A 9/11 Lawsuit No One Is Talking About Reveals Deep Saudi Complicity

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:44 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1061. I'm Thomas Smith. That over there is real-life attorney Matt Cameron. How you doing?

0:00:51 Matt: Tom, so I'm excited to talk about something I just have not seen covered enough.

0:00:54 Thomas: Yeah, you know the legal system moves slowly, but how are we just having updates on a 9-11 lawsuit? Let me do some math. 23-ish years later.

0:01:09 Matt: Coming up on the 23rd anniversary in a few weeks here, a number of reasons we might get into as to why we haven't heard that much about it, but there has been not too much long-form journalism about this. There's been some basic mainstream coverage, but until an Atlantic piece back in May, the only major long-term coverage of this was in Golf Digest, usually where I go for my anti -terrorism news.

0:01:28 Thomas: Oh, is it because of the the Saudi league that they're doing the, yeah.

0:01:33 Matt: Yeah. They did a very long piece about that, and they explained in detail about the claims that the families had, just to really underscore this. And I want to start just to set this up. Think that learning this information, as I have over the last couple of weeks, has really changed my view of September 11th, and I think it should change the view of anybody listening, because there is a lot now that the 9-11 Commission did not have. And I guess I want to say this right at the beginning, just as I did with the MKUltra episode. Everything we're going to be talking about here is going to be carefully sourced in places from PBS, ProPublica, New York Times. These are all major sources. If it's something that's only alleged in the complaint, I'll be clear that it's only alleged in that complaint. But if half the stuff alleged in this complaint is true, then this is an incredible case. Almost all of it is verifiable, just the documentation that has been released.

0:01:34 Thomas: Wow. Okay.

0:02:15 Thomas: Well, if crazy as this is, it's probably not as crazy as MKUltra, but it's as well sourced, and I can't wait to hear. I know there is some crazy stuff about this, so I'm so glad you looked into it and I'm really fascinated to hear what's happening and how it took so long. So on the other side of this break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/law, we're going to get into it.

0:02:19 Matt: No, not there yet.

0:02:39 Thomas: Is happening? Who? I just heard about these buildings coming down. What happened? Seems crazy. No, not really. But how did we just have new updates now? That's the first question. What in the world? How could it have taken so long? I don't get it. Can say my question sucks if you want and move on. It's okay.

0:02:44 Matt: Well, the I think no, it's a good question. It's a good question, I that it's taken so long because Congress had to actually change the law to make this lawsuit possible. The families have been running up against the wall of the existing law again and again and Again, most of the case was dismissed at some point until Congress finally changed the law. So I want to take you through how that happened.

I think that if the law had been as it is now, as of 2002, 2003, maybe we'd be seeing a lot more justice here. But But just off the top, this suit is outlining in exhaustive detail. And I recommend that anybody who's halfway interested in this, go just browse the complaint.

If you have any doubt about the things we're saying, or about what I'm saying about the Saudi government's complicity here, Just read the complaint and read the plaintiff's response to the defendant's motion to dismiss, because it's just overwhelming. The evidence that the Saudi government was not only aware that there was going to be a major attack in the United States involving planes crashing into buildings, but was actively facilitating it, actually helping to plan it, and senior officials of the Saudi Government. And again, the degree to which the Saudi government itself was involved is still being litigated.

0:03:56 Thomas: We knew all this. That's why we bombed Iraq, right?

0:03:58 Matt: That's right.

0:03:59 Thomas: Yeah. So this is all... And you're right. I don't know if geographically I'm terrible at it. Is that getting close? Like were we closing in maybe?

0:03:59 Matt: And Afghanistan, naturally. Yeah. Americans aren't great at geography. Yeah that might be the whole thing. Interesting. But really, question I keep running against as I think about all of this is what you just said. Why not just invade Saudi Arabia? Once we proved that 15 out of the 19 people were nationals of Saudi Arabia who were responsible for the hijackings, have extensive funding that we can prove. We know that they were funding al -Qaeda, that they're funding all this other extremism that became the Taliban, everything else. The answer is that we've been depending on them as a sort of geopolitical axis there, along with Israel. We're ready to have them fight a proxy war because they're deeply opposed to Iran and they'll do anything on our behalf for Iran, it seems. And now with the Abraham Accords, they're moving closer to a better relationship with Israel. So at this point, I think we're trying not to rock the boat too much. But this is a boat that needs rocking. This is not a country that we should be this close with.

0:04:08 Thomas: No.

0:04:49 Thomas: Back then, I feel like... It's hard to remember, but I don't remember us having anywhere near the friendly relationship back then that we kind of have now with them. So it's one thing now to say, "Yeah, now, like, we let them get away with murdering a journalist you in a embassy" apparently, and do almost nothing. But back then, I still don't fully get it. Oh.

0:05:02 Matt: Yeah. We've been counting on them for a long time as allies in that area. And if nothing else, it's a quarter of the world's oil. And that's really what it comes down to. But if say that we've invaded Iraq for the oil, which I certainly don't dispute, why would we not have gone to the place that has a quarterof the world oil? I don't know. This is a very complicated geopolitical question, and it'sa little beyond the scope of this discussion. But let's start with the fact that you can't really sue a foreign government. That's the first part. Right.

0:05:10 Thomas: Yeah. Now.

0:05:33 Thomas: When you say you, you mean just like a citizen of... I can a country sue for another country, or somebody that can do that, or is it just not really how it works?

0:05:42 Matt: There are ways, but it's very limited. I'm talking about the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. generally controls this stuff. That's 28 U.S.C. 1330. And generally speaking, it only has a couple of exceptions. And the families in this case found themselves tripping up against these established exceptions because the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act was not really contemplating a non -state actor with possible backing from a state doing something like this on U.S. soil. So the exceptions are that you can sue a foreign government for non -commercial torts, because they don't want people suing over business deals, obviously, occurring within the United States, as this did. And the other exception is that you can sue state sponsors of terrorism. But of course, the Saudi government has never been determined to be a state sponsor of terrorism, despite overwhelming evidence that they have been a state sponsored terrorism for a very long time for most of our lifetimes.

0:06:13 Thomas: Boy.

0:06:28 Thomas: We gotta fix our whatever, you know, like, I don't know if we're using one of those Ghostbusters things or whatever is detecting whether or not you're a state sponsor of terrorism, then we need to uh adjust the the dials on that a little bit. A

0:06:31 Matt: Yeah. Well, the problem with that detector is it's really bad in the presence of oil. For some reason, that really seems to throw it off. So yeah, really suppresses that needle.

0:06:43 Thomas: Lot of interference. You know, oil just, yeah. It's a technical thing, yeah. Yeah.

0:06:49 Matt: Yeah, so this, want to want to take you through. I don't want to get too far in the weeds, but I think the legal evolution here is interesting. And it's also interesting to sort of see why Congress had to finally do something, because everyone understood this needed to change. Want a to thank of the show, Steve Vladek, for a lot of this analysis. He's done a lot writing, obviously, on national security issues. It's one of his main things. And he really helped a lot.

He was edified by a lot of what he had to say about this, so I want to make sure I give him credit. So you've got this fundamental problem that the courts are just not going to find jurisdiction over the Saudi government because none of these exceptions clearly apply. And the families have been starting in 2002 for the one suit. There's another major one we're going to talk about this started in 2017. They're kind of conglomerated right now.

I'm going to sort of refer to them as one sort of giant action because the same issues arise in all of them. And there were two 2005 rulings early on when the families are trying to go after banks, they're trying to get to Saudi officials, they're going to go for anybody they could prove was linked to funding or plotting anything. And these two cases were called NRE Terrorist Attacks One and Two. And it's interesting just to track the analysis of how they're looking at this.

So the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, when they're looking at these exemptions, district court originally found that the discretionary function exception applied, which means that if a foreign state is doing something that arises from its discretionary function, which they literally said was funding terror groups where it puts its money, yeah, then

0:08:10 Thomas: In my budget, I put that, that's not like medical or, you, you know, rent or anything. I put that in discretionary personally.

0:08:16 Matt: Terror. Yeah. They found that that actually, because it was a discretionary spending thing, the original district court decision found that the foreign states were protected. And the Second Circuit reviewed this. They agreed that there was no jurisdiction, but they found that there could be no exception simply because the U.S. had not designated the Saudis a state sponsor of terror, which has been the fundamental problem through all of this because there's non -state actors that were officially responsible. And other issue that continued to come up, as we'll discuss, is secondary liability. And I'll get to that in a minute. But obviously, you can't say that the Saudies were were primary primarily responsible because obviously al -Qaeda as an organization actually carried it out. And you have to be able to show these links to show secondary. So when this went up, this is just a little interesting note here on a process I don't think we've talked about.

But the Supreme Court, when it receives a cert petition, it will sometimes put out what's called a call for the view of the Solicitor General. So literally just kind of calling up the SG and saying, hey, what do you think? You represent the United States in front of us. Would you like to provide a brief? And apparently, this is not so much a call as an actual order.

And Elena Kagan was the Solicitor General at the time, and she actually introduced a new argument, which has come up since, that you theoretically could allow a non -state sponsor of terror to be sued, but only if the entire tort took place in the territorial U.S., so sort of merging the two exemptions that are there.

0:08:16 Thomas: Yeah. Huh. Oh.

0:08:38 Thomas: Now.

0:09:27 Thomas: I to make light of it, but is terrorism a tort, or building demolition I don't know, hijacking.

0:09:32 Matt: Yeah, it's strange to think of, but, yeah, I mean, we've got wrongful death, we've got property damage, yeah. Yeah.

0:09:37 Thomas: A lot of things, I guess you it's just down to like the the death part, just death

0:09:39 Matt: There's Wrongful death is the main thing. Right. Uh, you know, certainly there's a lot other claims, and is very strange though to think the worst terrorist attack in American history as a tort, uh it's just, it is kind of the least of it.

0:09:42 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just the guy on Have the billboard you been hit by two to three jets? Yeah. That's not really how it works. It's weird to think of that, but you know, I

0:10:00 Matt: If you can get money, let's get money out of this. This became more and more of an issue because everything, like all of these families, every one of these litigations were just finding themselves up against the wall of the law not really applying to them. So Congress got energized about this, and this was an unusually bipartisan thing. It was first introduced in 2009, but it's the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. And it was originally introduced by John Cornyn and Chuck Schumer, so you can get an idea of the across the idleness of this. And it went through the Senate with no opposition, and it unanimously passed the House, which again, in May 2016, I don't think it was much that was unanimously passing the House.

0:10:33 Thomas: Do remember this though. I remember that like 2016, obviously interesting for many reasons, but like, do think showed was the first one where it really showed we were kind of moving on from from the mindset of 9/11 a bit, like the, you know, and one, and more people were like, "Hey, maybe we should look at what actually happened," you know, and who actually sponsored it. And I do remember I have a kind of a libertarian friend who at the time was talking a lot about it, was, was refreshing, that was, that was kind of a bipartisan thing somewhat, right?

0:11:00 Matt: Was. But unfortunately, it was vetoed by Barack Obama almost immediately, because he actually said he was disappointed with Congress for passing this unanimously. Said that it was unfortunate because it was an election year that they felt like they had to do it. He said he was looking out for the bigger interest. It does seem very strange to veto a bill that allows 9-11 families to sue. Because the bill was written very broadly, but it was obviously supposed to be for this purpose.

0:11:19 Thomas: Did they override the veto then?

0:11:20 Matt: Yes. Five days later and they did pass it again, overwhelmingly overrode the veto.

0:11:20 Thomas: Okay. A weird thing, like, why would Obama, it's weird to see something like unanimous and be like, "I'm disappointed in you," like, what when's the last time Congress was unanimous on anything, yeah?

0:11:27 Matt: Is, it is. I know. Yeah well I can I can read a bit from his statement because I had the same question. I certainly would like to know. And he was positioning as kind of more of a political and economic issue. He said that enacting this into law would neither protect Americans from terrorist attacks nor improve the effectiveness of our response.

0:11:49 Thomas: That's seem like it was what we were trying to do though, oh,

0:11:52 Matt: Permit litigation against countries that have not been designated by the executive branch as state sponsors of terrorism, nor taken direct actions in the United States. He says it would be detrimental to the U.S. national interest more broadly, probably. Will tell you that the Saudis were very angry about this. They were threatening to sell off $750 billion worth of treasuries, which would, would have hurt them quite a lot if they'd done it.

I don't think they would have gone and followed through on that, but they were really worked up about this. So, when they passed it, though, and again, I'm going to link to Steve Liddick's analysis because he's brilliant on this stuff, and this is not my field, obviously, and I trust what he's saying here, but he has a couple of pieces on how they watered it down. Even what was passed didn't have the teeth that it should have necessarily. Another bill involved.

And again, I don't want to get too far in the weeds. I want to try to keep this to what we need to understand this. But the Anti -Terrorism Act is also in play here. And that actually allows triple damages, if you can prove.

Now, the Antiterrorism Act is very poorly drafted, as Vladek points out, the Anti -Terrorism Act says any national of the United States injured in person, property, or business by reason of an act of international terrorism, or as a state, and survivors may sue therefore in any appropriate district court of the United States and shall recover threefold the damages. But it doesn't say who you get to sue, and

0:12:57 Matt: It doesn't say what the standard for that suit is. So there's been all kinds of litigation around this. The Right. Well, we'll talk about the end. That's the real problem when you're talking about these people. But yeah. So the Seconds and Seenth Circuit both held at the point that JASTA was being considered that the Anti -Terrorism Act didn't allow secondary liability, which remains the problem. So, the specific issue that they had to pass JASDA to address was the fact, as we've discussed, that this was a secondarily liable country. They're not necessarily primarily liable as a state. And what's really interesting about this to me is Congress, when they passed this, the authority that they claimed to be able to authorize these kinds of claims was based on a D.C. Circuit case, on an actual judicial case. I don't think I've really seen it put that way before, but they were very explicit in the bill itself that it was Halberstam v. Welch from 1983. And I want to talk about that because Because they're applying the logic of a petty burglary. We're talking about

0:12:57 Thomas: So how would you collect that? Okay. Sure sure I'm

0:13:48 Matt: A into someone's home, unfortunately killed the father of the home during the burglaring. And no, yeah, you wouldn't think this would be related at all, but it actually really is. It was an interesting read. I did not expect to be reading a burglary case in the research for this, but the fact was that Welch was living with a woman named Linda Hamilton, and they'd lived together for five years, and she knew that he had nothing when they got together.

0:13:55 Thomas: And hijacked a plane and crashed into a building, how is this, no, weird yeah the Terminator lady, hmm?

0:14:16 Matt: Yeah, that's right, the Terminator letter. That's right. I knew that name. Had nothing When they got Together, and She knew that by the end of their five -year relationship that he would have had a fortune, and he didn't really seem to care where it came from. And they found that there's all kinds of reasons that she should have known what he was getting up to. Too. So she was sued as secondary liability theory. And this allowed the court to examine vicarious liability for tortious conduct as it relates to secondary defendants, not the perpetrators. And that's becoming relevant, obviously, for the Saudi issue here.

0:14:31 Thomas: Interesting

0:14:40 Matt: So they're talking about the aiding and abetting analysis for criminal liability and how that applies to civil conspiracy. And it's all pretty interesting. But when it comes down to it, what they arrive at is a civil aiding and abetting liability standard in which the, the party, the defendant is aiding, the defendant in this case being the secondarily liable person, has caused the injury.

The defendant has to be generally aware of what the person is doing, that they're doing things that are illegal or tortious, and they must knowingly and substantially assist the violation. So it's pretty straightforward for secondary. And the problem, though, with JASTA is that Congress just says in the bill, "Well, this is what we're proceeding on. This is the legal theory," but they don't really break down how it's going to work, what the standards are so much, and that's up to the courts, as it always is.

So Supreme Court got around to refining this actually in a case I wouldn't have expected. I missed this one somehow, but it was called Twitter v. Tom Nuts from last year. And there's a case in which the plaintiffs were claiming that Twitter failed to control terrorist activity on its platform. And that actually ended up resulting in a shooting in Istanbul. And so they're trying to apply the secondary vicarious liability theory to Twitter, which

0:14:38 Thomas: Yeah there you go, party

0:15:40 Matt: Makes some sense given, even though they're allowing these communications knowingly, people are promoting terror.

0:15:41 Thomas: Even though they're not not like funding it, it just has to be okay so it's like sort of aiding and

0:15:48 Matt: And yeah,

0:15:48 Thomas: So being, a being, basically, it sounds like the standard is like you kind of, you have to be aware of it and in some way helping, not necessarily like cutting checks, really? Okay. Gotcha

0:15:56 Matt: You know that this person is doing things that are illegal or tortious, and you're just kind of letting it happen. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to review the Halberstam standard and to refine all of this. And they decided they were better. It's kind of interesting the way that Clarence Thomas does this, where he says basically, "Well, they had some factors in Halberstam. We think those are interesting.

But at the end of the day, they were just using the common law." So, "We're going to go back to a common law standard, and we're just going to say, as long as you have a conscious, voluntary, and culpable participation in another's wrongdoing, then that's enough for secondary liability." And at the ends of the day, comes down to the basic common law idea that you participated in a way that helps it succeed.

But they said, "We don't have to resolve the exempts of this difference," but as it is, that's the standard now. Also said that you don't have to have nexus a strict between the activity and the attack. You don't know what the plan is, you don t have to know exactly what they're going to do. You just have to be doing something illicit, something that's going to hurt people in this case. Have to just be supporting the attack in some way. That's what it comes down to.

So I just want to give some of the history. This is why it has taken so long. This, the very long answer to your question, is that it has taken, taken so long because we had to not only pass a bill, but then figure out what that bill meant. And then there've been multiple motions dismissed and all kinds of litigation around what this bill meant, even after it was passed, trying to help the families to do this.

Other complication, as Vladak points out, is that in the end, it not only limited the ATA claims, so that the ATA claims are only for primary liability at this point. We can only do the JASTA -based claims, you don't get the triple damages, is the main significance of that. It also allows the US government to intervene to seek a stay, if the Secretary of State can certify that the US is in some sort of good faith discussion with the foreign government about trying to resolve it. So you can imagine what happens to that. You're

0:17:31 Matt: Going to end up in litigation limbo. You are going to have the US Secretary of States say, just to smooth things over with Saudis, yep, we

0:17:31 Thomas: Oh yeah we're just talking over yeah, we'll do, we'll find some diplomatic solution to this, you know, no?

0:17:40 Matt: Are working on it. It is on the agenda. And they can come back every 180 days and just keep getting stay after stay after state indefinitely.

0:17:46 Thomas: Wonder, okay, that sounds like, like it could be the major timing factor because that, wow, go on forever.

0:17:48 Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I can certainly see that be a problem. There is one more issue that we'll discuss at the end when we're getting through. I just want to keep it organized. So that is what we're working from, and that is why we're able now to finally get into the courthouse door after all of this back and forth and all of these efforts. And now we're going to start to talk about some of the facts that I wasn't really aware of, and that a lot of listeners may not have been aware of either, of course. We've learned a lot since 2002, and a lot things have been declassified. Other governments have discovered things and handed them over to us.

0:17:55 Thomas: Sure.

0:18:16 Thomas: I bet we learn a lot when we're not making an effort to justify a war that had absolutely no justification. Like I'm sure once you've taken those lenses off your, you probably helps learn more actual facts.

0:18:28 Matt: Certainly does when you can actually step back and pay attention. We're talking about basically there's a whole suite of cases here, but the one of them is Burnett from 2003 that's been going on for a very long time. The other one is Ashton v. Saudi Arabia from 2017. And that one was filed actually by the guys you want to get. And if you're doing any kind of aviation disaster, Crindler and Crindlar. And the New York Times called Lee Crindlor the founder of Asia Aviation Disaster Law.

0:18:54 Thomas: Wow.

0:18:54 Matt: Basically, they've had their hands in all kinds of cases you've heard of. The biggest one before this was the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing, which they not only won the suit against Pan Am for negligence, but then they got $2.7 billion in a settlement with Libya, which is a lot of money. Yeah. So, you know, we get some heavy hitters on that side. On the other side of it, representing the kingdom, you've got Kellogg, Hanson, Todd, Feigl, and Frederick, and they're a very well -known commercial litigation firm, best best done recently for Neil Gorsuch being an alumni. We had to mention Neil Gorsuch somewhere in here, I guess.

0:19:08 Thomas: Wow. Huh.

0:19:26 Thomas: Pretty. Yeah. I mean, I get that there's always the, you know, everyone deserves their, their advocate in court, but it's pretty weird to be like, Like, we're going to defend Saudi Arabia in... I don't know who does that job and why, I guess. Money.

0:19:36 Matt: Yeah. Well, I know why, but yeah, there's a lot of it. But yeah, I agree. I don't judge lawyers by their clients, but this is one that you can.

0:19:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I do. I do judge them by their clients.

0:19:51 Matt: It can be done. They're usually like an antitrust and communications kind of firm, like doing serious commercial litigation. 2017 case I wanted to focus on because it really brings everything into focus here. Complaint, as I said, is extremely well -written, and it incorporates at the time a lot of what they knew, and now they've been able to update it through several more filings. But just talk about some of the basic things here. There's so much that has been revealed, but starting with somebody named Omar al -Buyumi, and he was a known Saudi intelligence agent, and the FBI has finally admitted that they know that he was a known Saudi intelligence Agent. He was posing as a grad student. He had a fake job, but he was getting a stipend from the Saudi government to do intelligence work in the United States for more than 20 years. And

0:19:51 Thomas: Somewhat. Yeah.

0:20:18 Thomas: Hmm. Wow.

0:20:31 Matt: He was working on behalf of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which is the part of the kingdom which spreads their Wahhabi Islam, the very extremist form of Islam that they support. This office was openly, actively supporting Al -Qaeda and other extremist operatives. They're not being very subtle about it even. That he was sending information directly on to Ambassador Bandar. Mean, this is again, a known Saudi intelligence agent. He was working in the United States, but we didn't know exactly what he was doing for all of these things.

And more and more has come out, most the most important thing that we have learned, and that really is the top line item out of all of this, is that agents of the Saudi government, including al -Bayoumi, met Nawaf al -Hamzi and Khalid al -Midhar, who were two of the hijackers who were in the Pentagon plane. These are people who just showed up in the US. They didn't speak English, have ties to the area, they didn't know anything about anything.

And al - Bayoumi just claims claims to run into the random somewhere and then they just show up in San San Diego. Saudi government's official position on this still is that these two Saudi nationals who would go on to be on the Pentagon plane, Al -Hamzi and Al -Madar, they showed up in LA and just randomly ran into al -Bayoumi at the consulate, even though he didn't actually need a new passport. Allegedly, that's what he was doing.

And he runs into a cafe near the mosque and they start chatting. And they claim, the Saudis still claim that Bayoumi never offered Never invited them to San Diego that somehow, for some reason, they just turned up in San Diego a few days later and then happened to have a welcome party, which was caught on video. Like they have

0:20:31 Thomas: Right.

0:20:42 Thomas: I Wow.

0:22:00 Matt: This entire welcome party of them hanging out with these terrorists, just having a party on video. But he found them an apartment. He co -signed their lease. He opened up a bank account and put in $10,000 of his money.

0:22:10 Thomas: That's like, he's trying to win the award for best aiding and abetting of something. Like, do

0:22:14 Matt: That's right. Yeah, just the full package. He's a very welcoming guy.

0:22:16 Thomas: You need direction? I Printed, printed up the MapQuest for you of where you need to go. Yeah. Just everything you could possibly need. Why?

0:22:21 Matt: Yeah, here's some uh, some Starbucks gift cards and yeah, you know, get yourself started. Uh, you know, the party is a remarkable document just the video itself, because you've got any number of key figures that we know about, now, yeah, I know it's a good question, too, um,

0:22:30 Thomas: Is someone videoing? What okay are there some amount of people involved that were like, don't know what's happening or just normal people or something? Like, is that how why, or, or is this, I don't know, they do weird stuff, these terrorists, sometimes they do film stuff maybe because they're proud of it. I don- yeah.

0:22:40 Matt: Yeah, They're just having a party and wanted a video, I guess. Everybody's videoing everything, I don't know. This is before cell phones. So you had to go out of your way to actually do it.

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0:22:55 Matt: Sure.

0:24:47 Matt: Complaint exhaustively details all of the different ways that funding has been flowing through, and all of the different way that known contacts in the US were assisting these people. But the at the moment has been limited. It's probably gonna be opened up pretty soon, but it's been limited to these two terrorists we've been talking about. And there's more than enough there.

0:25:04 Thomas: So everything we're talking about with all this is just these two?

0:25:07 Matt: This is what all this new information mostly pertains to. But there's a lot of other stuff that could likely come out and a lot of things that have been declassified. So I should mention the 9-11 Commission, which did a beautiful report. I haven't read the whole thing, but I was going back and revisiting some of it. Did not have a lot information that I'm telling you about. And I should read their official finding as to the Saudis right now, just so we have this in mind.

Commission staff found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution, or as individual senior officials supported al -Qaeda, which I'm not the first person to point out that's individual senior official, so certainly you're leaving room for other officials. And the Saudi government as an institutional is a very specific turn of phrase, because it appears to maybe have been factions within the Saudi Government that were doing this.

A lot here, and I want to be careful not to speculate beyond what we know, and I don't want to get into conspiracy stuff. I'm just going to present the stuff that we have have here. But there was a section called Finding Consensus on Certain Security Matters, which remained classified until 2016. It was 28 pages, and it opens with this finding. Finding.

While in the United States, some of the September 11th hijackers were in contact with and received support or assistance from an individual connected to the Saudi government. There is information primarily from FBI sources that at least two of these individuals were alleged by some to be Saudi intelligence officers. So 9-11 Commission was at least aware of this, but they have said they did not know a lot of this stuff about Bayoumi.

They didn't have a lot of the evidence that is now coming out and that maybe things would have been different. It seems like it's time to revisit a lot this because there's just this network of support that we seem to know about now.

0:26:36 Thomas: I- are remaking every- every single movie, they're doing a sequel where everybody's old, you know, do that with the 9-11 Commission. Hey, you need it now. I don't do that anymore, I'm retired. I know, but there's, I could get the band back together, you know? Yeah.

0:26:41 Matt: Yeah. Right, right. That's right. The 2024 edition. Yeah, or just a reboot. Reboots are big now too. So just start over.

0:26:54 Thomas: Well, you will have the one, like, younger member, just in case the franchise is going to continue forward. You do have to have that, like, you know, one of them, well, he's no longer with us, okay, but I hear his grandson is just as good at 9-11 commissioning, so let's get, get him casing.

0:26:59 Matt: Sure.

0:27:08 Matt: That really recently came out for declassification, I've sent you a video here. We'll just play a few minutes of it. This was on 60 Minutes in June. And this is al -Bayoumi casing the Capitol. There's no other way to say it.

0:27:19 Clip: 60 minutes was recorded in the summer of 1999. The man behind the camera is Omar al -Bayoumi, who the FBI says was an operative of the Saudi intelligence service with close ties to two of the 9-11 hijackers.

0:27:46 Thomas: That's disturbing. Jeez.

0:27:49 Clip: The video was filmed over several days. Bayoumi recorded entrances and exits of the Capitol, security posts, a model of the building, and nearby landmarks. In this portion of the video, Behumi points out the Washington Monument and says, I will get over there and report to you in detail what is there. He also notes the airport is not far away. What

0:28:19 Thomas: Oh

0:28:20 Matt: Sure you'd like to know how the Saudi government has characterized this video and their response to this lawsuit. Yeah. Plaintiffs' increasingly wild theories even include assertions that Al Bayou may prepare a flight plan and a casing report for the attacks. And I'll skip, we'll talk about the other thing in a second. A tourist video that includes footage of artwork, flower beds, and a squirrel on the White House lawn.

0:28:23 Thomas: Just yeah, tourism that

0:28:41 Matt: That's what he was really concerned about, was the squirrel.

0:28:42 Thomas: Squirrel was one of the targets. Yeah, yeah.

0:28:46 Matt: But I mean, you can see in the link to the video, it is explicitly, he's targeting security stuff. He's just showing you all the different security things. It's take extended videos of security checks. It's the best part. And again, the Saudis' position is indignant all the way through their response to all of this. They think this is all coincidence. How dare you say this guy was an agent? How dare he say that the stipend that he was receiving, and just coincidentally, it happens that we quadrupled his stipend just when the terrorists showed up and started giving him more money. There's also another piece of evidence that was found by the British that was given to us, and we didn't seem to really know what to do and didn't see it either, but I sent it to you actually in an email. If you want to take a look so you can see what I'm looking at, it is a notepad,

0:28:51 Thomas: Oh you're missing out. Yeah, someone's math notes

0:29:29 Matt: Math notes, and you can see the cursive there. So there's definitely a drawing of a plane and some little dotted lines. And under the dotted lines, it says distance from the plane on horizon and height, the plane, something, the earth. I can't quite read that in mile, but it's pretty obviously, yeah.

0:29:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah playing from height the plane from the earth in mile, uh, how far they could see. Horizon, that's what they wanted to know.

0:29:48 Matt: Yeah. So the expert that analyzed this said that it could be used to help calculate the rate at which a plane would need to descend in order to hit a target on the horizon. And so Bayoumi acknowledged in the deposition that he did this. And the Saudi story, the official Saudi story, as argued in court and their motion to dismiss, was that this was his 14-year-old son's math homework, which, I don't know, that doesn't seem like something that you'd been assigned in math class to calculate a plane crash. Them for trying to explain it, I guess, because you got to come up with something. Judge was very skeptical and said if he didn't testify this belonged to his son, if he's saying, yeah, that was mine, why are we supposed to believe this? This is in his deposition, come on. These two things were not previously available. And that video I should mention, I just showed you a little bit of it, But he not only is casing the building, but he talks about the demons of the White House, and he talks about a plan.

0:30:18 Thomas: Doubtful just stuff, you know, I go on the demons of the White House tour, there's a double-decker bus. Yeah.

0:30:44 Matt: Yeah. It's just hard to miss what this stuff is and what's going on. And especially, I just can't encourage you enough to just read the complaint because it is just a mountain. I mean, it is incredible too the way that they've just responded to this. They're doing the best they can to respond, but all they can really do is just try to say that this isn't us. But they can.

0:31:04 Thomas: Well, and that's the thing about, um, you can say pretty much anything in a complaint. But this is not your typical, you know, two civilians suing each other over some car, you accident, just- This is just nonsense. This is like, first off, massive resources going into this. And you can also, yes, you can allege anything in a complaint, but the response is pretty telling. Like, if- if you allege something and, the- you best they can do is, you know, tourism stuff, like- that's like maybe.

0:31:09 Matt: Sure. And math homework. Yeah, yeah. Make that point in their response. They say the kingdom's unwillingness to engage the very question the court directed the parties to address, which is about their agency in this, reflects its recognition that it has no credible argument to make on the agency issue. The evidence is clear that Saudi Arabia deployed its officials and agents to serve in an illegal government enterprise that was extensively intertwined with terrorism. So they're coming on strong with this. And I just- just want to point out the legal theory at this point. So what the case is down to is respondeat superior. We're looking at the scope of the agency. That's the official sort of Latin term for how liable an employer is for something that employee does.

And kind of an interesting side note here, that they had to narrow it down to California law, because they decided that California was where the agency was established because of this San Diego connection. But they also acknowledged that even if we use New York law, it basically works out to the same. And the standard that we're working with here is if the employer's liability extends beyond his actual or possible control of the employee to include risks inherent in or created by what they call an enterprise.

This is enterprise liability. And they're saying that the Saudis are aware that there's some kind of enterprise, that they're responsible for anything that happens out of that. And it makes sense, I think, that's what you can do with this.

0:31:44 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:41 Thomas: Again, it does seem pretty reasonable to be like you can't have just as an example, you have a state set up a cell somewhere and be like, hey, hey, we don't really want to know what's going on, but, you know, here's some help and give them hell. You know, it's like that doesn't get you out of jail free or I guess civil.

0:32:50 Matt: Right, you can't wash your hands. Yeah, no, it's not that easy. Mean, the Saudies in in this case, they went so far out of their way to give him cover. They gave him a false job with the Saudi presidency of civil aviation. They tried to, in every different way, deny or cover up anything that he was doing for them. And he and this imam, but I'm Thumari, provided... were hosting. I mean, there's no other way to say it. They were helping them through, they were facilitating all kinds of extremists.

0:32:57 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:33:22 Thomas: Know, this may be a dumb question, Matt, and maybe out of the scope of what you're looking at, but like, why? Why did Saudi Arabia want to do like, you Know, is it was it merely a question of extremism? You know? Like, Like, is there any answer to that? Like, why they, as a country or as a, certainly to a broader extent than we knew, would have wanted to do something like this?

0:33:46 Matt: Might be a little bit beyond my understanding. I mean, the official reason, right, was that the U.S. was too involved in Saudi Arabia. That was the official reasons that Al-Qaeda gave. And maybe there were people in the Saudi government that felt the same way. They just thought we should be taking down a pig. Certainly one way to do it. That's pretty far beyond what I can speculate on. Also that we know a lot about this from Abusa Beida, who was number three at some point in Al -Qaeda. Now, some of what we know about him, unfortunately, is from extreme acts of torture. He was one of the people who was tortured the most. We still have him in custody.

0:33:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

0:34:17 Thomas: So, do we really know it? Or is it,

0:34:20 Matt: Provide the actual private phone numbers of people when he was under interrogation in the Saudi government, including Ahmed bin Salman, who's a pretty important Saudi businessman who was actually one of the first people to get out. I'm sure you're familiar with the flights that we now know about that the FAA denied for a long time. There were flights of not only the bin Lans, but some other Saudis when other planes weren't running.

0:34:40 Thomas: Oh, no, I don't remember this. So, like, after the terror attacks, they got out of there? Or,

0:34:45 Matt: No, There was this whole story, especially about this one on the 13th, because planes were down, nothing was happening, nobody's going anywhere. And the bin Laden family and a number of high -ranking Saudi officials, including Prince Achman, were allowed to leave at a time when nobody else was. And this all kind of came out in 2004. four, but the official explanation was the US government was concerned about acts of retaliation against the bin Laden family. Are a lot of bin Ladens. I think that Osama bin Laden was 17th out of 54 or something, and a very influential family, for those who don't know, very involved in construction. At the time, Prince Ahmed was in the process of spending $1.2 million on a thoroughbred when he was snapped up, and this is just what they've been doing. FAA denied, denied, though, for years for whatever reason that this had ever happened until they finally had to, until June 2004. provided numbers and information about a number of Saudi princes and military commanders who would know about this attack.

And three of them were killed under mysterious circumstances within days of this information coming out. And I should mention, I'm drawing on the book Secrets of the Kingdom by Gerald Posner from 2005. So some of this Obviously, it doesn't have to do with the new stuff, but I went back just to try to get a sense of what we knew. And we've actually known quite a lot, a lot more than I would have expected, has been known for quite a while. And Posner's a serious journalist. He actually, just for context, he wrote a book about about why Oswald acted alone. So he's not a conspiracy theorist.

0:34:51 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Sure. Wow. Wow.

0:36:03 Thomas: Oswald acted alone? Is

0:36:05 Matt: Closed. And he's establishing his belief that there was a solo act. Book is really well -researched and it's an interesting read. I just went back and read some of it. But again, just the known connections between the US and Saudi governments.

0:36:17 Thomas: So Saudi Arabia didn't support Lee Harvey Oswald. Okay.

0:36:21 Matt: No, we do know that at least. We got that for sure.

0:36:23 Thomas: Gotcha. Cleared that up.

0:36:25 Matt: But But they have been spending a lot of money on PR and lawyers and trying to protect themselves here and do their best to make sure that this is not what we know about it. And

0:36:25 Thomas: I could help. Going to ask that, too, because they have more money than is even believable. And I have to imagine like a settlement probably could happen. But is it less about money for them and more about image and reputation and the principle of it?

0:36:49 Matt: I don't think they want to have any kind of admission that anything to do with the worst terrorist attack. I was going back, and as of the time he wrote the book, Saudi Arabia was making in profits $300 million a day, and that's split between 6,000 men in the kingdom. That's why they have so much money, and it's much more a day now.

0:36:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:03 Thomas: Jesus. Can we get off oil, everybody? You want to maybe get off foil a little bit?

0:37:11 Matt: It's really just a terrible historic historic joke that the quarter of the world's oil ended up in this place. I mean, it's really unfortunate because these are not people we should be doing business with. The more you learn about this government and about their beliefs and what they're spreading in the world right now, it's bad. It's very concerning.

0:37:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:30 Matt: So remember, of course, this isn't a criminal case, so they don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. They just have to approve to the civil standard. And the test from JASTA, from 18 U.S.C. 2333 is that they providing substantial assistance or conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism. It has to be more than negligence. They have to be actively involved in aiding and abetting and knowing that there's some kind of plot out there. And at this point, it just seems like I don't see how they haven't met that burden. I don't see how the motion to dismiss is possibly going to work. This is what was just litigated recently was a motion to miss in which the the Saudis are denying agency. And that was heard on July 31st. It's in front of District Judge George Daniels down there in the mother court, as we like to call it.

0:38:13 Matt: For for those those of those who heard the Law'd Awful Movies episode about, what was the name of that show? I've already forgotten.

0:38:12 Thomas: And so good. Oh, It wasn't the mother court, like it seemed like the name of the show was that, and then it got changed, I don't remember. It's uh, justice for, it's a really generic name, yeah, that's the Metallica album, uh, love is blind, no, Justice Blind, I donno, stupid, we the people, it might have been We the People, honestly, yeah, that is so generic.

0:38:21 Matt: It should have been. Yes. Something bland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a fun episode anyway, but I it was. It was the other people. And that's right. And I'm going to think of the SDNY as the mother court forever. Thank you very much. So stuck in my mind. But George of this, and he's taken under advisement this very long motion. And I'm sure we're going to get some kind of decision over the next few months, and we'll be able to talk about it again. I'd love to talk to Steve Lattich about this actually, because he follows this stuff like nobody else. National security is very much his game. And so much complexity to this. But again, provide substantial assistance is not standard. I think that's something that they should be able to prove here. I don't see how this doesn't get past a motion to dismiss and how this doesn't go on to real damages, but we will have to see.

0:38:38 Thomas: Okay.

0:39:12 Thomas: How would you collect those damages, no?

0:39:14 Matt: That is a really good question. So

0:39:16 Thomas: Do remember that for this show, when we covered the the Fonny Willis hearings, the best character in the history of all fiction, except somehow he's real, uh, came on, Governor Barnes, I want to say, uh, his, past governor of Georgia, I think most interesting, he's, he's interesting. I went with Lydia, and I went back and watched that again, like, they're like a couple, like a month ago, because we're like, remember that guy? It was, it's the best. Anyway, he talked about when he sued, some might have been Saudi Arabia, I don't know, he sued somebody, some other country for killing someone and did win money. So it must be possible, but I don't know how. How would you get that money?

0:39:29 Matt: Barnes, yeah. Yeah. Treasure.

0:39:55 Matt: It can be done. The thing is that you're getting this money through this new bill, which again is untested and we don't know a lot about because it's really only for this kind of case. And it creates creates a new exception in the Foreign Sovereignty Immunity Act. But there's a problem that Steve Vladeck pointed out, and this is an extremely technical problem, but it could be a very serious issue.

And he's pointing at it as one of the ways that it was actually watered down and has become more toothless than it should have been, maybe. So new exception that it created under JASTA for non-state sponsors of terror, for secondary liability, doesn't actually have a corresponding waiver of attachment immunity. And attachment immunity is how you actually do the job of collecting.

You know, there's the separate question as to if you can actually bring the suit versus can you attach any kind of damages to this foreign state and actually get the money out of them? So that's something that may have to be located after all of this anyway. But at the end of the day, you read the interviews with families, you hear them talking about this, and what they really want is the knowledge of this responsibility. They want an admission more than anything, of course. That's often what people want

0:40:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:53 Matt: In litigation like this. They just want to know the truth, and they want to known that we are able to hold at at least in some public way, that we're able to hold the Saudi government responsible for this. And it is just, I don't know why in my mind, even as I'm saying that out loud, it does seem so strange to just say out loud that the Saudi response, the Saudi government was responsible for 9-11. And again, in a broad sense, they absolutely were. And that's new information, but it's not really new information. Most of this has been around since 2002, 2003. We know one way or another, we've known about some of these people.

0:40:53 Thomas: Well, from the very beginning, wasn't weren't some number of the hijackers? That's a very vast majority from Saudi Arabia.

0:41:29 Matt: 15 and 19.

0:41:30 Thomas: Yeah, that was The I remember that early on was like, what's going on there? That seems weird. But then I thought the explanation was you was some sort of intentional choice by bin Laden or something, but is that now bullshit, or is that not? You have no idea. Hmm.

0:41:31 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I really don't know. Anything goes at this point. I am willing to believe after reading the complaint and especially the way the Saudis respond to this, I'm willing to believe quite a lot here. Nothing I'm really not willing to leave about the Saudi complicity in this at this because it just seems so widespread. It seems like they put so much money into it. And if nothing else, they really were pretty intent on funding Al-Qaeda. They've denied this. They say that they're fighting Al-Qaeda, whatever. But at the same time, They are our best allies against Iran, and So, this is very complicated for the United States, and I think they would probably prefer that we didn't talk about this at all.

0:41:44 Thomas: Yeah. They're Question. Is all very complex and there's so much going on. Can you dumb it down a little in terms of the extent? Now, granted, we're just talking about these two hijackers. So, literally, who knows if there's way more connections to the others, right? Right. But when it comes to these two hijackers, draw us that straight line again in summary, just for our takeaway. It's that this this Saudi spy, this agent was providing, aiding and abetting in all the ways you said, you know, and that the argument against that person being a rogue agent or whatever? I mean, it sounds like they even try to argue that. But, you the I guess the evidence that you've seen that makes the case more against a broader group of rather than just, you one or two people like the original 9/11 Commission said? Good.

0:42:59 Matt: With the fact that the FBI has confirmed that al-Bamiyya was a Saudi agent. We already got somebody who's on the Saudi payroll, they were pretending to give a job but actually paying directly to do this kind of intelligence work. It was a no-show job. He never did anything resembling the job that he was being paid for. So we've got that to begin with. The FBI is aware of this. It's very hard for the Saudi government to deny it, but they try to. And they are trying to say that all of these things are coincidental and there's just no way that you could possibly believe that they weren't. And people, I mean, try to imagine the version of this where these two potential hijackers show up not speaking English or knowing anything about the United States with no help, right? I mean it almost would be a comedy.

0:43:36 Matt: I can see a comedy version of that where they just don't have any ability to rent a place. They don't know how to order food. I mean, it's just like, sure,

0:43:35 Thomas: Yeah, they have to train. There's a lot they had to do.

0:43:45 Matt: Sure. Once these issues are established and once, I am assuming just based on everything I have read so far that this is going to go forward. What's going to get really interesting is when this opens up and the plaintiffs would would then be allowed to examine the other hijackers to see locations including Florida and Phoenix and Virginia, New Jersey, the people that were operating all over, and start looking into more ties.

Because I think there's a lot more that's going to come up when you start turning these rocks over. And this could be a story that's potentially with us for, unfortunately, many more anniversaries of September 11th. But this really seems like a turning point from what I've seen.

This seems like if this goes forward from this motion to dismiss that we're actually going to get somewhere, assuming that the government doesn't step in and put in a stay that we were talking about, or there's not something else that trips up the litigation. But there's more that should still be declassified and probably more things we should know and more that's going to come out in discovery.

But I am fundamentally shocked, honestly, by just the weight of the evidence against the Saudi government in all of this. And it's to argue with when you see it all in one place. I really hope that that gets the families some injustice. And also fundamentally changes our understanding of what this event was and why it happened. There's a lot we don't know. And even the why, as you said, at this point, we don't really know if it's the Saudis doing it. I'm not sophisticated enough in geopolitics to be able to tell you what this all means. I'm just trying to look at it as a lawyer.

0:45:02 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, me neither. Yeah. It is interesting though. And they have put so much money and effort into laundering their reputation in the past 20 years or whatever, you know, soccer golf leagues, like there's so much stuff that is depressing because I feel like while I do hope there's some level of success on this legal front, front. I don't know what that really means. It might be nice to get some sort of piece of paper that says something or maybe some money for families. But I feel a like lot of this was probably known at some, at least it's maybe not at first, but like US we to have known this. And there's so many times it seems like we just prioritize some other objective objective or something higher justice on these things. Yeah.

0:45:46 Matt: In typical fashion. It's unfortunate. Was one more little detail I meant to mention involving Jamal Khashoggi. And this is, again, kind of like in the MK Ultra direction of things I don't really know what to do with. Because Khashoggi was very well connected. Think we all remember that he was, we know for sure, assassinated by the Saudi government when he went into the embassy there in Turkey. But the last known interaction between Khashoggi and the Saudi ambassador to the US happened the day that he met with the investigator for this case, a former FBI agent who was interviewing people in connection with this lawsuit. Suit. And And the has talked about this and said that he was agitated, that he was very concerned about talking about these things, that had a lot to say. And that was the last time that she met with him.

He was killed about a year later, so it wasn't like it was the next day. But certainly, if he wasn't already a target, it seems like that might have really moved him into that territory. But I don't want to make any direct connections. We don't know for sure any of these things. It just happens that Jamal Khashoggi was involved in this on top of everything else.

The case with a lot of these lawsuits though, even if you can't ever get an admission of liability, even if you can ever get damages, and I badly hope the families get both of those things. I think they deserve it. The country deserves it at this point. We all need to know what actually happened. This lawsuit is kind of doing is writing a second 9-11 Commission Commission report, just in its filings. And we might get something approaching that from all of this discovery.

And I think it would actually be a good time, once this comes a little further along, and maybe if it does open up to the rest of the investigation, to call on Congress to revisit all of it and to do a second report. We're joking about

0:46:02 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:47:12 Matt: A reboot, but things come out. And don't think that the report as it is should be allowed to stand without this information, and it just seems too vital.

0:47:21 Thomas: Well, what's the next thing we look for? Court deadline wise, when

0:47:24 Matt: We should see what happens with this motion dismissed. As I I said I'm optimistic that it will not be dismissed. Don't have a date. We don't have anything official yet.

0:47:28 Thomas: We Don't. Oh. Okay.

0:47:30 Matt: Yeah. So we're just going to have to wait to see, and we'll keep talking about it.

0:47:33 Thomas: All. Right. Well, fascinating, Matt. Thanks for doing that deep dive. And, uh, yeah, wow, what the hell. Well, how, don't want to know.

0:47:38 Matt: Yeah, still getting my head around it weeks later. I'm still trying to understand everything I've just read and put it in the context of what I thought I knew for the last 23 years.

0:47:40 Thomas: Yeah. Right, Matt. Well, thanks as always for the deep dive. And thanks to our listeners as always. And please support the show. Patreon.com/law. We promise none of those funds will support terrorism.

0:47:57 Matt: Guaranteed.

0:47:58 Thomas: Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm sure none of none of these funds will will support terrorism. Them. I think I could commit a hundred percent to that. I don't know, but yeah. Okay. So We'll see everybody on Wednesday.

0:48:06 Matt: To know.

0:48:10 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:48:28 Matt: Question is how this action was... Sorry, let me not reframe that. Let me answer your question. Especially for the purposes of this lawsuit. What we have learned is, let me make sure I've got this in front of me.

0:48:38 Thomas: Mean, suspense. Jeez. Is this the end of a reality TV show episode?

0:48:39 Matt: Yeah. Sorry.

0:48:45 Thomas: And the thing we have learned is...

0:48:47 Matt: I want to make sure the hardest