Posted on 04/16/2020 6:02:31 AM PDT by Theoria
The move comes after President Donald Trump promised to help families, who accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks. Barr says he cannot even explain why the material must stay secret without putting national security at risk.
Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret.
In a series of filings just before a midnight court deadline on Monday, the attorney general, William Barr; the acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell; and other senior officials insisted to a federal judge in the civil case that further disclosures about Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot would imperil national security.
But the administration insisted in court filings that even its justification for that secrecy needed to remain secret. Four statements to the court by FBI and Justice Department officials were filed under seal so they could not be seen by the public. An additional five, including one from the CIA, were shared only with the judge and cannot be read even by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Barr insisted to the court that public discussion of the issue “would reveal information that could cause the very harms my assertion of the state secrets privilege is intended to prevent.”
What the various security agencies are trying to hide remains a mystery.
Since the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in federal district court in New York in 2017, their primary focus has been on the relationship between the hijackers and relatively low-level Saudi officials. Those include at least two Saudis who crossed paths in Southern California with the first two Al Qaeda operatives who were sent to the United States by Osama bin Laden in January 2000.
Yet the broad outlines of the hijackers’ connections to those two Saudi officials — a diplomat at the kingdom’s Los Angeles consulate and a suspected Saudi spy living as an exchange student in San Diego — have been publicly known for years. The FBI shared thousands of pages of its files on the plot with the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which explored them in its 2004 report.
“The extraordinary lengths that they’re going to here suggest that there must be some deep, dark secret that they’re still trying very hard to hide after almost 20 years,” said a lawyer for the families, Steven Pounian. “But who are they protecting? Something might be a Saudi government secret. But how can these be secrets that still need to be kept from the American people after all this time?”
The Justice Department has declassified some information about the Saudi role in 9/11 and shared it with lawyers for the plaintiffs under a protective order that allows them to read it but not make it public. But the department has not asked the lawyers to obtain security clearances to view other material, as is fairly common in national security cases involving American and foreign citizens whose constitutional rights are at issue.
The chorus of senior national security officials who wrote in support of the Trump administration’s secrets claim appeared to respond in part to Justice Department guidelines set down by the Obama administration in 2009. Those rules were intended to restrain overly aggressive use of the privilege, which the administration of George W. Bush had often cited after 9/11 to block legal challenges to its policies on torture, extraordinary rendition and warrantless surveillance.
Barr cited those more restrictive guidelines in his statement to the district court, noting that they prohibited the government from asserting a state secrets claim in order to conceal illegalities or potential embarrassment. He assured the magistrate judge in the case, Sarah Netburn, that those guidelines had been met.
At a ceremonial gathering at the White House last Sept. 11, representatives of the families of those killed in the attacks repeatedly asked Trump for fuller access to the FBI’s secret files in the case. According to more than a half-dozen people who were at the meeting, he assured several of them he would help.
“He looked us in the eye on 9/11, he shook our hands in the White House and said, ‘I’m going to help you — it’s done,’” recalled one of those present, Brett Eagleson, a banker whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “I think the 9/11 families have lost all hope that the president is going to step up and do the right thing. He’s too beholden to the Saudis.”
The White House press office did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the families’ characterizations of the meeting. One day after that encounter, Justice Department officials agreed to release the name of one mid-level Saudi religious official who had been tied to the case in an FBI document that had been partially declassified earlier. At the same time, however, Barr asserted the state secrets privilege to protect other FBI documents sought by the families. The latest flurry of statements supporting that claim responded to challenges from the plaintiffs.
Although the close alliance between the United States and the Saudi kingdom has survived countless moments of tension, it has frayed in recent months in ways that could prove helpful to plaintiffs in the 9/11 lawsuit.
In recent weeks, Republican senators from states that have been hard hit by the collapse of world oil prices have criticized the Saudi government with growing intensity. On March 25, before the Trump administration negotiated a cut in Saudi oil production, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska cited the law under which the 9/11 families were allowed to sue the Saudi government as one of the levers of pressure that the United States could use if the kingdom did not take account of American concerns.
In a letter on Monday, three other influential senators asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine in depth why the FBI has refused to disclose more information about Saudi connections to the plot in response to a subpoena filed by the 9/11 families in 2018.
Those senators, Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and two Democrats, minority leader Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, cited a recent investigative report by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that raised new questions about the FBI’s inquiry into the Saudi role in the attacks.
“The September 11 attacks represent a singular and defining tragedy in the history of our Nation,” the senators wrote to the Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz. “Nearly 20 years later, the 9/11 families and the American public still have not received the full and transparent accounting of the potential sources of support for those attacks to which they are entitled.”
Kinda makes one wonder how serious the information in those reports are.
Does everyone here realize ProPublica is Soros funded?
Talk about itchy trigger fingers....
https://www.propublica.org/supporters
Look through the list of “contributors”,how many are tied to Soros?
Apparently “national security” trumps justice, civil rights, and the Constitution, just as the Founding Fathers intended.
And WTC7 was a controlled demolition, as proven by the University of Alaska civil engineers, in their recent years-long evaluation/final report, disproving the NTSC nonsense.
9/11 has large hidden secrets that the. fedgov refuses to release.
Who were the Americans that were instrumentally complicit in the 9/11 attacks? Who had the explosives installed that brought down the Twin Towers? Who had all of the gold removed that was kept in the Twin Towers vaults days prior to the attacks and where is that gold now? A.G. Barr knows!
Yes, and did you know that a plane did not hit the Pentagon?
Then maybe you can tell me why they are trying to “recoup monetary gains” after 19 years if it is such an important issue a generation later. It’s just a scam to make money and they are trying to use sensitive information to do it even when they don’t need it. No better than slavery reparations. And again, they have everything they need and have had it for years. They’re fishing for other settlements whether it exists or not. And they shouldn’t use national security to hunt for them. This is not a discovery, it’s a ambulance chase.
rwood
“The default setting should always be to release the information.”
This would completely destroy the work of the government. Let’s put the shoe on another foot. Would you be willing to release your medical records or your family’s? How about your tax information, paycheck stub, bank account or visa numbers, your social security number, your companies operation numbers and info....all of this, and more relates to information.
That’s what you’re asking them to do only it isn’t theirs, it’s yours for you. And the safety and security of thousands of people will be compromised upon release of sensitive information. I would think this takes precedence over a 20 year old sudden need for a lawsuit in a fishing expedition.
rwood
Because if America was told what the Saudis REALLY did, they would demand a nuclear strike on them.
I will be happy to release my twenty year old medical records if the intelligence agencies release their twenty year old material—fair trade!
Only if you haven't been paying attention. Apparently Barr is just fine with shooting a woman in the head while she's holding her infant daughter, since he gave pro-bono legal help to Lon Hourchi. Some of us haven't forgotten.
Because 'our' government has chosen not to produce US taxpayer documents. Monetary gains is the only way at this point to hold the Sauds accountable for anything. The US government has repeatably chosen to look the other way concerning a criminal or military response.
“This would completely destroy the work of the government.”
At this point about 80% needs to be destroyed.
L
I mentioned active things not inactive. The information they are asking for is still sensitive. Twenty year old medical records were not in the post I sent. Referencing current ones were.
Fair trade? Hardly. Information in government files can create problems. Your 20 year old medical record probably won’t. Your credit history and your personal numbers most likely will for you. Releasing files from sensitive areas will cause problems, possibly death, to many. All for a money hungry lawsuit that the info they have already will suffice.
This is the reason information is stored safely because people don’t know what can happen to it when released. And as the suit has nothing to do with the US, or the people that store the information,and since those people have nothing to gain or lose, then you give me a reason why it should be released because I just gave you some as to why it should not.
rwood
The details matter.
Twenty year old sources and methods are usually not secret.
If there is a specific source that needs to be protected, then Barr should simply state that there is a source or sources that are still living that need to be protected.
If there is a method that needs to be protected Barr need only say there is a method still in use that needs to be protected.
But—he should at _least_ attempt to give a reason, and be prepared to defend it before a judge in a secret proceeding.
I think building 7’s collapse was a preventative failsafe collapse to keep presumed enemies from gaining vital secrets should New York had suffered some sort of Nuke or other devastating attack....like the Trade Center bombing. One copy of our Constitution in DC for example is supposed to drop down a special shoot in DC incase of attack for protection. I think it was something simple as that.
I agree. This “people of the government by the government and for the government “ bullsh** HAS TO STOP.
You can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
You got the best thing going in the world and you think 80% of it should be tossed? Maybe you should talk to the 31.3 million legal and 11.9 illegal immigrants that gave up everything to get here since 1990 alone.
Ever heard the phrase for your own protection? Used all the time in government and court cases. You as a citizen hired them by your vote to make those decisions for you. Your parents voted in the people that made rules along with grandparents that made some too. You don’t like the rules, work at getting them changed. But I can’t come to a conclusion why information that is twenty years old means anything to a case so unimportant it was filed 20 years later. This is a political game, not a harmless case. It has no purpose. And all it can do is harm to many people not involved with the case. And even if they sue Saudi and win, are they going to collect? It is doubtful if not impossible. They are not under our laws.
rwood
“But—he should at _least_ attempt to give a reason, and be prepared to defend it before a judge in a secret proceeding.”
He did give a reason...it’s sensitive material. The lowest level of clearance to gain information like this is confidential and is define as:
The type of security clearance that provides access to information that may cause damage to national security if disclosed without authorization.
Lives fall under that definition. Secret and top secret and their levels are even more sensitive. And whose to say someone hasn’t already been before a federal judge. That is not mentioned in the article.
There are a lot of files stored/hidden in the US that can cause a variety of problems from trade embargoes, to wars, to deaths. This is why they are stored. To keep the people, the lawyers, and the idiot media out of them.
rwood
“You got the best thing going in the world and you think 80% of it should be tossed?”
Yep. I’ve got a handy list, too.
L
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