ON THE 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York the FBI released a newly declassified 16-page document detailing their investigations into the support provided to two of the Saudi Arabian hijackers involved.
This was the first release of the massive number of documents relating to the FBI investigation of the terrorist attack promised by President Joe Biden.
For years this information has been kept secret by the US state, but Biden has come under increasing pressure from the families of those killed who have waged a long fight for the records to be made public.
These families are pursuing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit in New York alleging that senior officials of the Saudi Arabian government were complicit in the attack, a charge strenuously denied by the Saudi regime.
The 16-page heavily redacted document released on Saturday deals with an interview in 2015 with a Saudi national applying for US citizenship and who had repeated contacts years before with other Saudis the FBI has said provided ‘significant logistical support’ to the hijackers.
The man interviewed was a student at the time, but the FBI suspected he was a high-level Saudi intelligence agent. The document also strengthens already reported links between two of the hijackers and an official at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles.
While the Saudi government and the US government were quick to point out that this newly declassified document provides no ‘smoking gun’ directly linking Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terrorist attack, this was rejected by the victims’ families.
A statement from 9/11 Families United said the document ‘put to bed any doubts about Saudi complicity in the attacks’.
They went on to say the document implicated ‘numerous Saudi government officials, in a coordinated effort to mobilise the essential support network for the first arriving 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khaled al Mihdar’.
Jim Kreindler, a leader in the lawsuit, said that far from exonerating the Saudi government it validated the contention that the Saudi government aided and helped the hijackers.
He said: ‘With the first release of documents, 20 years of Saudi Arabia counting on the US government to cover up its role in 9/11 comes to an end.’
In fact, in the past 20 years three US administrations have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks and shift the blame on completely innocent countries.
The original 9/11 commission report found ‘no evidence that the Saudi government’ as an institution funded the attack by al-Qaeda but they were forced to admit ‘the likelihood’ that Saudi government-sponsored charities did.
Despite the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, that the head of al-Qaeda (Osama bin Laden) was from an influential Saudi family and all the abundant evidence that they drew funding for official Saudi ‘charities’ the US government has refused to point the finger at the Saudi regime.
Instead, the 9/11 terrorist attack was used by the then US administration of George Bush as a pretext for invading Afghanistan to remove the Taliban government that had sheltered Bin Laden but had nothing to do with the attack.
It was then used as an excuse to move on to imperialism’s real objective – the invasion of Iraq to seize its oil wealth.
Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 but this didn’t stop the US invading or the attempt at regime change in Syria or the bombing of Libya – all carried out under the lying pretext of the ‘war against terror’.
The September 11 attack was an act of terrorism that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and all the subsequent wars in the region.
The attack served the interests of world imperialism. No wonder that the Saudi regime, US imperialism’s faithful ally in the Middle East, is protected at all costs.
There will be no justice for the 9/11 victims and no justice for the millions of men, women and children killed in imperialist wars until imperialism itself is destroyed by the victory of the world socialist revolution.