9/11 families fume over US govt. siding with Saudi: NYT

The families of 9/11 victims in the US are reportedly infuriated at the administration of US President Barack Obama for “siding with Saudi Arabia” over a congressional bill that could incriminate Saudi officials for the deadly attacks on September 11, 2001 in America.

According to The New York Times report citing US officials and congressional aides from both Republican and Democratic parties, the Obama administration has intently been lobbying the Congress to block the passage of legislation that would allow American courts to hold Saudi authorities responsible for any role in the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage.

If the legislation passes, US courts would be allowed to freeze assets held by the Saudis.

The Obama administration argues that the 9/11 bill would “put Americans at legal risk overseas,” as other countries would retaliate with passing their own bills against the United States.

US Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate panel back in February that the legislation would “expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent.”

The families of victims, however, accuse the Obama administration and the former one of George W. Bush of covering up the Persian Gulf kingdom’s involvement in the attacks in order to “protect US-Saudi relations.” 

A group of the victims’ families pushing for the legislation says the Obama administration has “consistently sided with the kingdom” and thus thwarted their efforts to learn “the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot,” the report wrote.

“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” the Times quoted Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center nearly 15 years ago.

Over the recent weeks, the US State Department and Pentagon officials have been discussing possible consequences of diplomatic and economic fallouts with Riyadh, if the legislation passes in Congress.

According to the Times report, Saudi Arabia threatened to sell off hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US assets if Congress passes the legislation.

Last month, Saudi Foreign Minster Adel al-Jubeir told US lawmakers in a visit to Washington that the kingdom would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts, said the report.

Economists, however, cast doubt on such an effort, saying such a sell-off would be difficult to carry out and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy, the Times said.

Obama will pay a visit to Riyadh on Wednesday for meetings with King Salman and other Saudi officials. Speculations are high that the 9/11 bill would be on the agenda there.

Since Saudi officials have long been accused of having plotted the 9/11 attacks, a number of lawmakers keep calling on the White House to declassify certain pages of top secret documents that could implicate the kingdom in the attacks.

The 28-page account in question is part of a larger Congressional report on 9/11, which was released in 2002 and called the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities. It was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Reports say the Obama administration and intelligence officials are now weighing whether or not to declassify those pages.

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