More than two decades, two wars, and countless lives later, 9/11 victims can take Saudi Arabia to trial. New evidence pointing to the kingdom’s involvement in the World Trade Center attacks prompted the federal judge to grant a civil trial, a historic moment and victory for the plaintiffs. Rarely in American history is a foreign nation tried in a U.S. court.
Their lawsuit revealed new evidence pointing to a wider conspiracy, challenging what many previously understood about the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil. But a federal judge ruled the case can go before a jury only because of a law, enacted 15 years after the lawsuit was filed, that allows foreign nations to be sued in U.S. courts under certain circumstances.
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“This is extraordinary,” Jerry Goldman, an Anderson Kill partner who represents the lead plaintiff, hundreds of families and thousands of people, told Straight Arrow News. “It should not have been this long. I got family members dying. 24 years is a long time. … This is the longest case of my career.”
No trial date has been set. U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels of New York gave the Saudi government 30 days to respond to his ruling that the case can go forward.
Saudi Arabia has not answered in court, and Fahad Nazer, a spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to SAN’s request for comment.
Years of suspicions
Since 2001, U.S. policy has been rooted in the understanding that al-Qaeda acted on its own in deploying hijackers to crash airliners into four targets.
But through the discovery phase of the lawsuit, Goldman and the plaintiffs’ legal teams uncovered connections between al-Qaeda members and Saudi officials in Los Angeles ahead of the attacks.
New evidence focused on “the relationship between two of the hijackers and a Saudi support network in Southern California,” Goldman said from his office overlooking Times Square. “We filled in over a lot of years many of those blanks. We filled in communications between Saudi government people in the embassy, in the consulate, in Washington and in LA and people on the ground helping hijackers. … Helping them operate in this country, helping them get apartments, helping them get transportation, getting them acclimated, getting them the support they needed to function in the country so they can go out and kill people.”
Goldman thinks the plaintiffs’ lawyers will uncover more information. “We got that,” Goldman said. “I believe we’re going to get more.”
There were those who believed there were other operators involved in the attacks.
“People were suspicious of it all along,” Goldman said. “There were FBI agents who were suspicious. … The congressional investigators were suspicious of it.”
Incomplete report
The 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan panel charged with investigating all aspects of the attacks, released a report in 2004. But Goldman said the document didn’t tell the whole story.
“The 9/11 commissioners, after the fact, stated their investigation was by no means definitive; it was based on what they had and what they were given,” Goldman said. “Remember, they could not talk to many of the witnesses: it was filtered through the CIA or the FBI. They had a limited budget and a congressional mandate with a very short period of time and they were fighting to get information from the Bush administration.”
Commission members came forward years after the report came out and said there was information withheld from them.
“The conclusion almost all of the commissioners came to, I think all the commissions came to, was that there was too much damn classified information,” Tom Kean, the former two-term Republican governor of New Jersey and chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, wrote in 2021. “You came across documents that would have a classified stamp on them and you’d read them and think, why in hell is this stuff classified, because it’s something the public should be aware of.”
“It was an incomplete report,” Goldman said. “We’ve added pages.”
The lawsuit has added to a new understanding of what was behind 9/11 and of the U.S. response in the years that followed.
“This vanguard of jihad, it seemed, was the first nonstate actor that rivaled nation-states in the damage it could wreak,” Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote last year for The Atlantic. “That assessment now appears wrong. And if our understanding of what transpired on 9/11 turns out to have been flawed, then the costly policies that the United States has pursued for the past quarter century have been rooted in a false premise. The global war on terror was based on a mistake.”
Going to trial
The plaintiffs faced a formidable challenge from the start. When they filed the lawsuit, federal law made holding foreign nations accountable for crimes committed in the U.S. difficult. A federal court dismissed the case in 2015, citing Saudi Arabia’s sovereign immunity.
That changed in 2016 with the enactment of Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism, which can allow civil cases to proceed against foreign governments that are charged with terrorism on American soil.
“Congress amended the act to provide the second avenue to achieve justice,” Goldman said. “Congress was real clear: this is a pathway to establish this. And the judge [Daniels] said, ‘You established this, go forward.’ Almost like a toll road. He opened the gate.”
Saudi Arabia could appeal the judge’s ruling. Or the attempt to settle the case or take its chances at trial.
Regardless, Goldman said the fight for the 9/11 victims continues.
“We’re not stopping,” he said. “And it’s just going to get worse for them. Because we pulled this stuff out, the U.S. government fought us, everybody fought us, but we got this material out and out in public, in a public courtroom, in a public forum, widely reported by the media. That’s what the system is supposed to do. And we’ll continue to do that until we get justice.”
“We want more accountability,” Goldman said, “and more transparency.”
