John Pastore

On May 2, 2011, a U.S. Navy SEAL shot and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, ending a manhunt that had lasted nearly a decade.

Three days later, President Barack Obama flew to New York City to commemorate the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which were orchestrated by bin Laden. After laying a wreath at the former site of the World Trade Center towers, the president entered the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site to meet with 60 of the victims’ families over lunch. The president spoke briefly at a podium with a faulty microphone, then made his way through the hall to talk with those in attendance.

Eventually, Obama reached a heavyset man with a comb-over. This 64-year-old man, deeply tanned from half a decade of faithful attendance at the golf course, was Bill Doyle, a retired stock trader who lives in a Central Florida retirement community. Doyle’s youngest son Joey died on Sept. 11, after being trapped in the smoldering North Tower.

Doyle congratulated the president on the kill: “You got the mission accomplished,” he said, only half-jokingly. Then, with the sort of bluntness typical of a native New Yorker, he admonished the president: “You said that you were going to let those 28 pages be known,” he said. “I’m waiting for them.”

The pages Doyle refers to are part of a heavily redacted portion of a report published in December 2002 by a bipartisan Congressional Joint Inquiry established to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. Leaks to the press following the report’s publication established that the subject of those pages was the nation of Saudi Arabia, America’s oldest ally in the Middle East and its second-largest source of oil. Though the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (aka the 9/11 Commission, which picked up its investigation where the Joint Inquiry left off) later cleared Saudi government officials of alleged links to al-Qaida in a 2004 report, the Joint Inquiry’s findings on the Saudi connection remain redacted to this day, and many interested parties, including Doyle, suggest that they may contain key information about who was truly behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

But then again, Doyle feels he already knows who the guilty parties are. Since the summer of 2002, Doyle and a group called 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism have been pressing to shut down the alleged financiers of al-Qaida through a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed by one of the rock stars of the trial-attorney world, Ron Motley. Many of the original defendants in the case are from Saudi Arabia, including three prominent princes who held important positions within the Saudi government. The case is awaiting a trial date.

In their efforts to bring these Saudi officials and businessmen to trial, however, Doyle and his allies have encountered a formidable foe: the U.S. government, which has urged the courts to drop the charges against the case’s most powerful defendants and has yet to give up the 28 pages that Doyle wants to see. So when Doyle had his chance to talk to President Obama, the conversation ended on a cautionary, rather than a congratulatory, note. “I’m going to stay on you on this,” Doyle said. “I promise you, I will.”

 

Four months into the Iraq War, former General Counsel of the U.S. Department of the Treasury David Aufhauser told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security that Saudi Arabia was the “epicenter” of terrorism financing. For a casual student of the Sept. 11 attacks, this may seem to be an obvious conclusion: Osama bin Laden was a wealthy Saudi; his family, which owns a construction conglomerate valued in the billions, has enjoyed very close ties with the Saudi royal family since the 1930s. (Last month, the Saudi government awarded the Binladen Group $1.23 billion to build what will be the world’s tallest building, near the coastal city of Jeddah.) It also seemed likely that, in addition to bin Laden’s own fortune, the wealth of other sympathetic Saudis could have helped fund the attacks carried out by 19 Arab hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

Only a few months before Sept. 11, former FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill shared with French terrorism-financing expert Jean-Charles Brisard (the lead investigator for the plaintiffs in the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism suit) his frustrations in extracting potentially valuable information from Saudi officials. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, are in Saudi Arabia,” he told Brisard.

But in the months following the attacks, there was no retaliation—military, economic, or diplomatic—against Saudi Arabia. Instead, the United States bombed Afghanistan, a deeply impoverished country that bin Laden’s organization, al-Qaida, had used as a base (though al-Qaida’s operatives were, and still are, spread around the world), and Iraq, a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Since the first air strikes on Iraq in March 2003, the United States has spent $797.3 billion on the ensuing war and has seen 4,474 U.S. soldiers and more than 102,000 Iraqi civilians killed from the resulting violence. The war in Afghanistan, which by some accounts is now the longest military conflict in U.S. history, has only been marginally successful in its aims: Al-Qaida has found refuge in neighboring Pakistan, and the United States is now in the midst of talks with the Taliban, the fundamentalist group that then President George W. Bush declared in 2004 to be “no longer . . . in existence.”

Throughout the term of President Bush, who was extremely close with the Saudi elite—in a book dedicated to this relationship, journalist Craig Unger compiled an appendix detailing $1.4 billion in transactions between the Saudi royal family and businesses tied to the Bush family—discussions with and about Saudi Arabia have generally been kept highly confidential. It appeared that a change was in order when President Obama was elected—only weeks into taking office, he met with family members of Sept. 11 victims, among them outspoken widow Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed; Breitweiser told reporters that the president told her he was willing to have the pages declassified. But more than two years later, nothing of the sort has happened.

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