Posted on 04/24/2016 5:22:38 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The 9/11 attacks were not civil torts. They were acts of war. It is important to keep that fact in the front of our minds as we press for long-overdue disclosure of evidence linking the Saudi Arabian government to the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, to say nothing of the even more overdue investigation of Irans contributory role an investigation that should have been in high gear immediately after the planes struck their targets.
Over the years in these pages, we have catalogued the damage done to national security by regarding international terrorism as a mere law-enforcement problem the 1990s Clinton counterterrorism paradigm that President Obama has gradually reinstated. We havent much considered, though, another problem with thinking about violent jihadism as a litigation matter: It leads us to lose perspective about who was attacked, and why.
Much as our hearts ache for the victims whose lives were lost, and for the families whose lives were ripped apart, 9/11 was not principally an attack on the victims and their families. It was an attack on the United States of America. It was a stealth combat operation against the American people, all of us, by foreign enemies who had quite publicly declared war on our nation. Those killed and wounded are more accurately thought of as casualties than as victims.
This is why it is so unfortunate that the drive to get public accountability for the attacks has been intertwined with the effort to get financial compensation for the families by way of civil lawsuits against complicit nations.
Dont get me wrong: All of us should demand that state sponsors of terrorism be made to pay dearly for their atrocities although, for reasons Ill get to in a bit, legislation permitting victims to sue is a counterproductive way to go about this. But for all the incalculable pain and suffering inflicted on our fallen fellow Americans and their families, the laudable desire to see them awarded hefty money damages is, at best, a secondary priority.
The national security of the United States demands that we endeavor to understand why and how the 9/11 attacks happened as well as what kind of relations we should have, all these years later, with nations that were culpable.
In just the last few days, as Tom Joscelyn reports, the Obama administration has transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Riyadh nine more hardcore anti-American Yemeni detainees notwithstanding that al-Qaedas most capable franchise (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) has alarmingly expanded its safe haven in Yemen. Meanwhile, we learn in a jaw-dropping Wall Street Journal dispatch, the administration has announced that it will purchase from Iran tons of heavy water (used in developing plutonium bombs). In one fell swoop, Obama thus cures yet another Iranian violation of his vaunted nuclear deal (so soon after Iran tested ballistic missiles festooned with vows to destroy Israel); subsidizes Irans nuclear program; legitimizes Irans heavy-water production (i.e., its plutonium R&D) by encouraging other nations to engage in similar commerce; and apparently structures an infusion of multi-millions of American dollars into a country he promised Congress would continue to be precluded from access to our economy.
I know, I know: Obama is incorrigible. There is no American national-security interest that would be allowed to take precedence over his legacy hunt. He is determined to be remembered by the global Left the only audience that matters as the president who shut down Bushs Gitmo gulag; and if Congress wont cooperate by transferring anti-American jihadists to stateside prisons, then he will simply empty Gitmo by transferring the jihadists back to the jihad. And we have seen time and again that he is desperate to sustain his historic achievement in striking the Iran nuclear deal, no matter how often Tehran humiliates him.
Nevertheless, we will have a new president soon (albeit not soon enough). That president will have to decide the nature of our relations with the Saudis and Iranians. Assuming that, unlike Obama, the next president figures there should be a rational connection between how we engage a country and how much it threatens our interests, the facts about Saudi and Iranian complicity in the anti-American jihad must be known. More to the point, the American people are entitled to be able to weigh those facts in choosing the next commander-in-chief.
As I outlined last week, there is extensive evidence of complicity by high levels of the Saudi government in the 9/11 attacks. There is, moreover, compelling evidence of Iranian complicity.
Iran had an alliance with al-Qaeda beginning in the early 1990s. It principally included training by Hezbollah (the Beirut-based terrorist faction created and controlled by Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and such joint ventures as the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, in which 19 U.S. airmen were killed (and the FBIs investigation of which was obstructed by the Saudi government). Toward the conclusion of its probe (and thus without time to investigate the matter fully), the 9/11 Commission learned that Iran had provided critical assistance to the suicide hijackers by allowing them to transit through Iran and Lebanon as they moved from obtaining travel documents in Saudi Arabia (Saudi passports and U.S. visas) to training for the attacks in al-Qaedas Afghan safe havens.
Indeed, we now know that Irans assistance was overseen by none less than Imad Mugniyah, the now-deceased Hezbollah master terrorist who spent much of his life killing Americans, most notoriously in the Beirut marine-barracks bombing in 1983, and almost certainly at Khobar Towers. In October 2000, Mugniyah went to Saudi Arabia to coordinate activities (as the 9/11 Commission put it) with the suicide hijackers. (See 9/11 Commission Report at page 240, as well as affidavits of former CIA officers and a 9/11 Commission staffer, here and here). Thereafter, Mugniyah and other senior Hezbollah members accompanied the muscle hijackers on flights through Iran and Lebanon.
By enabling the hijackers to cross through these countries without having their passports stamped an Iranian or Lebanese stamp being a telltale sign of potential terrorist training Iran made it much more likely that the jihadists applications for Saudi passports and U.S. visas would be approved, as they were. That is why, on the topic of potential Iranian complicity in the plot, the 9/11 Commission wrote, We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.
The plea has fallen on deaf ears. In fact, thanks to Obamas Iranian nuclear deal, our government is no longer content to be willfully blind; it is knowingly and materially supporting Tehrans terror promotion, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Will we ever get accountability?
The prospects are not promising at the moment. As noted above, legislation has been proposed by Senators John Cornyn (R., Texas) and Chuck Schumer (D, N.Y.) to allow 9/11 families to sue the Saudis. Unfortunately, this Cornyn-Schumer bill has gotten itself tied to the effort to get disclosure of the 28 pages on Saudi complicity in 9/11 from Congresss 2002 report.
The Saudi government has threatened to destabilize the U.S. economy by dumping up to $780 billion in dollar-denominated assets if the kingdom is made liable to suit. They are probably bluffing. It is doubtful that they actually hold assets in that amount, and even if they sold off whatever they have, they are likely exaggerating the amount of havoc it would wreak. Still, the threat has given Obama the fig leaf he needs not only to threaten a veto of the legislation but to continue suppressing the long-sought 28 pages.
The two issues must be de-linked. The development of a truly definitive public accounting of the nations and terrorist organizations that colluded in acts of war against the United States should have nothing to do with whether the 9/11 families are given a legal basis to sue foreign sovereigns. Even if the two things were necessarily connected and theyre not it would be the legislation, not publication of the 28 pages, that should be dropped.
Civil lawsuits by victims are no more a serious response to wartime aggression than are grand-jury indictments. A great nation does not react to acts of war by issuing court process. Furthermore, permitting such lawsuits (a) encourages other nations to subject the United States to lawsuits for legitimate actions taken in our national defense; and (b) consigns the conduct of the most delicate foreign-policy matters to the vagaries of litigation presided over by the judiciary the branch of government that lacks constitutional responsibility, political accountability, and institutional competence for managing international affairs and national security.
Of course our government should pressure rogue regimes to compensate victims of terrorism. The political branches of government that are actually responsible for foreign affairs should demand that any nation complicit in the 9/11 attacks provide a fund for the families. It is feckless, however, to punt that job to the courts. Unlike the president and Congress, judges are powerless to enforce their writs against, or otherwise credibly threaten, hostile foreign sovereigns.
That, however, is the least of our problems. First, we need to find out exactly what happened in the lead-up to and aftermath of 9/11. (Post-9/11, Iran harbored al-Qaeda as the terror network fled invading U.S. forces.) Then, we need to define our engagement with Saudi Arabia and Iran in accordance with what they have done and who they actually are not who Obama and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment fantasize they could become.
So lets get the facts . . . finally.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor at National Review.
The Pentagon was bombed as well as the WTC.
And the result:
The Capitol, White Mosque and Islamic-controlled Pentagon
now support al Qaeda over the American people.
Need proof?
Was the material released?
Are we all prepared to whether the crashing of the trillion dollar bond market if the Saudi’s unload all their US debt holdings as they threatened to do?
Going into Afghanistan and or Iraq may have been a diversion from the real culprits...Iran/Saudi.
The Iranians have taunted America for decades, murdered our civilians, killed our troops on the battlefield, taken sovereign American territory and kidnapped/held our embassy/military personnel captive for over a year.
Yea...it's time. The Iranians should be taught what is meant by waking a sleeping giant.
Remember all the talk of Iraq's army being the 5th largest battle hardened army in the world? We walked over them twice like a hot knife through butter. The Persians are masters of deceit. They, like the Iraqis are braggarts. The Iranians shape this grandiose image of strength and military might....all the while, cowards who kill innocent people.
I wish I were a young man again. I'd gleefully enlist were there to be a conflict with Iran. My countrymen/woman's blood screams out for justice.
There was a training camp in Salman Pak Iraq that contained commercial aircraft. The initial view was that terrorists ran drills on how to highjack aircraft there. That make sense to me as Saddam Hussein provided major support to terrorists, financing the families of suicide bombers against Israel, providing a safe haven to retired terrorists, etc.
It’s worth remembering that Bill Clinton declared war against Saddam Hussein. He did so in the Obama/Clinton style of trying to destabilize the regime. 9/11 could well have been payback. Of course, our one-party press totally rejected this narrative as it would have benefitted GW Bush.
A revised and sanitized narrative about Salman Pak is that Iraqis practiced anti-terrorist training there. Who knew that Saddam Hussein was big on anti-terrorism?
It seems clear to me that there was a large pipeline of terrorists trained in airplane highjacking. Post 9/11 there were several attempts, most of which were foiled. I think the pipeline has about run dry and other forms of terrorism are preferred. Where were these highjackers trained if not Salman Pak?
Save
The Saudis will never do it.
The bond market will not collapse.
L
There is an elephant in the room that no one wants to notice. The problem is Islam. It teaches the subjugation of infidels. Sure most Muslims are not terrorists. Most Nazis were probably nice people too. As individuals and as a group, Muslims do not condemn terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks. Most silently approve.
Yup.
Every $1 of bonds would bring $.40.
Isn’t Iran blowing a gasket because the Supreme Court just cleared the way for the families of victims of state sponsored terrorism to seize their assets currently residing in a New York bank?
How much of the assets Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell are actually due and payable to the victims of 9/11 I wonder?
If there is no difference between GW Bush and Obama, then there is no difference between Donald and Hillary.
Present the truth as objectively as you can. That will free Americans make a best decision about Saudi Arabia and Iran. So far the US government has participated in hiding the truth and that flies in the face of what America once stood for. No matter how much it hurts, we have to return to truth to make correct decisions and to re-validate our national character.
SA has gotten a free pass. Clinton, Bush, and Obama have never been held accountable, and never will.
“Iran’s contributory role”?
I have heard a lot of different theories about 9/11 but that one is new to me.
The idea that Iran and Saudi Arabia would be cooperating on this is ludicrous. Their enmity is deep and longstanding, and I can think of nothing on which they have cooperated at any time ever.
I have to wonder about Andrew McCarthy’s contributory role.
He is not an outside observer of these events, but at least a minor player in them. His articles should be read with this in mind.
RE: I have to wonder about Andrew McCarthys contributory role.
Well, his contributory role was the prosecution of the Blind Sheik, who he put behind bars for the first World Trade Center bombing.
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