JASTA: Barking up the wrong tree

On Nov. 13, 1995, Al-Qaeda launched its first terrorist attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aimed at both the US and Saudi Arabia. The car-bombing attack, which targeted a joint US-Saudi training facility, left seven people dead (including five Americans) and over 60 injured. Within two weeks, the Saudi government captured four Saudi nationals, who confessed to the attack and were punished accordingly.
Seven months later, a Hezbollah-supported terrorist group attacked the Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in the Eastern Province, killing 19 US airmen and one Saudi, and injuring 386 others. Alarmed by the emerging threat of international terrorism, Saudi Arabia has since embarked on a long counter terrorism campaign.
A key part of this campaign was the involvement of the international community, including the US, in sharing information about terrorist activities.
On June 21, 2001, the US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced an indictment issued by a federal grand jury stating that a militant group called “Saudi Hezbollah” was responsible for the Alkhobar attack. According to the indictment, the group consisted of 13 Saudis and a Lebanese. The attorney general explained that “the charged defendants reported their surveillance activities to Iranian officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials.”
He added that “next week’s five-year anniversary of this tragedy will come with some assurance to victims’ family members and to the wounded that they are not and will not be forgotten.” Then, attorney general concluded by thanking “the Saudi government for its assistance throughout this investigation.”
Two months later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks hit the US, redefining terrorism and overshadowing the attacks on Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 attackers held Saudi passports. For the Saudi government, and Saudis in general, those 15 individuals were the same brand of terrorist that had attacked their cities of Alkhobar and Riyadh. However, the Americans did not perceive it this way. To them, the attackers were not individuals, acting on their own accord, but members of a larger nation. Fueled by the many self-proclaimed “terrorism experts,” who gained authority after the 9/11 attacks, this perception created an environment of misdirected fear and anger toward the Saudi government. Although there was no evidence linking the Saudi government to those individuals, allegations snowballed into a long-standing federal lawsuit, resulting in the families of 9/11 victims filing a lawsuit accusing the Saudi government of supporting Al-Qaeda.
At the same time, the US government conducted a thorough investigation of the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission, an independent bipartisan commission created by the US Congress to investigate the attacks, concluded that there was no connection between the Saudi government and the terrorists involved in 9/11. However, the commission found that there was “strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of Al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”
But the commission stated that Iran might not have been aware of the plan for the 9/11 attacks and called for further investigation into this lead.
The fact that the 9/11 Commission classified 28 pages of its report, which contain preliminary information about some Saudi individuals, fed conspiracy theories and public speculations about possible Saudi ties to the attacks. Therefore, the lawsuit against the Saudi government continued until September, 2015, when US District Judge George Daniels dismissed it.
The judge stated that “the allegations in the complaint alone do not provide this court with a basis to assert jurisdiction over defendants.” In March, 2016, the same judge issued a default judgment ordering Iran to pay $10.5 billion in damage to the families of 9/11 victims for its role in the attacks. According to the New York Times, the judgment was based on information provided by former 9/11 Commission staff members, ex-CIA officers, and two defectors from the Iranian intelligence.
Nevertheless, allegations against the Saudi government continued to grow until it reached the US Congress. In May 2016, the US Senate passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a bill that would allow victims of terrorism in the US to bring lawsuits against foreign states for supporting terrorism. Although the bill did not mention Saudi Arabia specifically, the two senators who sponsored it, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Sen. John Cornyn, drew connections between the bill and the long-standing lawsuit against the Saudi government. They even used the then-classified 28-page report to support the bill. To the surprise and confusion of many, when the 28 pages were declassified, they held no evidence of Saudi involvement. Nevertheless, the bill proceeded to the House of Representatives, which unanimously passed it and sent it to the president. When President Obama vetoed the bill, the Congress vowed to override his veto setting up another round of confrontation.
Given the breadth of information the US has collected during the last 15 years about terrorism, the question remains as to why the US continues to ignore Iran’s ties to terrorism, and furthermore, why it insists that much remains unknown about Saudi Arabia’s involvement. If JASTA is designed only for the 9/11 attack, who is defending victims of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s? Given the evidence and information available to the US, it is clear that the efforts behind JASTA are feeding politically motives, rather than justice.
The war against terrorism should not be compromised for political gain. Today’s international terrorism is anti-state in nature, and will not follow any regional political realignment. The fight against terrorism cannot be won without states working together, not only with mutual trust, but also with mutual understanding of the nature of the threat. The US and Saudi Arabia are strategic allies on the war on terrorism. However, when they override their sovereign immunity laws, the main beneficiaries are transnational terrorists, particularly Al-Qaeda.
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Dr. Saad Alsubaie is a researcher in international security and a distinguished international security fellow at the National Council on US-Arab Relations. He holds a Ph.D. degree in International Security Studies from Kansas State University, Kansas, and a Master’s degree in Defense Analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.