[Peace-discuss] NYT: Did the Saudis Play a Role in 9/11? Here’s What We Found

[Robert Naiman]

NYT gives these two things as main takeaways:

1. "Potential leads went unpursued for years."

2. "The C.I.A. interfered with a planned F.B.I. investigation, officials
say."

Given what we know now about the Saudi regime, its support of Al Qaeda, its
anti-civilian war in Yemen, its murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, and its relationship to the CIA, isn't it quite plausible that
the CIA deliberately sabotaged the overall investigation, with the eventual
cooperation of some in the FBI leadership? Isn't it quite plausible that
senior U.S. officials suspected that the Saudi government was more involved
than U.S. officials publicly claimed? Isn't it quite plausible that senior
U.S. officials didn't want to know how involved the Saudi government was,
because they didn't want us to know?

Why aren't Democrats in Congress clamoring for the release of the FBI
investigation files that the 9/11 families have asked for?

Why isn't there a push for a Congressional vote on declassification, as a
means of pressure for disclosure, as there was with the Senate Intelligence
Committee's report on CIA torture?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/us/september-11-attacks-saudi-arabia.html

Did the Saudis Play a Role in 9/11? Here’s What We Found
Investigators continued to investigate Saudi links to 9/11 even after
high-level officials discounted connections.

By Daniel Victor
Jan. 23, 2020
Updated 11:25 a.m. ET

F.B.I. agents who secretly investigated Saudi connections to the 9/11
attacks for more than a decade after high-level officials discounted any
government links found circumstantial evidence of such support but could
not find a smoking gun, a joint investigation by The New York Times
Magazine and ProPublica shows.

One dogged F.B.I. agent in San Diego helped drive the investigation for
years, after superiors advised the team to give up on the case. Three
presidential administrations have built a wall of secrecy around
information about possible Saudi government ties to the attacks.

“Given the lapse of time, I don’t know any reason why the truth should be
kept from the American people,” said Richard Lambert, who led the F.B.I.’s
initial 9/11 investigation in San Diego.

The full article includes new details that have never been reported before,
revealing missed investigative opportunities. Read the entire article from
The New York Times Magazine here.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/magazine/9-11-saudi-arabia-fbi.html?>


But if you have limited time, here are the main takeaways.
Potential leads went unpursued for years.

An investigator found evidence that suggested Omar al-Bayoumi, a
mysteriously well-connected Saudi student who knew two of the hijackers,
might have had prior knowledge of the attacks, even though senior U.S.
officials had essentially exonerated him.

In a trove of seemingly disorganized evidence taken from Bayoumi’s home in
Birmingham, England, in 2001, [a] detective found a spiral notebook that
contained a hand-drawn aviation diagram of a plane descending to strike a
spot on the ground. An F.B.I. agent who had studied aeronautical
engineering concluded that the diagram showed a formula for an aerial
descent like the one performed by Flight 77, the jet that Hazmi and Mihdhar
hijacked, before it struck the Pentagon. Apparently, the notebook and its
contents went unnoticed after Bayoumi’s detention and hadn’t been looked at
again.

A former supervisor of the investigation said he thought the finding would
have been more significant if it had been discovered in the fall of 2001.

“That would have been harder evidence,” the supervisor, Joseph Foelsch,
said. “If not a smoking gun, a warm gun.”

Telephone records that were reanalyzed years later revealed multiple calls
among Mr. Bayoumi; Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi diplomat and imam; and Anwar
al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American imam who was killed in a drone attack in 2011.
The C.I.A. interfered with a planned F.B.I. investigation, officials say.

In 2010, the F.B.I. planned to place two Saudi religious officials from the
kingdom’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs under full-time surveillance. The
bureau had previously found that their travel overlapped with movements by
the hijackers and people believed to be supporting them, and that they had
ties to suspected militants. The two men sought new visas to study English
in the United States, which officials feared could be cover for something
nefarious.

But, F.B.I. agents believe, the C.I.A. intervened before the surveillance
could happen.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, ended abruptly. In the
Saudi capital of Riyadh, C.I.A. officers objected strongly to the F.B.I.
plan, one former official said. “They didn’t want to give the Saudis a
black eye by letting these guys walk into a trap,” the former official
said. For reasons that remain unclear, the two Saudis canceled the visit at
the last minute. F.B.I. officials suspected that someone in the Saudi
government had been warned.

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