The Social World

Tag: 9/11

Dick Cheney dies at 84

Former vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defense under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration.

What is perhaps his most lasting legacy is the “Cheney Doctrine,” which influenced America’s decision to engage in wars in the Middle East. He campaigned for a military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which drove his conviction that any country, organization or individual that posed a threat to the US, or that might in the future, needed to be taken out.

Cheney had something of an imperial mind, a belief that presidential power had to be restored after it had been curbed following the executive crises of the 20th century, like the Vietnam war and Watergate. His will to power earned him comparisons with the Star Wars villain Darth Vader – critically by the left, and admiringly by Steve Bannon: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

Cheney was critical of Donald Trump, especially after the 2021 election. He called Trump a “threat to the republic” and a “coward” who tried to steal the election using “lies and violence.” Yet it could also be said that the Cheney years paved the way for a powerful executive like Trump. Where one president acted in the shadows, the other craves the limelight.

I grew up in the Bush-Cheney years, with a father who was frequently away from our family on deployments fighting in Middle Eastern conflicts. If circumstances had been slightly different, if my father had not come back, I might easily see Cheney as one of the great villains of American history. I would not be alone in thinking so. Cheney is one of the most unpopular figures in US politics of the 21st century, and the America First movement has arisen largely in reaction to his foreign wars.

My instinct is still to be highly critical of entanglements abroad, but it is impossible to judge what the world would be like if America had not fought the war on terror. Throughout his life, Cheney held that what he had done was necessary. He believed at the time, and continued to believe, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

November 4, 2025
The rise of the mayors

In Britain, the leading political parties have just held their annual conventions. After a month of national political debates, lost in all the commentary about polling and positioning is a larger and more consequential story about the changing dynamics of power. And it’s simply this: in a world where parties, prime ministers and presidents have long dominated the global stage, the spotlight is increasingly turning to a new group of leaders: mayors. And they are shifting the plot from talk to action.

Mayors have emerged as entrepreneurial actors on national and even international issues

In recent years, mayors have emerged as increasingly entrepreneurial actors on national and even international issues. They’re not only collecting trash and fixing roads, but they’re also pioneering new ways to tackle job creation, healthcare, housing construction, climate change and more. They are bringing a spirit of innovation to city halls, as the best US mayors in both major political parties are doing, too.

This development is only natural, since mayors stand on the front lines of our biggest challenges. And as frustration with national leadership grows around the globe, cities stand out as laboratories of renewal. Mayors are showing how progress happens in practice, by embracing pragmatic problem-solving, rather than ideological combat.

In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has capitalized on devolution to reduce air pollution, provide school lunches for children and improve social services. Mayoral combined authorities in Greater Manchester and Liverpool are developing new ways to provide better transportation for residents, more plans for affordable housing and more effective police and fire services. And earlier this year, the British government announced six new regions that will develop mayoral combined authorities, a move that will put 80 percent of the country under devolution.

Across the EU, local leaders are also raising their ambitions and asserting their power, even without new grants of authority. Helsinki, Finland, has gone without a traffic fatality for more than 365 days thanks to the mayor’s efforts to improve street design and public transport. And the city of Madrid is one step closer to reaching net zero emissions, in no small part because of the mayor’s effort to transition the city’s bus fleet to electric power.

As mayors rise to meet the moment, it’s critical that they have the skills and capabilities needed to pursue bold ideas – and succeed. When I was first elected mayor of New York in 2001, just weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, I had spent 20 years building and running a company. But most mayors arrive in office with little experience running complex organizations. They haven’t spent much time, if any, using data to manage performance; attracting and retaining talent; breaking down silos; improving customer service; solving complex problems by developing and implementing innovative solutions – and many other activities essential to success.

In the private sector, executive leadership and management training are the rule rather than the exception. But in the public sector, it essentially didn’t exist. And so in 2017 Bloomberg Philanthropies formed a partnership with Harvard University to bridge the gap. Since then, the program has trained mayors in eight of America’s ten biggest cities and more than 380 mayors worldwide, including in Liverpool and Greater Manchester.

Now, as Europe increasingly turns to its mayors, we are teaming up with the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Hertie School in Berlin to create the first-ever leadership program designed specifically for mayors and top city officials in the UK and across Europe. The inaugural class will include 30 mayors from 17 countries representing a diverse array of cities, from industrial centers and tourism magnets to university hubs and national capitals. The initiative will build their capacity to lead – aligning talent, tools and shared purpose to help them write Europe’s next chapter.

Over the course of the one-year program, which is backed through a $50 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, mayors and their staffs will take part in training inside and outside the classroom, including one-on-one mentoring and coaching sessions. The focus of the sessions will be on strengthening their capacity to empower their teams, build partnerships with communities and businesses, bring new ideas and creativity to challenging problems, share lessons across city and national boundaries and accelerate progress they are already making.

As the world increasingly turns to mayors to deliver results, the stakes are much too high to expect them to go it alone. With the very best in leadership and management training, mayors can redefine what is possible for cities – and their countries – to accomplish. As they do, voters will see the virtue of electing problem-solvers over flamethrowers, with the benefits spreading far and wide. In the theater of politics, as in life, Shakespeare’s words hold true: “Action is eloquence.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country?

A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it.

The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’

At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia. Carlson argues that Saudi agents were working undercover to get inside al-Qaeda and, in the process, gave the hijackers crucial support. Carlson says the CIA knew about, or even directed, the effort – then covered it up after the September 11 attacks.

The most important revelations are being made in a courtroom in the Southern District of New York, where the Saudi government is being sued by victims’ families. Among the plaintiffs is Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the North Tower. She was left to bring up three children on her own and now leads 9/11 Families United, a coalition of victims’ relatives and survivors. She tells me: “We know that the government failed us, but we also know that the kingdom, Saudi Arabia, sponsored the attacks.”

A federal judge has recently denied a Saudi motion to dismiss the case, finding enough evidence of the country’s involvement to move forward to trial. In court, the families’ lawyers described how Saudi Arabia built up a network of extremists around the world throughout the 1990s. Combing through thousands of documents from the Saudi government, the lawyers say they have identified more than 50 Saudi agents placed in the US to support and direct Sunni jihadists. Strada lists the places: Falls Church, -Virginia; Paterson, New Jersey; Scottsdale, Arizona; Twin Cities, Minnesota; Vero Beach, Florida. Saudi Arabia “had people in every single city. It’s horrifying.” One Saudi family in Sarasota, Florida – who were “obviously supporting the hijackers” – disappeared two weeks before 9/11. They left their house with food in the refrigerator and cars in the driveway. Strada says the Saudis knew what was going to happen on 9/11 because “the Saudis orchestrated it.”

Central to the story is a Saudi civil servant named Omar al-Bayoumi. Bayoumi moved to California in 1994 to become a “student,” though he rarely attended class. He befriended two of the al-Qaeda operatives who eventually carried out the 9/11 attacks, offering them extraordinary support. Much of this has been known since 2002: Bayoumi invited the two men to stay with him in his apartment in San Diego in 2000, then found them their own place across the street; he co-signed their lease and loaned them money for the deposit and first month’s rent; he got them bank accounts and driver’s licenses. The official report from the 9/11 Commission accepted that Bayoumi did all this unwittingly.

But the lawsuit has turned up new and damning information. The most consequential material comes from the Metropolitan Police in London – the file had been hidden from public view until now. The Met had this evidence because Bayoumi moved to the English city of Birmingham a year before 9/11, signing up to study at a university there (where he once again failed to attend class). Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, British counterterrorism officers arrested Bayoumi and searched the garage at his home. They found his address book, some videos and numerous documents and notes. This was Bayoumi’s personal archive and, the families’ lawyers say, the key to what happened on 9/11.

One video shows Bayoumi on a visit to the US Capitol in 1999. It’s not your typical tourist film. He concentrates on entrances, exits and structural features such as interior columns. He points out security personnel and patrols by the Capitol police. He speaks of a “plan.” An expert witness for the families said the video had all the “hallmarks” of reconnaissance for a terror-ist attack. Bayoumi refers to “demons” in the White House. One of the families’ lawyers described the video to me as a show of “seething contempt” for the symbols of US power.

Most revealing was a small yellow notepad found in Bayoumi’s garage. One page had a sketch of a passenger plane; another had an equation and calculations. Ten years passed before an FBI expert examined the calculations, and another ten before the notebook was given to the court in Manhattan. A pilot testifying for the families said the formula would have been used to work out the minimum altitude an aircraft would have to be flown at to see a target on the horizon. Lawyers for the Saudi government said this was a homework project by Bayoumi’s son. But Bayoumi had admitted in a deposition that the handwriting was his, explaining: “Perhaps this was an equation that we studied before in high school.” Asked why he would want to calculate the height of a plane from Earth, all he could say was: “It’s an equation like any other equation.”

Bayoumi told the British police officers interrogating him it was “pure coincidence” that he repeatedly “just happened to meet” the al-Qaeda men – as he did in Los Angeles, in San Diego and in Saudi Arabia. One of the cops told him: “You are a very unlucky person, or you are involved.” The British police expected the US authorities to ask for extradition and bring Bayoumi back to the US for questioning. They were incredulous when the US told them to let Bayoumi go. One of the officers told London’s Sunday Times: “I am still shocked to this day… I would have taken Bayoumi to the cleaners on those pieces of evidence.”

The 9/11 families’ lawyers believe the Saudis successfully lobbied the US government to get Bayoumi released. With 15 of the 19 hijackers identified as Saudis, the royal family was panicking and – as one of the lawyers told me – began “an audacious manipulation” of its relationship with the US. The lawyers are still trying to obtain the cable traffic they think would prove this. But they claim that the kingdom was telling the US its help would be needed for the new War on Terror – to prevent a future 9/11 – and for the invasion of Iraq. The result was a joint effort to conceal the “direct line of culpability leading back to Riyadh.”

In The 9/11 Files, Carlson says the Bush White House was all too happy to let the Saudis off the hook. Bush himself had ignored intelligence briefings warning that al-Qaeda planned to attack the US.

Carlson, you may think, has gone down a few rabbit holes since he left Fox News, moving his studio to what looks like a log cabin on the American frontier (it’s actually a garage in Maine). But Carlson does not claim that 9/11 was an “inside job,” an attack orchestrated by the US government, nor does he argue that the Saudis directly planned the attack. Instead, we get a story of failure and cover-up by the CIA.

Carlson says the official account of 9/11 is a “lie.” According to that version of events, the US government “just didn’t have the intelligence it needed” to prevent the attack. In fact, the CIA was closely tracking two of the al-Qaeda men as they arrived in the US – the same two housed by Bayoumi in San Diego. The CIA kept this information from the FBI, Carlson says, because the agency was using the Saudis for a surveillance operation targeting al-Qaeda. “The CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources.”

In the documentary, a former FBI agent, Mark Rossini, tells us this was the CIA’s “delusional” grand plan. Rossini was one of the FBI’s representatives in the CIA’s bin Laden unit. In effect, he says, the CIA protected these terrorists from the rest of law enforcement, especially the FBI. “You have the CIA following two men all over the planet, then landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI… You had a duty to protect Americans, and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion.”

The CIA is not allowed to spy within the United States. But, Carlson tells us, the agency used Bayoumi as a “workaround” – he was on the payroll of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Carlson says. He quotes declassified government documents showing that Bayoumi got large sums of money from the Saudi embassy. The money was apparently funneled from accounts belonging to the wife of the ambassador. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9/11 hijackers, Carlson says, the CIA gave itself cover if things went wrong – which of course they did, -spectacularly. The 9/11 Commission’s report doesn’t even mention this alleged recruitment scheme. Carlson says the CIA stopped the -officer supposedly running the operation from speaking to investigators. As he puts it, the Commission allowed the CIA to get away with saying it made an “honest mistake” in failing to tell anyone that two al-Qaeda terrorists had arrived on American soil.

Terry Strada isn’t buying it. If this was a CIA operation that spun out of control, why didn’t the agency loudly blame the Saudis after 9/11? “They did the opposite. They bent over backwards to protect the Saudis,” she says. The cover-up was not about a spying operation gone sideways, she says, but about the much bigger story that 9/11 was a plot hatched by one of America’s closest allies. The Saudi royal family have always denied that their government had anything to do with 9/11; there may now be new inquiries in the US Congress and elsewhere. The new evidence prompts many questions; the Saudi government should be afraid of the answers.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025
Where is America’s 9/11 spirit?

Stark was the contrast between the selfless heroism and unity of purpose on and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the nation’s reaction to the events of September 10, 2025.

In abundantly obvious respects, the two days differed. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, his wife, their two children, and the rest of his loved ones were the only immediate victims of his assassination on September 10.

In contrast, Osama bin Laden’s hell-bound errand boys murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, saddled thousands more with diseases that later claimed their lives, and altered New York City’s skyline forever on September 11. America went to war afterwards.

But the two tragedies, though they varied in scale, shared one key similarity that a disturbingly small proportion of the country has acknowledged: they both represented attacks on the very idea of the United States as a tolerant, pluralistic democracy whose citizens enjoy freedoms unknown to most of human history – including, and perhaps most importantly, the freedom to disagree.

Kirk traveled to college campuses to try to persuade young men and women to adopt his worldview. For that crime, a madman sentenced him to death.

The correct reaction to this horrifying act of vigilante injustice was modeled on the far-left by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who delivered a masterclass in how to honor his political opponents – and their shared country – in an admirably unqualified manner.

“I want to say a few words regarding the terrible murder yesterday of Charlie Kirk, someone who I strongly disagreed with on almost every issue, but who was clearly a very smart and effective communicator and organizer, and someone unafraid to get out into the world and engage the public,” began Sanders. “Freedom and democracy is not about political violence. It is not about assassinating public officials. It is not about trying to intimidate people who speak out on an issue. Political violence, in fact, is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.”

There was no “But” in Sanders’s condemnation of Kirk’s assassination, no self-righteous enumeration of his countless – and doubtlessly vehement – disagreements with Kirk, and no attempt to put political points on the board. Only a sincere expression of condolences and articulation of unifying principles. All was as it should be.

Sadly, Sanders’s words were made all the more moving by their loneliness. To be sure, an overwhelming majority of public figures, including on the left, condemned Kirk’s murder. But far fewer reckoned with the gravity of what happened in Utah last Wednesday, or responded to it with the gravitas the crisis demands.

While the “rats” – vocal ghouls who celebrated the murder of an innocent countryman – are not a critical mass of Democratic voters, or activists, or even congressmen, that is not to excuse the behavior of some particularly shameful members of the party. Though they may not have popped any champagne after Kirk’s death, they betrayed their apathy toward it in other ways.

The day after Kirk fell, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) joined Mehdi Hasan for a session in which they – among other indignities – mocked the self-evident truth that Kirk believed in the power of civil debate. Reps. Dave Min (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA), meanwhile, glibly attempted to make a political profit off of Kirk’s murder by misleading the public about the perpetrator.

“Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT,” mused Min.

“It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer,” submitted Swalwell.

Let the reader understand: authorities have identified the alleged shooter as a man “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology” whose partner was transgender. Kirk was shot while discussing the phenomenon of transgender mass shooters.

While for understandable, if not entirely laudable reasons, some on the right have called for a figurative war effort in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. “Y’all caused this!” shouted Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) at her Democratic colleagues following a moment of silence for Kirk on the House floor.

It all amounts to a scathing self-critique of not the right or the left, but of a society so self-indulgent and siloed that hardly anyone inside of it can subordinate the interests of their faction after a national tragedy – not even for a week – to those of the wider country, or even to memorializing the man who died.

Twenty-four years ago, Americans came together to face a common enemy. Today, they’re coming together on opposing sides of a battlefield, tragically convinced that their enemies have lived next door all along.

September 14, 2025
When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits.

But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B. Daniels, in a little noticed ruling in Manhattan, denied a motion by the Kingdom to dismiss the case, opening the way for a trial. In his decision, Daniels found that a small cadre of Saudi government employees tied to the consulate in Los Angeles had formed a support network for two of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and 2001 and probably had advance knowledge of the plot. In his opinion, Daniels raised the prospect of wider involvement by Saudi officials. Daniels ruling is the first judicial finding in the United States that the government of Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

A key piece of evidence in the case, what plaintiffs lawyers call an al-Qaeda surveillance video of the US Capitol, came from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service. The Met obtained the video during a raid of the Birmingham home of a suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, two weeks after 9/11.

Daniels said the evidence suggests Bayoumi, employed ostensibly as an accountant for a Saudi aviation firm, and Fahad al-Thumairy, a radical cleric based in the Los Angeles consulate, assisted two of the hijackers in advance of the attacks in their official capacity as Saudi government employees. “Thumairy and Bayoumi were not just acting as an imam and accountant,” Daniels declared. “Their employment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.”

Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, which the terrorists apparently intended to use to attack the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and rushed the cockpit.

In all, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, including 657 at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, who were killed when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the Kingdom.

Plaintiffs lawyers have been collecting evidence of Saudi involvement almost from the day of the attacks – the first lawsuit against the Kingdom was filed on September 10, 2003 – and those facts have long suggested that the Saudis provided logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plaintiffs’ theory rests in part on uncontroverted evidence that the Saudi royal family and Saudi government officials, beginning in the mid-1980s funded Islamist charities that in turn supplied weapons and logistical support to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

That movement later spread to the vicious Balkans war of the 1990s, which pitted indigenous Muslims and their al-Qaeda allies against local Serbs and Croats. From there, al-Qaeda quickly leapfrogged to attack other western targets including two US embassies in East Africa and the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

Regional offices of the charities employed al-Qaeda members in senior positions and these charities supplied money, travel documents, arms, safe houses and other assistance to al-Qaeda cells, the plaintiffs allege. Absent the assistance of Saudi government funded charities, a half dozen of which were designated as terrorism supporters by the US Treasury Department, al-Qaeda and bin Laden never could have mounted the logistically complex 9/11 operation.

So alarmed were US government officials by the role of the Saudi charities in funding international terror that then-vice president Al Gore met privately in 1999 with then crown prince Abdullah in the White House to ask for assistance in tracking down terror groups based in the Kingdom. Abdullah agreed to put senior US intelligence officials with their Saudi counterparts, but US officials said nothing came of it.

“We went to the Saudis as a government, showed them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place and ultimately nothing happened,” said Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement.

Central to the lawsuits against the Kingdom are reports that emerged within days of the attacks that Bayoumi and Thumairy, the Saudi consular official, assisted Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States, getting settled in southern California in January of 2000.

Bayoumi’s ostensible employment as an accountant was with a Los Angeles based Saudi aviation company named Dallah Avco, in a government funded position. While Bayoumi drew a salary, fellow employees told investigators he only rarely showed up for work. He did, though, have multiple contacts with the hijackers, along with Thumairy, helping them find an apartment and co-signing a lease for a rental in San Diego, and arranging for them to take flying lessons and learn English.

When interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, Bayoumi said he had met the hijackers by chance in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles on February 1, 2000, near the Saudi consulate, where he had traveled to clear up a visa problem. He claimed to have taken the initiative to introduce himself to the hijackers when he heard them speaking an Arab dialect common in the Persian Gulf and felt it was his duty as a fellow Muslim to help them get settled.

This claim was dismissed early on by FBI investigators who concluded that Bayoumi’s luncheon meeting with the hijackers had been planned and that he likely was a Saudi intelligence operative with links to al-Qaeda. “(Bayoumi) acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion,” an FBI agent told congressional investigators. “And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if provided some kind of financing or payment of some sort, then I would say there might be a clear connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL (Osama bin Laden).”

Bayoumi moved to England before 9/11, but soon after the attacks FBI agents who had picked up his trail in southern California, alerted British authorities of his potential role and the Met Police searched his Birmingham home. Among the items taken from the house was a video recording Bayoumi made of the US Capitol building in 1999 along with the Washington Monument and other landmarks. Also confiscated was a drawing of an airplane with a calculation that experts for both the FBI and plaintiffs lawyers later concluded was a mathematical formula showing the rate of descent necessary for an airplane to collide with a target on the ground.

While he made the video, Bayoumi was accompanied by two Saudi embassy officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a branch of the Saudi government staffed at the time by radical clerics whose role was to propagate a militant form of Wahhabi Islam that vilified the west. In the video, Bayoumi takes pains to note the Capitol’s main entrances and points out locations of the capitol’s security staff.

Former acting CIA director Michael Morrel, and other former US intelligence officials have described the video as a casing film made in preparation for a terrorist attack. “No doubt in my mind that al-Qaeda tasked him to do this casing video,” Morrel said in an interview with CBS news.

One of the more salient aspects of the aftermath of 9/11 is the degree to which the United States government has sought to conceal what it knows about the origins of the plot, a tactic that has frustrated efforts by the plaintiffs lawyers to get at the truth while greatly benefiting the Saudis. The stonewalling began with the administration of President George W. Bush, which insisted on classifying and keeping from public view portions of the first congressional investigation, the so-called Joint Inquiry, raising questions about Bayoumi and the potential role of the Saudi government.

The late Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation, then went so far as to accuse Bush of protecting the Kingdom because of Bush family ties to the oil industry and Saudi royals.

The equivocations and evasions continued through each succeeding administration. The FBI, for example, has been in possession of the Bayoumi video of the Capitol building since 2001, but failed to turn it over to not only plaintiffs lawyers but also the 9/11 commission. The plaintiffs only were able to access the video when the Met Police agreed to give it to them in 2022.

Some of the foot dragging at times has resembled theater of the absurd. Early in the case, when plaintiffs lawyers requested the Justice Department make public a copy of the Interpol bin Laden arrest warrant, the answer they got back was the warrant was protected by privacy rules and that department couldn’t release it without bin Laden’s permission.

At other points, the government obstruction was of far greater import. In 2009, then US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a US Supreme Court Justice, filed an amicus brief in the litigation asking the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision dismissing the case against the Kingdom. Kagan argued there was no persuasive evidence of Saudi government involvement, even as the FBI continued to pursue evidence Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative with possible links to al-Qaeda. The Supreme Court, heeding Kagan’s request, declined to hear the matter.

Later, in 2016, the Obama administration lobbied heavily against legislation intended to aid the 9/11 victims by expanding the basis for suing foreign governments that foment terrorism. Administration officials warned the Saudis would withdraw upwards of $750 billion in assets from US financial institutions if the bill became law. Obama vetoed the measure after both the House and Senate passed it overwhelmingly. Congress overturned the veto and the bill became law.

That measure, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, clarifies the US State Department need not designate a foreign government a terrorism supporter as a condition for being sued in US courts, a requirement that had hampered the 9/11 lawsuits. It also makes clear that not all of the tortious conduct must to take place in the United States.

The dire scenarios depicted by the Obama administration never came to pass, while the measure gave new life to the plaintiffs’ litigation and set the stage for Daniels’ groundbreaking decision on August 28.

Now that the lawsuits seem to be headed for trial, 9/11 victims and their families, along with the nation as a whole, may finally get answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement that have been swirling around the case since the beginning.

September 11, 2025
Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC.

But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many.

Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country’s highest civilian award.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, can be given to anyone “who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The medal can be awarded posthumously; such recipients include Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Babe Ruth.

Given that the award can be given posthumously for “an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, the 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 obviously qualify – especially given the details of their heroism.

On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 left Newark, New Jersey for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. At 9:28 a.m., four al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered the Boeing 757. Wielding knives, they claimed to have a bomb, forced passengers to the back of the aircraft and breached the cockpit. In the process, the hijackers stabbed pilot Jason Dahl, co-pilot Leroy Homer Jr., flight attendant Deborah Walsh and passenger Mark Rothenberg. Walsh and Rothenberg immediately died from their wounds.

“Uh, is the captain,” Ziad Jarrah, the terrorist flying the plane, said over the intercom. “Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board and (we) are going back to the airport and to have our demands… Please remain quiet.”

Flight 93 was traveling over Ohio when it turned east toward the Capitol, the intended target. Meanwhile, passengers were calling their loved ones to explain what was happening. Through those calls, they learned about the World Trade Center.

“It’s Lynn,” passenger Linda Gronlund told her sister. “I’m on United 93 and it’s been hijacked… Apparently, they’ve flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.

“Mostly, I just wanted to say I love you… and… I’m going to miss you… and… and please give my love to Mom and Dad, and (sigh) mostly, I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not. (sigh),” Gronlund continued before giving her sister the combination to her safe.

Passenger Todd Beamer surreptitiously called Lisa Jefferson, an operator for an airline telephone service, and in the midst of tears, asked her to call his wife.

“You have the same name as my wife,” he said. “We’ve been married for ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her that I love her… (choking up)… I’ll always love her… (clearing throat). We have two boys… David, he’s three and Andrew, he’s one… Tell them… (choking) tell them that their daddy loves them and that he is so proud of them. (clearing throat again) Our baby is due January 12… I saw an ultrasound… It was great… We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.”

But the passengers refused to submit to the inevitable. They chose to act.

“We have decided we would not be pawns in these hijackers’ suicidal plot,” Beamer told Jefferson. “We’ve hatched a plan. Four of us are going to rush the hijacker with the bomb. After we take him out, we’ll break into the cockpit. A stewardess is getting some boiling water to throw on the hijackers at the controls. We’ll get them… and we’ll take them out.”

Beamer then asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 25 before turning to his fellow passengers.

“Are you guys ready?” he asked. “Let’s roll.”

Jefferson, who described Beamer as “a soft-spoken, calm gentleman,” believes he “played a great role because when he told the guys ‘Are you ready?’ I assume that they were waiting on his cue,” she said.

Alice Hoagland, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham, described what happened next.

“They ran up the length of the 757 with all their improvised weapons,” Hoagland said while listening to a recording of the flight’s final moments. “You could hear them coming. It became louder and louder, people yelling, ‘Get ’em!’

“They rattled the heck out of those guys in the front. They were terrified.”

Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of passenger Tom Burnett, elaborated.

“You could hear the scuffling,” Bailey said. “There were several people working together. You could hear a hijacker being hit with some type of object and you could hear the pain that he felt when he was hit. It was a cry, a wail as if he had been fatally struck. They were realizing that the passengers and crew members were coming to get them.

“Then we all heard Tom’s voice. All of us just jolted. Tom said, ‘I’m injured.’ It was in a way that you had the sense that he was saying, ‘Don’t wait for me. Keep going.’ “

The frightened terrorists responded by violently steering the 757 up, down and sideways to try to throw the passengers off balance. When the passengers remained undaunted, the hijackers – amid cries of “Allahu akbar” – chose to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

At 10:03 a.m., frenetic activity turned into morbid silence.

In recent years, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has become just another token of political patronage, with recipients reflecting a sitting president’s political agenda. Such recipients include Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editorial director and a fundraiser for President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns; Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic activist nun who helped get “Obamacare” passed, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who received it “with distinction.”

But President Donald Trump can help restore the award’s original luster by bestowing individual medals to 40 ordinary men and women who performed an extraordinary act that must never be forgotten.

September 11, 2025