The Supreme Court today ruled that it will not allow any lawsuits to go ahead, just a few weeks after the government filed a court brief asking that the case be quashed.
The court, in an order Monday, is leaving in place the ruling of a federal appeals court that the country and the princes are protected by sovereign immunity, which generally means that foreign countries can't be sued in American courts, reports the Associated Press.
In late May, the Justice Department had sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action to hold it liable for the attacks.
The move came less than a week before Obama was scheduled to meet Saudi King Abdullah as part of his "rebuilding" trip to the Middle East.
More than 6000 family members denounced the move as an "apparent effort to appease a sometime ally" in a public statement.
The lawsuits claimed that Saudi Arabia and four of its princes actively aided in financing the plot through front groups posing as charities.
Last week, the New York Times ran a report highlighting how documents uncovered by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.”
The documents consist of “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families, according to the report. The families also point to a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks.
Senator Bob Graham, who sat on the 9/11 Commission, has also charged that Saudi involvement in the attacks has been covered up.
Court Won't Hear Sept. 11 Claims vs. Saudi Arabia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062901630.html
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court has refused to allow victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to pursue lawsuits against Saudi Arabia and four of its princes over charitable donations that were allegedly funneled to al-Qaida.
The court, in an order Monday, is leaving in place the ruling of a federal appeals court that the country and the princes are protected by sovereign immunity, which generally means that foreign countries can't be sued in American courts.
The Obama administration had angered some victims and families by urging the justices to pass up the case.
In their appeal, the more than 6,000 plaintiffs said the government's court brief filed in early June was an "apparent effort to appease a sometime ally" just before President Barack Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia.
At issue were obstacles in American law to suing foreign governments and their officials as well as the extent to which people can be held financially responsible for acts of terrorism committed by others.
The appeal was filed by relatives of victims killed in the attacks and thousands of people who were injured, as well as businesses and governments that sustained property damage and other losses.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York previously upheld a federal judge's ruling throwing out the lawsuits. The appeals court said the defendants were protected by sovereign immunity and the plaintiffs would need to prove that the princes engaged in intentional actions aimed at U.S. residents.
In their appeal to the high court, both sides cited the report of the Sept. 11 Commission. The victims noted that the report said Saudi Arabia had long been considered the primary source of al-Qaida funding. The Saudis' court filing, however, pointed out that the commission "found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization."
The victims' lawsuits claim that the defendants gave money to charities in order to funnel it to terrorist organizations that were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The appeal also stressed that federal appeals courts have reached conflicting decisions about when foreign governments and their officials can be sued.
The case is Federal Insurance Co. v. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 08-640.
Justice Dept. Backs Saudi Royal Family on 9/11 Lawsuit
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/politics/30families.html?_r=1
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is supporting efforts by the Saudi royal family to defeat a long-running lawsuit seeking to hold it liable for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Justice Department, in a brief filed Friday before the Supreme Court, said it did not believe the Saudis could be sued in American court over accusations brought by families of the Sept. 11 victims that the royal family had helped finance Al Qaeda.
The department said it saw no need for the court to review lower court rulings that found in the Saudis’ favor in throwing out the lawsuit.
Lawyers for the Saudi family said that they were heartened by the department’s brief and that it served to strengthen their hand before the court, which has not decided whether to hear the case.
But family members of several Sept. 11 victims said they were deeply disappointed and questioned whether the decision was made to appease an important ally in the Middle East. The Saudis have aggressively lobbied both the Bush and Obama administrations to have the lawsuit dismissed, government officials say.
“I find this reprehensible,” said Kristen Breitweiser, a leader of the Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. “One would have hoped that the Obama administration would have taken a different stance than the Bush administration, and you wonder what message this sends to victims of terrorism around the world.”
Bill Doyle, another leader of the Sept. 11 families whose son was killed in the attacks, said, “All we want is our day in court.”
The lawsuit, brought by a number of insurance companies for the victims and their families, accuses members of the royal family in Saudi Arabia of providing financial backing to Al Qaeda — either directly to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, or indirectly through donations to charitable organizations that they knew were in turn diverting money to Al Qaeda.
A district court threw out the lawsuit, finding that the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act provided legal protection from liability for Saudi Arabia and the members of the royal family for their official acts.
Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/middleeast/24saudi.html?_r=1
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.
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.
Sen. Graham: Bush covered up Saudi involvement in 9/11
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/09/08/graham/index.html
As the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. Bob Graham tried to expose what he came to believe were national security coverups and manipulations by the Bush administration. But he discovered that it was hard to reveal a coverup playing by the rules. Much of the evidence the Florida Democrat needed to buttress his arguments was being locked away, he found, under the veil of politically motivated classification.
Now, as he prepares to retire after 18 years in the Senate, the normally cautious former governor of Florida is unleashing himself in a new book, "Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror."
In his book, Graham asserts that the White House blocked investigations into Saudi Arabian government support for the 9/11 plot, in part because of the Bush family's close ties to the Saudi royal family and wealthy Saudis like the bin Ladens. Behind the White House's insistence on classifying 27 pages detailing the Saudi links in a report issued by a joint House-Senate intelligence panel co-chaired by Graham in 2002 lay the desire to hide the administration's deficiencies and protect its Saudi allies, according to Graham.
Graham's allegations -- supported by the Republican vice chairman of the House-Senate 9/11 investigation, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, but not his co-chairman, Rep. Porter Goss, Bush's nominee to become director of the CIA -- are not new. But his book states them more forcefully than before, even as Graham adds new insight into Bush's decision to invade Iraq, made apparently well before the president asserted he had exhausted all options.
In February 2002, Graham writes, Gen. Tommy Franks, then conducting the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan (and later to speak in prime time on behalf of Bush's candidacy at the Republican National Convention in New York), pulled the senator aside to explain that important resources in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, such as Predator drones, were being quietly redeployed to Iraq. "He told me that the decision to go to war in Iraq had been made at least 14 months before we actually went into Iraq, long before there was authorization from Congress and long before the United Nations was sought out for a resolution of support," Graham tells Salon.
Graham voted against the congressional war resolution authorizing force to topple Saddam Hussein. In 2003 he briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, arguing that Bush had diverted resources from the hunt for America's real enemies with his joy ride in Iraq.
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