The Ripples of Pain
September 11, 2021 -- 20th Anniversary
For General Ray Odierno, the Scars From Iraq Were Personal
October 17, 2021
A soldier died this week.
But Raymond Odierno was more than just another guy in a uniform.
We think of war as a story of battles and deployments. So it was, in many ways, with Odierno, 67, the retired four-star Army general from Rockaway Township, who died Oct. 8.
Odierno, the grandson of Italian immigrants, took on multiple roles during the Iraq War. He began as the commander of the rough and controversial, kick-in-the-doors U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division that captured Saddam Hussein. He later became the overall troop commander in Iraq between stints in Washington, D.C., first, as an adviser to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and later as a member of the Pentagon's joint chiefs of staff.
I met Odierno as he walked a very different path -- as a father whose son had become one of the casualties of that long and terrible war.
It was early 2005. I was in on assignment in Washington to cover Congressional action on recommendations put forth by the 9/11 Commission, chaired by former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean. I had some free time, however. And with the Iraq War raging and so many U.S. soldiers returning with lost limbs because of the large number of booby-trap roadside bombings, I telephoned Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on the edge of Washington.
Could I visit the amputee ward?
"Yes," a clerk said.
When I arrived, I walked into a room that seemed part hospital ward, part gym, part classroom with tables and chairs. A few soldiers clustered in one corner. A few more in another, their voices muffled and intense.
One of them, Tammy Duckworth, an Army major and soon-to-be lieutenant colonel, had recently lost both legs when the helicopter she was piloting crashed. Who knew that Duckworth would later turn up on Capitol Hill as a Democratic U.S. Senator from Illinois? Certainly, she did not.
Back then, Duckworth intently tried to lift some light weights, her eyes focused and unblinking. She had yet to find that light-up-a-room smile that would propel her into politics.
I casually asked if any of the soldiers were from New Jersey. A nurse pointed to the back -- to an auxiliary room. A young Army captain with intense eyes and a lanky frame was there. He had Jersey roots. He recently lost an arm.
A minute later, I said hello to Raymond Odierno's son, Anthony.
Anthony wore jeans, a baseball cap and a gray USA Basketball T-shirt. As I approached, he tried to lift an unloaded M-16 rifle to his shoulder -- just to see if he could still do it.
Anthony frowned and placed the black rifle on a table. Minutes later, fitted with an electronic prosthetic arm, he tried to pour beans from one stainless steel cup into another.
"Why does your last name sound familiar?" I asked.
"My father is a 3-star general," Tony quickly answered.
"Oh, yes," I said, recognizing the connection.
So began a story that was not so much about war and its horrific wounds. This was a tale of a son following his father's path -- first to West Point, then into the Army's infantry ranks, then to the same set of dusty battlefields in the same forlorn Middle East nation where tribal factions have fought for generations.
The father, then 50, came home to glory -- and a promotion, with a job in the Pentagon and a bright future in the Army. The son, still in his early 20s, was now pouring beans in a steel cup in a hospital ward.
Anthony and I talked into the afternoon, mostly about his ongoing physical therapy and his dreams of the future. He had just been promoted to captain and said that he wanted to stay in the Army. But he knew he couldn't remain as an athletic infantry officer. And the notion of sitting at a desk did not seem appealing. He mentioned grad school but quickly added that he couldn't decide what he wanted right then. He was still coping with the fact that an arm was gone.
On the night in Baghdad when he lost his arm, Anthony somehow pulled himself from a Humvee after a rocket tore through the door, killing his driver and obliterating his left arm. With blood soaking his uniform, he remained with his troops, directing them to safety. While Iraqi insurgents attacked, Anthony pleaded with a sergeant to tighten a tourniquet on his mangled arm.
For such heroism, the Army announced it would give Anthony a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, with a special citation for valor.
"I'm told I'm going to get it," Anthony said of the medals at the time. "I don't know when. It doesn't matter."
After I left Walter Reed, I placed a call to the Pentagon, asking for Gen. Ray Odierno.
A U.S. Navy captain, who handles interview requests from journalists, advised me that Odierno would probably not want to talk about his wounded son. After all, the captain said, Odierno was now working with the Joint Chiefs and advising the secretary of state and may not want to get into personal matters.
"Here's my cell number," I said. "Tell him I'm from New Jersey."
An hour later, my cellphone pinged. It was Odierno, calling from his Pentagon office.
What transpired was the kind of kind of conversation that so many U.S. families now wrestle with as they send their sons and daughters off to any war or military deployment. Parents want to support their kids -- to let their sons and daughters follow their dreams and find some measure of fulfillment in volunteering for a stint in the military. But when this involves war, parents also know that their support may come with a horrible price tag.
Ray Odierno knew this all too well -- all too personally.
"We understood the risks," Odierno said, mentioning his wife, Linda, and their feelings of support for their son. "I understand why he was over there. I understand the mission. That helps a lot. But it's no help to get a call that your son has been injured."
Odierno recalled that he and Linda received the news about Anthony's arm while visiting his parents in northern New Jersey. The next day, they boarded a military plane with parents of other wounded soldiers and flew to Germany where they visited with Anthony in a U.S. military hospital.
"I understand my responsibilities as a general," Odierno said. "Maybe in public I act a little bit different. Privately, my wife and I felt it as parents. We just wanted to see him."
Such words say much about the emotional undercurrent between parents and their children amid the horrors of war. In the case of Raymond and Anthony Odierno, each was acutely aware they had public roles as military officers. And yet, they also had to now balance their rank and mission with their personal emotions.
In the coming months, the two became a very personal face of war for America -- the acclaimed and admired general with the wounded son. Their story was featured in national magazines. They tossed "first pitches" at baseball games. They promoted the "Wounded Warrior" campaign to help other veterans maimed by the war.
I stayed in touch here and there with Raymond and Anthony Odierno.
Just before Raymond was dispatched to Iraq as the top military commander, I phoned him at his Pentagon office and interviewed him for a column. I mentioned I was also heading to Iraq in a few months -- not with a gun or wearing a uniform, though. I would be carrying a reporter's notebook.
"Call me when you arrive," Odierno said.
I did. Months later, while on assignment in Iraq, we spent most of a morning together in a U.S. military encampment on the outskirts of Baghdad, with Odierno slouching on a sofa in one of Saddam Hussein's marble palaces as he explained his strategy for dispersing thousands of captured Iraqi insurgents that were being guarded by units from the New Jersey National Guard. Little did Odierno know at the time that some of those insurgents would become the organizers of the brutal Islamic State known as ISIS -- yet another war fought by young Americans.
Anthony remained in the Army for a few more years, serving as a special aide to then Joint Chiefs Chairman at the time, Marine General Peter Pace, who grew up in Teaneck. But Anthony eventually left the Army and headed to graduate school.
A few years after that, I connected with Anthony again, this time at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, where he had taken a job as the chief of special events. He was trim and competing in triathlons, a father now, with a home in the Connecticut suburbs. He had even tried skiing, chuckling to himself as he described his efforts.
Yankee Stadium was empty the day we met, except for a groundskeeper mowing the infield grass and a few sea gulls gliding on the breeze that swept across the empty seats. A subway train rattled on the elevated tracks just beyond the right field bleachers. We took seats in the left field bleachers.
"The Army," Anthony said, "is something I'll always miss."
Anthony now works as an executive with JPMorgan Chase. He is widely regarded as a success --a soldier who left war behind and moved on. And yet, he still carries the scars of that faraway war on a dusty street.
In those worrisome months after Anthony lost his arm, Raymond found comfort in the fact that his son was "doing what he wanted to do" and that he "loved what he was doing" when he was injured.
Anthony, in turn, knew that too. "It was totally worth it," he said.
But like his father, the son was also a realist.
"Sometimes, things like this happen," Anthony told me. "That's something you accept."
Wars teach us much about brutality. In the stories of Raymond and Anthony Odierno, we also learned about our humanity.
FBI Release of Secret Files If "Tip of the Iceberg"
September 13, 2021
The 16-page, heavily redacted report, written in April 2016 and titled "Encore Investigation Update," offers no overall conclusion on the totality of Saudi government involvement - long a major question in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But it contains plenty of alarming Saudi fingerprints and new insights on efforts by Saudi officials in America to connect with the team of al-Qaeda operatives behind the attacks and offer help in the form of finding apartments or other seemingly ordinary tasks.
Imagine you have just arrived in a large city, in a country you have never visited and where you plan to carry out a massive terrorist attack that kills thousands of innocent people. You don't speak the language. You have no idea how to rent a car, find an apartment, open a bank account - even find a restaurant that offers food you like.
Did someone help you?
This is the central question that weaves through a newly declassified FBI report, released
Also significant is that this report, which is only a summary of a much larger FBI inquiry of alleged Saudi links to the 9/11 plot, is just the beginning of what relatives of 9/11 victims hope will be the release of a steady stream during the coming six months of previously secret files on the U.S. investigation of the attacks.
"The dam is broken. The truth is spilling over," said James Kreindler, the New York-based attorney who represents thousands of relatives of 9/11 victims in a massive federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia now moving through U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Kreindler said on Sunday that he is confident that future releases of formerly secret FBI files will show even more connections to higher-level Saudi officials. He even predicted U.S. authorities may indict some Saudi officials on criminal charges.
"We're climbing up the totem pole," he said.
The release of the FBI report late Saturday was expected. Indeed, as the nation mourned the attacks, victims' relatives texted back and forth throughout the day, wondering when the report would be made public.
Ten days earlier, President Joe Biden, under pressure from victims' relatives, ordered a sweeping declassification of FBI, CIA and other secret files on the 9/11 attacks. In his executive order, Biden specifically ordered the FBI to turn over its 16-page summary of its Saudi-related "Operation Encore" investigation by the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
Biden's order - and reversal in U.S. policy that had kept the alleged Saudi links to 9/11 top secret for nearly two decades - came after victims' families told him not to bother attending the annual 9/11 commemoration services in lower Manhattan, Virginia and Pennsylvania if he did not declassify the files. If Biden had not ordered the files released, some families threatened to stage protests during the services in lower Manhattan that traditionally includes a somber reading of nearly 3,000 names of those who died in the attacks.
Also, Biden's order came as a growing number of congressional leaders, including U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York, announced their support for bipartisan legislation to declassify all U.S. investigative files on Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks.
How tangible are the Saudi connections?
At issue in the report - and, indeed, the overall controversy - is whether the connections of some Saudi government officials to the 9/11 plot is tangible evidence that the Saudi government. officially supported the attack.
In its "Encore Report," the FBI appears to be drawing a careful investigative line between those two issues. The FBI refrained from making a blanket conclusion that the Saudi government officially conspired with the 9/11 hijackers. Instead, the FBI focused on a handful of Saudi officials - all with links to the Saudi intelligence services and a Saudi government agency whose mission is to spread a form of Islam known as Wahhabism that promotes a fundamentalist view of religious laws and teachings.
This raises the possibility that only a rogue group of Islamists within the Saudi government may have conspired without higher-ups knowing. Or it raises a question that Saudi higher-ups turned a blind bureaucratic eye to the connections of lower officials to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and its growing terrorist activities.
Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia - the son of a wealthy construction magnate with deep connections to the Saudi royal family and the government. Fifteen of the 19 Islamists who carried out the 9/11 plot were Saudi citizens.
Saudi Arabia has long claimed it had no connection to the 9/11 attacks, while also trying to distance itself from bin Laden and the hijackers who were Saudi citizens. Likewise, the U.S. has delicately stepped around the question of Saudi government links.
The 2004 report by the 9/11 Commission concluded that neither the "Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually funded" the 9/11 plot. But since the report's release, some commission members - notably Tim Roemer - have raised the possibility that lower-ranking Saudi officials were involved.
Two weeks ago, the commission's chairman, Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor, told NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network that he favored the top-to-bottom release of all top-secret files on the Saudi links to 9/11. But Kean cautioned that he did not believe the files would contain a "smoking gun" that would conclusively link the Saudi government to 9/11.
Days before the 9/11 anniversary and likely in anticipation of the release of the FBI report, the Saudi embassy in Washington, issued a statement saying that "any allegation that Saudi Arabia is complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks is categorically false." But the Saudi government, which has hired a team of U.S. lawyers to defend itself against the 9/11 allegations, has never answered the question of whether lower-ranking officials - perhaps with the tacit approval of higher-ups - became involved in the 9/11 plot.
The FBI report details extensive links between two Saudi officials - Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy - with two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy both reportedly had ties to Saudi intelligence services, the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and the Saudi government's religious arm.
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000. Neither spoke English. Neither had ever visited the United States. But al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy managed to not only link up with them but help them settle into American life. Was this accidental or part of a preconceived plot?
Also not clear from the FBI report is how al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi made their way across the United States and settled into a series of motels in New Jersey, including the Congressional Inn on Route 46 in South Hackensack.
The travels of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi into the U.S. and then to New Jersey is one of the most controversial and mysterious of the overall 9/11 narrative.
The CIA had been tracking al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Both were known members of al-Qaeda and visited Malaysia and Thailand before boarding a flight to America.
When al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi landed in Los Angeles, the CIA waited more than a year to tell the FBI that two al-Qaeda terrorists were on the loose inside the U.S. The CIA has never explained why it did not reach out to the FBI. Such a lapse, many critics feel, allowed al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi to set in motion the 9/11 plot with other hijackers - and Saudi officials. The new FBI report offers more insight into the movements of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. It also names several more Saudi government officials besides al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy.
Several prominent leaders among 9/11 relatives who have long demanded that Saudi Arabia comes clean on its links to bin Laden and the hijackers claimed that the FBI's report is just the start of more revelations.
"This isn't a crack. This is a split that opens into all of the Saudi lies and deceit," said Terry Strada, formerly of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, who lost her husband, Tom, when the Trade Center's north tower fell. Strada, who now lives in Florida and had given birth to a son only four days before the 9/11 attacks, said the FBI's report, despite its redactions, shows "the Saudis were deeply involved." "It's clear," she said.
Brett Eagleson, of Middletown, Connecticut, who lost his father, Bruce, at the trade center, agreed. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the opening gambit," Eagleson said on Sunday, adding that the release of the FBI report "marks the moment when the Saudis cannot rely on the
U.S. government from hiding the truth about 9/11."
A key question now is whether the Saudi government will change its strategy of denying any connection by its officials to 9/11, much like Libya altered its deny-everything approach after more information surfaced of its links to the terrorist bombing of the U.S.-bound Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Another possibility is that Congress will increase pressure - perhaps with sanctions - on Saudi Arabia to reveal more about the 9/11 plot.
For now, the relatives of 9/11 victims are awaiting the release of more files in the coming months.
It Doesn't Get Any Easier
September 12, 2021
Grief at Ground Zero Is Still Raw
NEW YORK - Suddenly, it was 20 years.
Once again the living victims of the 9/11 attacks -- the walking wounded who lost friends and relatives or survived and now wonder why -- came back to the place we once called ground zero. They grieved on a morning eerily similar to that Tuesday in 2001 -- a cloudless blue sky filled lower Manhattan with bright light and the cool of the fall to come.
This year was different, though.
Yes, the bagpipers played "Amazing Grace." Children who were not born on that bloody day read names of uncles and aunts they never met. Firefighters pinged a silver bell to mark the precise times when planes crashed and skyscrapers fell and smoke smudged a perfect azure sky. But the pain seemed deeper now.
Trying to measure sorrow is never easy. Was the first 9/11 anniversary, with mourners laying flowers in a construction pit worse than the fifth? Or the 10th? Or the 15th?
But 20 years is a benchmark. A generation has been born since the 9/11 attacks. Five presidential elections have taken place. America has fought its longest war. It now battles its worst pandemic in more than a century and faces a sense that our people are more disunited and hateful of each other than any other time since the Civil War.
Twenty years ago, Greg Packer, then a highway maintenance worker from Huntington, Long Island, rushed to the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. His goal: Help any way he could.
He found himself passing out water and meals to firefighters, police and construction workers who scrambled over the twisted steel and crumbled concrete, attempting to find survivors or recover bodies.
What Packer found was a sense of unity that he had never felt before in his nation.
"It's 20 years later and I need to be here to remember and never forget," Packer said on Saturday as he stood on Greenwich Street, a block from the 9/11 Memorial Plaza and its majestic oak trees and soothing waterfalls and names of the dead.
Remembering also makes Packer sad.
"We're dealing with mass shootings," he said. "We're dealing with a pandemic and people are not getting along."
The sense of disunity -- and its shocking contrast to the united spirit of America in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks -- was a theme of Saturday's memorials.
Speaking at the memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where passengers forced a hijacked plane bound for the U.S. Capitol to crash into a farm field, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Americans to come together.
"If we do the hard work of working together as Americans, if we remain united in purpose we will be prepared for whatever comes next," she said.
On Friday night, President Joe Biden made a similar plea for unity. And also speaking in Shanksville, former President George W. Bush said he "was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Now, he sees a far different political landscape.
"When it comes to the unity of America," Bush said. "Those days seem distant from our own." Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stood with Biden at the lower Manhattan service. Biden then made stops in Shanksville and at the Pentagon.
Former President Donald Trump, perhaps the the single-most disunifying figure in recent political history, did not join former presidents at any of the 9/11 commemorations.
The fact that most political leaders, except Trump, could come together and not fight was perhaps the most notable part of the day. But it did not seem to sooth the pain.
Tears brimmed in the eyes of Tony-winning Broadway actress Kelli O'Hara as she sang an emotional rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone" between readings of names of the dead at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza in lower Manhattan. Moments before, Bruce Springsteen seemed to choke slightly as he began his own anthem of sorrow and death, "I’ll See You In My Dreams."
In the crowd of several thousand mourners, Patrick Swift of Jersey City removed his newsie's cap as he listened to Springsteen.
Smith lost his brother, Tom, when the World Trade Center's south tower fell. He's now 52, still a tough iron worker.
But on Saturday, wearing a blue T-shirt with his brother's name and the slogan, "we will never forget," tears rolled down his cheeks as he remembered his brother, a budding executive with Morgan Stanley who worked on the 70th floor of the south tower.
Tom Swift's colleagues escaped by taking the stairs. Swift jumped on an elevator and was never seen again.
"My brother knew every word of every Springsteen song," Patrick Swift said as he wrapped his right arm around the shoulder of his wife, Evonne.
Evonne snuggled into Patrick's neck and the couple silently took in Springsteen's lyrics:
“I'll see you in my dreams.
We'll meet and live and love again. I'll see you in my dreams.
Yeah, up around the river bend. For death is not the end."
As Springsteen finished, Patrick looked up to heaven and smiled.
Patrick's nephew, Peter, read names of the dead from the stage next to the spot where Springsteen played. As he finished with his list of the dead, Peter, who wasn't born when the 9/11 attacks took place, mentioned Tom Swift, adding, "I can't wait to meet you."
"There is a God," Patrick said.
Such were the small moments of comfort. Perhaps it was just a humorous remembrance as a relative read names. Perhaps it was a handmade sign with family photographs carried by the elderly father of Danielle Kousoulis, a vice president at the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm who perished when the north tower fell. Or perhaps it was the sign and T-shirt carried by the mother of George Cain, a firefighter who died trying to rescue officers workers at the Trade Center.
"These 20 years have felt like both a long time and a short time," said Mike Low as he remembered his daughter, Sara Elizabeth, a flight attendant who died when American Airlines Flight 111 crashed into the north tower. "As we recite the names of those we lost my memory goes back to that terrible day when it felt like an evil specter descended on our world but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary."
As he walked the streets near the Memorial Plaza, Tony Hammond, 66, of Louisville, Kentucky, thought of how the pain of 9/11 had actually become something of a unifying balm for some. "They talk about six degrees of separation," said Hammond, who came to the memorial for the first time. "But I don't think there is that much separation for the people who come to this event." For a day at least, America caught a glimpse of how 9/11 brought us together.
But like all the other anniversaries of the nation's deadliest terrorist attack, that pain also hurt deeply.
Cliff Schlosser, now 57 and a battalion chief for the Rahway fire department, rushed to the World Trade Center only hours after the attacks. Then he kept going back, working 12-hour shifts to help recover the dead.
He came back on Saturday -- just as he always has in previous years. And the old pain returned.
"It's the same," he said. "It doesn't get easier."
Hijackers Lives in Plain Sight
September 10, 2021
On a quiet Tuesday in June 2001, two men walked into a store in a busy strip mall in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that rented mailboxes for people on the move who needed a temporary address to receive checks, bills or personal letters.
A mile away, the usual steady stream of cars and trucks swept across the George Washington Bridge, spanning the Hudson River. A dozen miles down the Hudson, at the tip of Manhattan, the World Trade Center's twin towers poked the sky.
At Mail Boxes Etc. -- a now defunct storefront in Fort Lee's Linwood Plaza shopping mall -- the men plunked down an indeterminate amount of cash and were assigned Box 417. FBI agents later learned they told a clerk they represented a firm based in Paterson, New Jersey, and explained they needed the temporary mailbox only until late September.
Actually, the men, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al-Hazmi, didn't need the mail drop that long. And their explanation that they were from a business in Paterson was just a ruse.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Hanjour and al-Hazmi joined 17 other followers of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network in hijacking four commercial jetliners and crashing them into the trade center's twin towers, the Pentagon in northern Virginia and a farm field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Al-Hazmi helped subdue passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the west wall of the Pentagon. Hanjour piloted the plane.
Their rental of a temporary mailbox in Fort Lee represents just one of thousands of examples of seemingly ordinary movements by the 9/11 killers in the months leading up to the attacks. These details were chronicled in an exhaustive and now-declassified FBI report that was reviewed by the USA TODAY Network as America commemorates the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
In grim yet mundane detail -- assembled from all manner of electronic records and old-fashioned gumshoe police work -- the report, titled "Hijackers Timeline," offers a day-by-day portrait of the 19 al-Qaida operatives before they set off on their suicide-murder mission that killed nearly 3,000 people and set in motion America's longest war.
Living mostly in central Florida, Southern California, northern Virginia and North Jersey, they rented cars, opened bank accounts, navigated complicated city streets and highway exit ramps, rented motel rooms, dialed each from pay phones in hair salons and hardware stores, ordered meals in diners, took flying lessons, played video games, lifted barbells at gyms and even purchased sunglasses at a Macy's department store.
Their time in North Jersey is especially illuminating. The crowded, multicultural hamlets of Bergen and Passaic counties became a meeting ground for nearly a dozen of the 19 terrorists during the summer of 2001. And the connection to North Jersey also gave rise to unfair accusations that some members of the region's Muslim community may have knowingly assisted them.
Some, like the 9/11 plot's ringleader, Mohamed Atta, flew in from Florida, checking into the King's Inn Motel in Wayne for a few days and then leaving -- and then returning days later. Others, such as Hanjour and al-Hazmi, bounced between motels and an apartment in a two-story home on Paterson's Union Avenue -- the same address Hanjour cited as a business office when he rented the Fort Lee mail drop.
The day after renting the mailbox in Fort Lee, Hanjour withdrew $161 from anATM at a bank across the street from Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa, New Jersey.
Hanjour could not possibly know at the time that just two months later, Holy Sepulchre would become the final resting place of the first official victim of the 9/11 attacks, the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Catholic chaplain of New York City's fire department.
Judge perished while ministering to firefighters at the World Trade Center's North Tower. The photo of first responders carrying his body from the rubble has become an iconic symbol of the pain of that day.
The close proximity of the ATM and Judge's grave, which is now an unofficial 9/11 shrine, illustrates how closely intertwined the terror plot was with its tragic aftermath. At the same time, the hijackers' comings and goings in North Jersey offer a glimpse of how they openly took advantage of the good life in America and its open society -- before attacking America in a way that challenged that openness and raised questions about how the U.S. might better surveil its citizens.
But examining that story now, as America commemorates the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, reignites one of the most persistent and controversial mysteries of that tragic day: How did 19 men from the Middle East -- most of whom barely spoke English -- manage to pull off such a deadly mission without being detected?
Hanjour and al-Hazmi were especially active.
The day before renting the mailbox in Fort Lee, they worked out at Gold's Gym in Totowa, New Jersey. Hanjour also rented planes at Teterboro and Essex County airports to practice flying. In one case, he made a pass over the Hudson River and the World Trade Center. Al-Hazmi regularly rented cars at a Jeep dealership in Wayne.
Neither Hanjour nor al-Hazmi -- nor any of the other hijackers -- resorted to using fake names. Nor did they live underground and avoid contact with ordinary Americans.
"They were essentially hiding in plain sight," said John J. Farmer Jr., the former New Jersey attorney general and senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission who now directs the Rutgers Eagleton Institute on Politics. "They were simply melting into the general population the way the planes they hijacked melted into the radar or ordinary air traffic."
Also, none of the 19 hijackers arrived in the U.S. without documentation. They arrived on commercial jetliners with ordinary -- and entirely legal -- visas.
Tragically, America's elaborate and expensive security services ignored clear warnings during the summer of 2001 that al-Qaida wanted to attack America -- and, in fact, were dispatching terrorists to U.S. soil.
Two of the hijackers -- al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar -- were known to the CIA as al-Qaida operatives. The CIA even tracked al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar from the Middle East to Malaysia to Thailand and then to Los Angeles. There, though, the CIA, which is prohibited from spying inside the U.S., gave up the trail. And the CIA never shared al- Hazmi and al-Mihdhar's movements with the FBI, which conducts counter-terror investigations in America.
The botched hand-off by the CIA to the FBI is considered one of the mostembarrassing security failures in U.S. history. It is now a centerpiece of a massive federal lawsuit by thousands of relatives of 9/11 victims who claim that Saudi Arabian officials helped the hijackers inside the U.S. The failure to stop al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar is also the source of two decades of anguish for Mark Rossini, a former FBI special agent and counter-terror specialist who was part of a team monitoring bin Laden's al-Qaida network in the months leading up to 9/11.
During the summer of 2001, Rossini was assigned as a FBI liaison to the CIA's bin Laden squad, code-named "Alec Station," at the spy agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Working with the CIA, Rossini learned about the arrival of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar as early as 2000. He pleaded with the CIA to pass on the information to his FBI colleagues across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
But Rossini was told to keep quiet. The CIA considered the information top secret -- not ready for the FBI. Rossini said that he was told that if he broke protocol and told the FBI, he would be charged with a federal crime.
Today, Rossini, 60, divides his time between France and Spain. He left the FBI in 2008 after he broke rules to examine records in an unrelated case without permission.
He wishes he broke the rules in 2001 with the CIA.
"It's not even frustrating. It's debilitating," Rossini said in a phone interview from Spain with the USA TODAY Network. "It basically almost caused me to have a nervous breakdown. It drove me to the brink. I felt like Don Quixote fighting windmills. I lost my faith in justice. I lost my faith in the system. I don't really understand it anymore."
Rossini said his CIA colleagues told him the arrival of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi was not a sign of an attack on America but a diversion. Rossini said the CIA believed -- mistakenly -- that the next al-Qaida attack would take place in South East Asia, Rossini said. Now Rossini believes the CIA thought it might use al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in an ill-conceived plan to infiltrate al-Qaida.
" 'This is CIA information and you are not to tell the FBI,' " Rossini said he was told. "I remember it like it was yesterday."
A few weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA finally relented and notified the FBI that at least two al-Qaida terrorists -- al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar -- were on the loose inside America. But it was too late.
"If the FBI was told earlier, the plot could have been stopped," Rossini says. "No doubt in my mind."
After 20 years, the CIA has still not explained why it did not pass the information on al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to the FBI.
Peter Bergen, a best-selling author of several books on bin Laden and a CNN security analyst, said he has come to believe that the CIA did not willfully ignore the growing threat of al-Qaida. "I think it's incompetence," Bergen said, explaining why the CIA did not sound the alarm on al-Hazmi's and al-Mihdhar's arrival in the U.S. "Incompetence is sometimes a better explanation of human activity."
In North Jersey, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar settled in nicely -- as if they seemed to know their way around.
In mid-July, al-Mihdhar, accompanied by al-Hazmi's brother, Salem, and another hijacker, Abdulaziz al-Omari, rented a mailbox at a storefront in downtown Paterson -- not far from police headquarters and City Hall.
Salem al-Hazmi would join his brother aboard the jetliner that crashed into the western facade of the Pentagon. Al-Omari was part of the hijacking team that took over American Airlines Flight 11, which left Boston and crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower.
It's not entirely clear why the group of hijackers needed another mailbox. The FBI timeline investigation was not able to determine that.
But, once again, the mailbox rental touched on the mystery of how the hijackers went about seemingly normal activities without arousing any suspicions. It also raised the question of whether anyone helped the hijackers.
Mary Galligan, a former FBI supervisory agent who directed the bureau's on-scene investigation of the al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and went on to lead the post-9/11 tracking of the hijackers that was known as the "Pentbomb" investigation, points out that the hijackers "didn't commit any criminal acts" until the day they hijacked the jetliners. As a result, she said, the hijackers did not catch the attention of police -- or private citizens.
"The first criminal act they committed was taking over the planes," said Galligan, who retired from the FBI in 2013 and now directs cybersecurity for a large consulting firm based in New York City. One question Galligan's agents were not able to resolve, she said, was whether U.S. citizens actively participated in the plot by knowingly assisting the hijackers.
Like Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor who chaired the 9/11 Commission, Galligan has come to believe that U.S. citizens likely helped the hijackers with advice on ATM machines, banking, phone service and other seemingly routine activities without knowing they were involved with dangerous terrorists.
"I think that any help they got was from people who did not know they were hijackers who were going to commit a terrorist attack on 9/11," Galligan said.
As a result, police made few arrests of potential collaborators.
The one exception involves Mohamed el-Atriss, an Egyptian-born storeowner in Patersn who sold fake IDs.
For years, el-Atriss sold the phony IDs openly, mostly to undocumented immigrants from Latin America and Mexico. But just before the 9/11 attacks, he sold IDs to al-Mihdhar and al-Omari. After the 9/11 attacks, the FBI contacted el-Atriss but did not arrest him. At the same time, however, local police in Paterson were also tracking el-Atriss and arrested him in 2002, charging him with a series of state crimes for selling false documents.
Federal authorities, claiming the need to preserve national security secrets, quickly shut down the case, sealing all documents and testimony before State Superior Court Judge Marilyn Clark.
El-Atriss, who spent six months in the Passaic County Jail, has long claimed that he had no idea that al-Mihdhar and al-Omari were anything more than another ordinary customers in search of ID cards that seemed to meet the approval of many local cops. El-Atriss eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges and Clark sentenced him to five years probation and fined him $15,000.
A naturalized U.S. citizen, el-Atriss continually insisted that he was not part of the 9/11 plot -- and, in fact, openly condemned the attacks. But he felt he had been unfairly branded as a conspirator because of his unintended connection with the hijackers.
He has since moved from Passaic County could not be reached for comment. But in 2006, he told NorthJersey.com: "Your country is my country and my children's country. I am an American citizen. When I took the oath, I meant every word of it. Unfortunately, I am the person who handed an ID to a hijacker."
Two decades later, the Passaic County detective who led the local investigation of el-Atriss, believes that el-Atriss never told all he knew.
"He knew these guys were bad guys," said Fred Ernst, a sergeant in the Passaic County Sheriff's Department when he investigated el-Atriss. "He knew they weren't there as tourists to see the Statue of Liberty."
Now 70, Ernst, who lives in West Milford and rose to chief in the sheriff's department before retiring in 2014, said he would like to re-open the case.
"He may not have known they were going to hijack planes," Ernst said of el-Atriss. "But there is no question in my mind that he knew these guys were bad guys."
The el-Atriss episode -- and its divergent story lines and theories -- underscores how unsettled the story of the 9/11 hijackers remains.
Another disturbing episode took place on a night in July 2001 at a cheap motel on Route 46, not far from Teterboro Airport.
South Hackensack Police Officer David Agar, then 25, pulled into the parking lot of the Congress Inn as part of a routine patrol. Agar, now 45, and a lieutenant with the Bergen County Prosecutors Office where he oversees intelligence and counter-terror investigations, was looking for suspicious activity.
Back then, Route 46's motels were frequent scenes of drug deals and prostitution. Agar spotted a light blue Toyota Corolla with California plates.
"To me, the vehicle stood out," Agar said in a recent interview. "We didn't get that many cars with California license plates in South Hackensack."
He stopped and wrote down the plate number. Then, he punched the number into a national computer crime index that was monitored by the FBI and contains information on outstanding warrants and other warning signals that might alert local police officers to make an arrest or summon federal investigators.
The license plate turned out to be a rental car. The renter: Nawaf al-Hazmi.
But the FBI had not yet been told by the CIA that al-Hazmi was an al-Qaida operative. The check of the FBI's computer offered no warning that al-Hazmi was anything more than just another guy with a rental car.
If it had, Agar is confident that he would have summoned other police and possibly the FBI to confront al-Hazmi -- and his friend that night in Room 506 at the Congress Inn, Khalid al-Mihdhar. But without any warning or instruction to arrest al-Hazmi, Agar had no choice but to drive on and continue his patrol in other parts of South Hackensack. His brief brush with the 9/11 story lasted all of 30 seconds, he said.
Today, the story is not just a reminder of how the hijackers blended in so intimately into American life. It's also a reminder of just how close police came to possibly stopping the 9/11 attacks.
"Looking back, I don't know if we could have stopped all the hijackings," Agar said. "In my mind maybe we could have saved some lives."
Biden Seeks Full Disclosure of Saudi 9/11 Files
September 4, 2021
The door to finding the truth behind the 9/11 attacks opened a crack on Friday. Whether it swings open all the way remains to be seen.
In a surprise move just eight days before the 20th anniversary of America's deadliest terror attack and with victims' relatives warning him not to come to commemorative ceremonies unless he supported full disclosure, President Joe Biden called for a thorough review, declassification and release of all top secret 9/11 files.
The move was immediately praised as a small but positive step by relatives of 9/11 victims who have long claimed that the attacks by 19 operatives of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network were also covertly supported by Saudi Arabian officials who provided money, advice and other help.
"It's a victory for all 9/11 families," said Terry Strada, formerly of Basking Ridge, who lost her husband, Tom, in the attacks just days after she gave birth to the couple's youngest son. "For 20 years we've been asking for the answers of who murdered our loved ones. Now we may finally get some answers."
But how much of a victory and how many answers is a key question. Like many relatives of 9/11 victims, Strada, who now lives in Florida, was cautious. "There is much more work to be done," she said.
In signing an executive order that calls for the review of all classified 9/11 files with the intention of making them public, Biden broke ranks with his three immediate predecessors in the White House. He also dismissed the wishes of the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services that have argued for secrecy. As a result, Biden's order is viewed as a boost for the thousands of relatives of 9/11 victims who have signed on to a massive federal lawsuit to hold Saudi Arabia responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, has been delayed for years as lawyers for 9/11 victims have argued for more access to secret investigative and intelligence files gathered by the FBI and CIA.
But Biden's order -- something he promised to do as a presidential candidate last year -- does not necessarily mean America is in store for a massive document dump of 9/11 files. It merely means that a process has begun to examine the files -- but with the goal of full disclosure.
The first major test of this decision could come as early as Sept. 11, when the nation pauses to remember the nearly 3,000 people killed when al-Qaeda Islamists hijacked four commercial jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center's twin towers in Manhattan, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm field. By then, Biden's executive order requires that the FBI and Department of Justice complete a review of a controversial 2016 report -- code-named "Operation Encore" -- that reportedly examines in great detail the alleged Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks.
The FBI could release the report in full. Or it could redact portions. Or it could claim that the report would damage national security and keep it classified.
The review of all other 9/11 documents must be completed within six months, according to Biden's order.
No matter the decision on what to release or keep secret, Biden's order would require the FBI to explain its reasoning -- and offer a process for appealing it if relatives of 9/11 victims are not satisfied.
"It's progress," said James Kreindler, a New York-based attorney who is part of the legal team that represents the relatives. "How much progress in terms of the nuts and bolts, we'll know soon." Kreindler told NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network on Friday that the new review process ordered by Biden "could be spectacular if we get everything and the Saudis know that the
U.S. government is no longer protecting them."
But Kreindler cautioned that the 9/11 relatives may face a crushing and disheartening loss if the Department of Justice and FBI "goes through a review and nothing is declassified."
Biden's decision nevertheless is remarkable in what it orders -- essentially a thorough examination of top secret files with the intention of making them public.
The FBI and the CIA declined comment. In releasing his order, Biden said in a statement that "we must never forget the enduring pain of the families."
Biden's decision to sign the executive order comes just days after Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor who led the 9/11 Commission, called for a complete release of secret files on the attacks.
And Biden's order also echoes a proposed bill, introduced last month by U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, and a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators that called for a review process of 9/11 files with the goal of releasing them.
Such bipartisan support -- unusual in the deeply divided Congress -- was seen as a factor in Biden's executive order. But another factor clearly was the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. With his popularity dropping after the chaotic exit by U.S. military forces from Afghanistan and with him facing embarrassing protests at next week's 9/11 ceremonies, Biden has managed to turn the tables.
Brett Eagleson of Middletown, Connecticut, who lost his father, Bruce, in the collapse of the Trade Center and has emerged as a leader of the relatives' lawsuit as well as the threatened protests, offered guarded praise for Biden's executive order.
"It moves the ball a little more forward," Eagleson said. "But it's not the silver bullet." The ultimate victory, Eagleson said, is full disclosure.
This is only a baby step.
Tom Kean Lends His Voices to Full Disclosure of Saudi Files
September 2, 2021
I've always been in favor of releasing everything. I've seen those files. People are going to be disappointed when they release them. It's not going to give the families what they want. It's not there."
Tom Kean
Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, who went from the rough elbows of Trenton politics to guide the highly regarded 9/11 Commission, has called on the Biden administration to declassify all top-secret files on America's worst terrorist attack -- especially those examining the possible involvement of Saudi government officials.
But Kean, whose comments came in a wide-ranging interview with NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY Network at his office in Central Jersey's horse country, cautioned that he does not expect the American public -- long suspicious of a Saudi connection to 9/11 -- will learn anything new about the terrorist attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people.
"I've read the files," Kean said. "There is no smoking gun."
Despite such a warning, Kean now takes center stage as the most significant figure yet in the long-running investigation of the attacks of September 11, 2001 to suggest that all top-secret files should be opened up to the public, especially those that touch on allegations that Saudi officials helped the 19 Islamist jihadists who hijacked four commercial jetliners and crashed them into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm field.
Fifteen of those 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. At least two of them were met by Saudi officials with links to that nation's spy service when they landed in California. As America is about to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with a series of solemn, carefully choreographed ceremonies, Kean's unexpected call for a massive declassifying will likely lend energy to the growing demand for America's intelligence-gathering agencies to come clean on what they knows about the so-called "Saudi connection."
More than 10,000 relatives of 9/11 victims have filed a massive federal lawsuit in New York to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for the attacks.
The lawsuit, which has moved at less-than-glacial speed for several years through a federal legal quagmire that involves demands for secrecy by the CIA and FBI and counter-demands by Saudi attorneys to dismiss all legal challenges, may still take years to resolve.
"I've always been in favor of releasing everything," Kean said. "I've seen those files. People are going to be disappointed when they release them. It's not going to give the families what they want. It's not there."
Earlier this summer, attorneys for the relatives completed a series of depositions of Saudi officials that were ordered by a U.S. federal judge. But those depositions were placed under court seal, with attorneys on all sides blocked from talking about what they learned -- or did not learn.
Kean's demand for the release of the numerous investigative files compiled by the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services was met with cheers by 9/11 relatives. The White House, the FBI and CIA could not be reached for comment.
"Wow. That's amazing," said Brett Eagleson of Middletown, Connecticut, who was a high school sophomore when his father, Bruce, was killed in the collapse of Trade Center's twin towers in lower Manhattan after they were struck by two hijacked planes.
But Eagleson, now an outspoken advocate in the families' lawsuit, said he disagrees with Kean's assessment that the secret files will not reveal any major evidence of Saudi efforts to help the hijackers.
Eagleson pointed to an 2016 internal FBI report -- Operation Encore -- that reportedly examines the bureau's inquiry into a number of questionable ties between two figures connected to the Saudi government and two hijackers who entered the United States in Los Angeles.
The Saudi officials helped future hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- neither of whom spoke English -- settle into an apartment and meet other Saudis.
But did those Saudi officials know of the 9/11 plot or that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network?
That question has never been conclusively answered.
The problem with the FBI's report on its Operation Encore investigation is that it's still secret. Also, it's based in part on investigations conducted by the 9/11 Commission.
But "Operation Encore" revealed deep divisions within the FBI over the potential involvement of Saudi officials in the 9/11 attacks and a series of missed opportunities by U.S. investigators to find the truth, according to a January 2020 report by the ProPublica news organization and the New York Times. For that reason, lawyers for the 9/11 families say the report could be vital to their lawsuit - and perhaps finding the truth about a Saudi link to 9/11.
Kean disagrees.
He said he had not read the "Operation Encore" report. But based on the work by the 9/11 Commission and earlier Congressional probes, he said he did not believe it would reveal any information that conclusively ties Saudi officials to the 9/11 attacks.
Nonetheless, Kean said that the "Operation Encore" report should be released.
Another potentially controversial issue stems from a recent CBS News report that British and U.S. investigators found a notebook from one of the Saudi officials targeted by the FBI -- Omar al-Bayoumi -- that contained mathematical calculations and other drawings that appeared to show pilots how to crash a jetliner into a low level target.
Al-Bayoumi played a key role in helping al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi find an apartment after they arrived in California. Al Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, who eventually turned up in New Jersey and stayed at the Congress Inn Motel in South Hackensack, were on board the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon -- a low-level target.
"I think the United States government should listen to Tom Kean and for once and for all finally put to bed the questions regarding the Saudi Arabian role in 9/11," Eagleson said. "I think the Saudis themselves should be calling for the release."
Terry Strada, who gave birth to her youngest child - a son - only four days before the 9/11 attacks and has now emerged as a leader in the lawsuit, also praised Kean.
"I think to have him coming out and saying to release everything is a positive thing for all of us," said Strada, whose husband died in the World Trade Center's North Tower. "His voice does carry weight."
But, like Eaglewon, Strada also disagreed with Kean. She believes that the files will likely show some form of Saudi support for the hijackers.
"We should release everything," said Strada, who recently moved from her home in Basking Ridge, New Jersey to Florida. "I'm confident that we will find something."
James Kreindler, one of the squad of U.S. attorneys who represent the 9/11 relatives, added that he would "love all the material to be released and to have a half hour with Tom Kean and go over the importance of it."
Kreindler said he is quite confident he would convince Kean that the declassified material was not just significant but probably show that a variety of Saudi officials were linked to the 9/11 attacks.
The ongoing mystery about Saudi Arabia's links to 9/11 has been a long-running flashpoint. Last year, this columnist reported exclusively that lawyers for the 9/11 families had even reached out to dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Soon after meeting with one of the lawyers' investigators, Khashoggi contacted the Saudi embassy in Washington. A year later, Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi intelligence operativeswhile on a trip to Turkey.
Were the events connected? Many 9/11 relatives and their attorneys think so. But the sequence represents the level of spy-versus-spy mystery that has cloaked the whole narrative about Saudi Arabia's alleged links to the 9/11 attacks.
In the interview, Kean was especially critical of what he called America's long reluctance to criticize Saudi policies or even suspicious actions for fear that the kingdom would cut off oil exports to the United States customers.
"People kowtowed to the Saudis for years," Kean said. "But we don't need to do that anymore." Kean suggested that the hijackers likely were helped "unwittingly" in a variety of ways by Americans -- especially in some Muslim communities like those in Paterson, New Jersey. But Kean insisted that this help was not part of a terrorist conspiracy.
"I started off thinking there had to be people on the ground helping the hijackers," Kean said. He said the 9/11 Commission assigned a "full investigative team" to run down leads of an American-based conspiracy to support the hijackers as they prepared to hijack the four jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001.
Kean said the investigators "looked and looked and were unable to find anybody."
He added that the Commission received plenty of rumors "but we were unable to nail down anybody."
Kean also said that he does not believe that a massive attack on the level of 9/11 could be carried out now. He praised the various federal reforms that require America's various intelligence-gathering agencies, from the FBI to the CIA, to work together.
But Kean sharply criticized U.S. spy agencies for the swift takeover of Afghanistan by Taliban forces.
"It was one of the greatest intelligence failures in the history of our government," Kean said. "This has given us internationally as big a black eye as anything in my memory."
Kean said the most dangerous form of terrorism today may come from so-called "lone wolves," acting alone or with just a few conspirators.
"We're a democracy," he said. "We can't put the kind of clamps that you can put on if you were a dictatorship of some sort. As long as we have freedom of motion and freedom of speech, you can't say we're not vulnerable."
Can a New Law Finally Shed Light on Saudi 9/11 Secrets
August 8, 2021
Sen. Robert Menendez, the senior Democrat from New Jersey, jumped into the war on terrorism on Thursday along with a handful of congressional colleagues. None are deploying overseas.
None will be firing guns. The battle Menendez kicked off with the support of several Democrats and Republicans will be fought in the halls of Congress and then perhaps in the castles of secrecy that encircle the FBI and the CIA - all in search of an answer to one of the most daunting questions of the 9/11 attacks two decades ago: Did Saudi Arabian government officials, operating secretly inside America, provide money and other assistance in the terrorist plot that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001?
As America approaches the 20th anniversary of that bloody day, it still has no conclusive answers over what has come to be known as the "Saudi Connection." Nor does America know why U.S. intelligence agencies - with the support of every president since George W. Bush - continue to turn a deaf ear to requests from Congress and relatives of 9/11 victims for information on Saudi Arabia's links to the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
On Thursday in Washington, with a nearly a dozen relatives of 9/11 victims standing behind him on a stretch of grass outside the U.S. Capitol known as the "Senate Swamp," Menendez introduced potentially ground-breaking legislation to declassify thousands of pages of secret documents on alleged Saudi support for the 19 followers of Osama bin Laden who carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Menendez said he hopes to break the logjam of secrecy that has stymied attempts to know the full 9/11 story. The effort he plans to mount in the coming months could evolve into one of the most consequential battles against terrorism in American history.
"I'm in search of the truth," Menendez said in an interview before introducing legislation known as the "September 11 Transparency Act of 2021."
"The truth is important to the families of 9/11," he said. "It's also important for the United States of America."
At stake is a long-standing concern, raised by relatives of 9/11 victims who filed a massive federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, that key officials from one of America's staunchest Middle East allies, in a misguided attempt to prop up a radical form of Islam, may have secretly supported the 9/11 plot.
On the homefront, however, another sensitive issue involves the growing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies not only ignored clear warnings of the attacks in the months before they took place but covered up the evidence of Saudi involvement afterward.
"Let's get real here: We're talking about the declassification of evidence relating to an attack that took place 20 years ago," Menendez said in his formal remarks outside the Capitol.
Menendez was joined at the briefing by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat and the Senate's majority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.
"These families have mounted a legal struggle against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," Blumenthal said at the briefing, which was broadcast on a video link through Menendez's office. "Now their struggle is not only against the Saudis, it is against their own government that is continuing to conceal evidence necessary for them to have that fair day in court."
"Justice, justice, justice - that's what this is about," added Schumer in brief remarks in which he also recalled visiting the burning ruins of the World Trade Center that came to be known as "Ground Zero" soon after the attacks and encountering throngs of people wondering what had happened to their loved ones.
"Before we even got to the rubble we could smell the death in the air," Schumer said, describing the "thousands of people standing in line, holding pictures ... 'Have you seen my daughter, Mary? Have you seen my brother, John?' "
"I'll never forget that," Schumer added.
Menendez's bill, which has garnered bipartisan support from such Republican senators as Chuck Grassley of Iowa and John Cornyn of Texas, would force the FBI and the CIA - and possibly other American intelligence agencies that examined the 9/11 plot - to turn over all their files on the Saudi connection to a special declassification review.
If that review concludes that the files should remain secret, the FBI, CIA and other intelligence services would have to explain why.
Saudi links - questions linger
Until now, the FBI and CIA have merely told Congressional investigators or lawyers for relatives of 9/11 victims who are pursing a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government that most of the files were secret and therefore off-limits. In one case, then-Attorney General William Barr cited national security concerns. But Barr did not have to explain what those concerns were or why they mattered nearly 20 years after the attacks.
Despite being blocked by their own government, lawyers for the 9/11 relatives have found considerable evidence of a Saudi link to a plan by 19 Islamist jihadists - 15 of them Saudi citizens
- to hijack four, California-bound commercial jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001.
Two of the planes took off from Boston's Logan International Airport. Another left Newark Liberty International Airport and the fourth from Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. After killing the pilots and several flight attendants, the hijackers flew the two planes from Boston into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The plane from Dulles International was crashed into the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. The plane from Newark crashed into a farm field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back against the hijackers.
After the attacks, U.S. investigators quickly focused attention on bin Laden's terrorist al-Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan. With months, however, the CIA also admitted that it had known that two of the eventual hijackers had been on the loose inside the U.S. since early 2000 after meeting with al-Qaeda leaders in a "terrorist summit" in Malaysia. The two flew to Thailand, then to California with U.S. visas.
The CIA never told the FBI until only weeks before the 9/11 attacks that a pair of well-known al-Qaeda terrorists had been roaming across America - even staying in a motel in South Hackensack. But the CIA's revelation came too late for the FBI to step in and possibly break up the plot.
The disclosure that the CIA held back secrets from the FBI sparked an outcry from relatives of 9/11 victims. It eventually led to the series of revelations - notably by the 9/11 Commission - that Saudi officials in California had assisted the two al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, in getting settled after they arrived in California in early 2000.
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi eventually made their way across America to New Jersey. But how they made that trip - and who financed it - is still a mystery.
In an exclusive report last year, this columnist revealed that an official from the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., who was also linked to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi reportedly delivered a check for $1 million to a mosque in Jersey City a month before the attacks.
It's not entirely clear how the money was used by Jersey City's Al-Taweed Mosque. But in what now seems to be an accidental disclosure from its secret files, the FBI revealed last year in a court document that the same Saudi embassy official who delivered the $1 million to the Al-Taweed Mosque, was also among a handful of Saudi officials who provided money, lodging and other help to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi before they participated in the 9/11 attacks.
The trip to Jersey City by the Saudi embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, coincided with a visit to New Jersey by the 9/11 plot ringleader, Mohammed Atta, who stayed at two motels in Wayne.
One of the lingering questions from that trip by al-Jarrah is whether he met with Atta or with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi who were also in New Jersey at the time.
Al-Jarrah, was recently interviewed by lawyers representing the 9/11 relatives in their federal lawsuit against the Saudi government. But the lawyers have declined to comment on the interview, citing an order by a federal judge that bars them from disclosing what they learned in the deposition with al-Jarrah, which was conducted over a Zoom-like link between the American attorneys and Saudi Arabia.
Yet another question is whether Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist who was murdered in Turkey in 2018 by Saudi intelligence agents, may have known about a Saudi government link to the 9/11 plot. Khashoggi was killed a year after he met with an investigator who was assisting lawyers in the federal lawsuit by the relatives of 9/11 victims.
Terry Strada of Basking Ridge, who gave birth to her youngest son only four days before losing her husband, Tom, in the collapse of the twin towers in Manhattan where he worked, specifically pointed to the CIA's mystery surrounding al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in her remarks Thursday after traveling to Washington to support of Menendez's bill.
"This travesty of justice must come to an end," Strada said, her voice rising with emotion as she criticized the FBI and the CIA for "perpetuating our continued pain and suffering" by not releasing its files on the possible Saudi link to the 9/11 attacks.
The FBI and the CIA did not comment on either the proposed legislation by Menendez or to the renewed allegations against the Saudi government. The Saudi embassy in Washington also did not comment.
Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed at the World Trade Center and who now co-chairs with Strada the group 9/11 Community United, said he sometimes feels forgotten by his own government in his quest for truth.
"It's a sad truth to know that the United States government values foreign interests more than its own citizens," Eagleson said.
He said he has become especially disheartened of some political figures as another Sept.11 approaches.
"They stand up and utter words, 'never forget,' " Eagleson said. "But the administration, behind a cloak of secrecy, continues to stab us in the back."
If Menendez's bill passes -- and is signed into law -- that cloak of secrecy and backstabbing may end.