The chilling pre-9/11 videos that victims’ families say will finally prove Saudi culpability in court
Constitutional questions test judicial philosophy as Americans debate the role of unelected judges.
Twenty-three years later and the families of the dead are still fighting to get a straight answer out of a government that called itself an ally. Two videos, sat in a drawer somewhere for decades, might finally be enough to keep this case alive in court next month. That alone tells you how hard this has been to pin down, and how hard certain people have worked to keep it that way.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Two videos kept out of sight for decades could be the key to persuading a court next month that Saudi Arabia was behind the Sept. 11th attacks, and that victims' families have found enough evidence to continue their years-long legal battle.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Twenty-three years later and the families of the dead are still fighting to get a straight answer out of a government that called itself an ally. Two videos, sat in a drawer somewhere for decades, might finally be enough to keep this case alive in court next month. That alone tells you how hard this has been to pin down, and how hard certain people have worked to keep it that way.
We've heard the official line for years: no smoking gun, nothing that rises to the level of state culpability, move along. Meanwhile the FBI's own 9/11 Review Commission flagged Saudi government contacts with the hijackers going back to their time in San Diego, and it's taken lawsuits, FOIA fights, and now apparently unreleased footage just to get this far. If Riyadh had nothing to hide, decades of stonewalling was a strange way to prove it.
None of this is about relitigating the war on terror or picking a new fight with the Saudis over oil and arms deals. It's about nearly three thousand American families who buried people and never got the accounting they were promised. If these videos actually move the needle in court, that's not a diplomatic inconvenience. It's the bare minimum of what this country owes its own citizens.
Washington has a habit of treating strategic partnerships as more sacred than the truth. This is a case where the truth should win, whatever it costs the relationship.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.