Pressure piles on Biden administration to release 9/11 Saudi files: Democrats AND Republicans demand documents are declassified to finally reveal if the kingdom was involved

A bipartisan pair of senators is urging the Biden administration to release all documents related to Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the September 11 attacks.

The senators said the FBI and Justice Department had blocked efforts to get to the bottom of Riyadh’s involvement in the attacks 22 years ago.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray in July asking “that the U.S. government finally provide full transparency about what it knows about the attacks, especially when it comes to the involvement of Saudi Arabia.”

Sens. Blumenthal and Johnson wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray in July asking “that the U.S. government finally provide full transparency about what it knows about the attacks, especially regarding Saudi Arabia’s involvement.”

They asked for complete, unredacted documents on the Saudi involvement and an explanation for any classified portions of the documents. Now, over a month later, the senators said they had not received any documents from the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

“Your inability to respond to our letter only adds to our concerns about the U.S. government’s long-standing refusal to provide full transparency to the American public, and in particular to the families of the victims of 11 September, about Saudi Arabia’s role in the September 11 attacks. ‘ the letter read.

The pair of senators, who lead the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, threatened to hit the Justice Department and FBI with subpoenas if their requests are not met.

Lawmakers, activists and survivors have been pushing agencies for decades to provide transparency about the links they have found between the Saudi government and the September 11 hijackers.

In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order requiring government agencies — the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department — to release a trove of documents to the public that would shed more light on how the attack occurred.

The move released more than 900 pages of documents — reversing a step by Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr, who invoked the state secrets privilege that suppressed information that might have pointed to Saudi involvement in the attack.

However, the administration refused to follow Biden’s order and released only a few sanitized summaries of the information, September 11 families say.

According to family members, the reason they are not releasing the documents is the same reason why they do not want a trial.

“They are terrified of what KSM and these other detainees will say, not only about the Saudi role in September 11, but also about what U.S. intelligence knew. And they don’t want information to see the light of day,” said Brett Eagleson, founder of 9/11 Justice.

Complicating matters further, President Biden is reportedly considering a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman at the G-20 conference next month.

Complicating matters further, President Biden is reportedly considering a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman at the G-20 conference in India next month. The pair could discuss an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations – which would be a huge win for the US president.

“Long ago, the US made a political decision not to embarrass the Saudis,” Eagleson said. “But we ask that the 9/11 families be included in any deal: we want an apology, we want an admission of guilt, we want closure.”

The Saudi government has consistently denied involvement in the attacks and has tried to move beyond the issue as bin Salman seeks to modernize and deepen ties with the West.

In 2000, then-Saudi student Omar al-Bayoumi, then 42 years old, claimed that he met the first two September 11 hijackers by chance in a restaurant and decided to be hospitable and take them under his wing.

He took them to their flying lessons, secured bank accounts and rented a property for them.

Both the FBI and the 9/11 Commission initially supported al-Bayoumi’s account that he was unaware of their intentions to kill people in their country when they met them.

But last year, the FBI released new documents confirming that a-Bayoumi was an agent in Saudi intelligence who worked with Saudi religious officials and even reported to the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

Officials in New York City have identified the remains of two more victims who died during the September 11 attacks, 22 years after the tragedy

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The two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were known to both Saudi intelligence and the CIA as al-Qaeda operatives. The CIA had tracked them from a meeting in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, but the agency said it lost track of them when they flew from Bangkok to Los Angeles in 2000.

The CIA failed to notify the FBI that two terrorists had entered the country for more than a year (in August 2001), just a month before the fateful attack.

Families of the September 11 victims say there is a slew of documents that could be released to create an even stronger bond between the Saudi kingdom and the September 11 attackers.

‘By refusing to give us the documents we achieve two things. They are there, they protect the kingdom from embarrassment, but they also protect our own intelligence shortcomings,” Eagleson said.

“They’re buying billions of dollars worth of US-made weapons, they’re stabilizing global oil markets. So there’s not a lot of people and there’s not a lot of willingness to push them a lot.”