Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists
WASHINGTON - Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda
and other Extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but
the material may never find its way into court because of legal and
diplomatic obstacles.
Jeremy Bales / Bloomberg News
Prince Turki al-Faisal is one of the figures in a dispute over a possible Saudi role in 9/11.
Brendan Smialowski / Agence France-Presse - Getty Images
Kristen Breitweiser is an advocate for families of 9/11 victims.
Amel Emric / Associated Press
A German intelligence report described bank transfers made in the early
1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi
royal family to a charity that was suspected of financing militants'
activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.
The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action.
Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents
related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the
families. The Justice Department had the lawyers' copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.
The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to
terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful
campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim
of sovereign immunity.
Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate.
Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off
terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their
own country.
But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.
Internal Treasury Department
documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act,
for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International
Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi
royal family, showed "support for terrorist organizations" at least
through 2006.
A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with
lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by
members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to
Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s
and hired militant operatives like himself.
Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998
he had witnessed an Emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki
al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $
267 million) to a top Taliban leader.
And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line
description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates
and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul
Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that
was suspected of financing militants' activities in Pakistan and
Bosnia.
The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are
among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained
by the Sept. 11 families and their Insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.
Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court
record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi
lawyers in the case.
The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial,
connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern
charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.
Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit
stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because
it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.
"In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have
not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with
the 9/11 attacks," Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing
Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.
He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden , who was Exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. "It's an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger," Mr. Kellogg said of the victims' families.
"They want to find those responsible, but I think they've been
disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against
the wrong people."
The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already
ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of
survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing
out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action
in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an
appeal, but the families' prospects dimmed last month when the Justice
Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the
court not to consider the appeal.
The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected
the Saudis from liability and noted that "potentially significant
foreign relations consequences" would arise if such suits were allowed
to proceed.
"Cases like this put the US government in an extremely difficult
position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the
better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims,"
said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was
involved in the Saudi litigation.
Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday
with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on
terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey
, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has
been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have
helped to finance terrorism.
Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they
might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence.
Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or
uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly
covered by sovereign immunity.
And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces
of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.
One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.
The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi
financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the
time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.
Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept.
11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said
in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims' families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.
But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.
The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified
documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice
of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial
lawyer who won Lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco .
Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents
that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi
lawsuit.
Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for
Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court
file.
"We wouldn't be fighting this hard, and we wouldn't have turned the
material over to the judge, if we didn't think it was really important
to the case," she said.
More Articles in World » A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2009, on page A11 of the New York edition.
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