years":

"The case is about whether Saudi government agents in the United States and elsewhere aided the Sept. 11 hijackers and supported al-Qaeda," said Sean Carter, a partner at the Center City law firm of Cozen O'Connor, who deposed Moussaoui. 

"An array of evidence points a strong finger at officials stationed in the Islamic Affairs offices of the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the consulate in Los Angeles. If any Saudi official had a role in 9/11, we need and deserve to know about it."

***

Moussaoui's allegation that he plotted with a Saudi government employee to shoot down Air Force One is important because the Cozen lawyers allege the 9/11 attackers received support from other Saudi government operatives in advance of the attacks. 

A central allegation of the lawsuit is that hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar met with a Saudi government employee shortly after they arrived in Southern California in February 2000, and that the employee, Omar al-Bayoumi, helped them get settled, finding them an apartment and occasionally paying their rent.

Mihdhar and Hazmi later became part of the five-member team that crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, after taking off from Washington's Dulles International Airport.

Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee after the attacks, has said that he believes Bayoumi was a Saudi government agent, that he provided assistance to the hijackers, and that he was "acting at the direction of elements of the Saudi government."

Bayoumi also had dealings during this time with an employee of the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles named Fahad al-Thumairy, who was later expelled from the United States. 

A central claim in the 9/11 lawsuit is that Saudi radicals with diplomatic credentials helped promote al-Qaeda's jihadist goals in the U.S. and abroad. Some 16 employees of the Saudi Embassy in Washington, who worked in the ministry of Islamic affairs, were expelled from the U.S. in 2003, the lawsuit points out.

The latest filings in the lawsuit also cite an FBI analysis of Bayoumi's phone records, which show that he made dozens of telephone calls to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, and other Saudi entities from January through March of 2000, around the time Bayoumi was helping Hazmi and Mihdhar get settled in San Diego.

Imagine if there was a fraction of evidence that pointed to Iran, Venezuela or Russia being involved in 9/11. The United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on even less proof of foul play.