The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.
Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.
“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’ family members pushing for the legislation.
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| Saudi FM delivered the Bonds sell-off threat to US Congress. |
Saudi officials have long denied that the kingdom had any role in the Sept. 11 plot, and the 9/11 Commission found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” But critics have noted that the commission’s narrow wording left open the possibility that less senior officials or parts of the Saudi government could have played a role.
Suspicions have lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi officials living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot. Those conclusions, contained in 28 pages of the report, still have not been released publicly.
The dispute comes as bipartisan criticism is growing in Congress about Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, for decades a crucial American ally in the Middle East and half of a partnership that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers. Last week, two senators introduced a resolution that would put restrictions on American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which have expanded during the Obama administration.
Families of the Sept. 11 victims have used the courts to try to hold members of the Saudi royal family, Saudi banks and charities liable because of what the plaintiffs charged was Saudi financial support for terrorism. These efforts have largely been stymied, in part because of a 1976 law that gives foreign nations some immunity from lawsuits in American courts.
The Senate bill is intended to make clear that the immunity given to foreign nations under the law should not apply in cases where nations are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill Americans on United States soil. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.
Obama administration officials counter that weakening the sovereign immunity provisions would put the American government, along with its citizens and corporations, in legal risk abroad because other nations might retaliate with their own legislation. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate panel in February that the bill, in its current form, would “expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent.”
The bill’s sponsors have said that the legislation is purposely drawn very narrowly — involving only attacks on American soil — to reduce the prospect that other nations might try to fight back.
They also discussed the Saudi threats specifically, laying out the impacts if Saudi Arabia made good on its economic threats. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement that the administration stands by the victims of terrorism, “especially those who suffered and sacrificed so much on 9/11.”
Edwin M. Truman, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said he thought the Saudis were most likely making an “empty threat.” Selling hundreds of billions of dollars in American assets would not only be technically difficult to pull off, he said, but would also very likely cause global market turmoil for which the Saudis would be blamed.
Moreover, he said, it could destabilize the American dollar — the currency to which the Saudi riyal is pegged. “The only way they could punish us is by punishing themselves,” Mr. Truman said.
The bill is an anomaly in a Congress fractured by bitter partisanship, especially during an election year. It is sponsored by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. It has the support of an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative senators, including Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. It passed through the Judiciary Committee in January without dissent.
“As our nation confronts new and expanding terror networks that are targeting our citizens, stopping the funding source for terrorists becomes even more important,” Mr. Cornyn said last month.
The alliance with Saudi Arabia has frayed in recent years as the White House has tried to thaw ties with Iran — Saudi Arabia’s bitter enemy— in the midst of recriminations between American and Saudi officials about the role that both countries should play in the stability of the Middle East.
But the administration has supported Saudi Arabia on other fronts, including providing the country with targeting intelligence and logistical support for its war in Yemen. The Saudi military is flying jets and dropping bombs it bought from the United States — part of the billions of dollars in arms deals that have been negotiated with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations during the Obama administration.
The war in Yemen has been a humanitarian disaster and fueled a resurgence of Al Qaeda in Yemen, leading to the resolution in Congress to put new restrictions on arms deals to the kingdom.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, one of the resolution’s sponsors and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Congress has been “feckless” in conducting oversight of arms sales, especially those destined for Saudi Arabia. “My first desire is for our relationship with Saudi Arabia to come with a greater degree of conditionality than it currently does,” he said.
A US judge has dismissed Saudi Arabia as a defendant in lawsuits brought by families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. The judge said there was insufficient evidence linking the gulf country to the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Among the evidence dismissed were claims by one man in custody that a Saudi prince helped finance the plot.
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| Muslim hijackers of 911 attacks. |
Recently, an inmate in US custody, Zacarias Moussaoui, claimed that a Saudi prince had helped finance the attack that flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia. A fourth plane crashed into an empty field in western Pennsylvania.
Moussaoui was arrested weeks before the 9/11 attacks on immigrations charges and was in prison at the time of the attacks. He had taken flying lessons in Minnesota and had been wired money by an al-Qaeda affiliate.
In court at his sentencing, Moussaoui said he had been part of the plot to fly a Boeing 747 into the White House. Saudi Arabia had rejected the accusation from a "deranged criminal" with no credibility. Zacarias Moussaoui in serving a life in a US prison called Supermax
This is the second time that Saudi Arabia has been dismissed from the cases. It was reinstated as a defendant in 2013 after a lower court tossed it on sovereignty grounds. The lawsuits came in the aftermath of the attacks and were brought against companies, countries and organisations that were accused of aiding al-Qaeda and other terror groups. They sought billions in damages.
Lawyers in the cases frequently
referenced the September 11 Commission's report, which they said supported
their argument that Saudi Arabia had been the primary funding source for
al-Qaeda. Lawyers for Saudi Arabia argued that the report did not implicate the
Saudi government or individual Saudi officials.
Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell $750 billion in American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to hold the kingdom legally responsible for the terrorist attacks, a report said.
Saudi Arabia is threatening to sell $750 billion in American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to hold the kingdom legally responsible for the terrorist attacks, a report said.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir
warned the Obama administration and congressional leaders last month that the
kingdom would sell treasury securities and other assets if Congress didn’t yank
the bill, The New York Times reported.
A Saudi sale could, in theory,
destabilize the dollar and create global market turmoil, although some
economists believe it is an empty threat.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Charles
Schumer, would remove immunity given to a foreign nations if the country’s
government is found responsible for a terrorist attack on US soil — which could
make the Saudi government vulnerable to a federal lawsuit by the families of
9/11 victims.
The threat comes before President
Obama’s trip to the oil-rich nation for meetings with King Salman bin Abdulaziz
al Saud on Wednesday.
Talks between the White House, the
State Department, the Pentagon and congressional leaders have intensified amid
the Saudi threats as federal officials warned legislators of the diplomatic and
economic effects of the bill, according to the report.
