Investigative Reporter Seeks Government Documents Regarding Possible Saudi Government Involvement in 9/11

Welcome to WMNF’s Radioactivity. I’m Rob Lorei. For years an investigative reporter in South Florida has been reporting on a mystery: Were people connected to the Saudi Arabian government involved in funding or directing the 9/11 hijackers? Our guest is veteran newspaper reporter Dan Christensen who now runs an investigative web site The Florida Bulldog. Christensen has been trying to get the federal government to release documents involving a Saudi family living in an exclusive enclave in Sarasota who according to some witnesses were visited by the leader of the 9/11 hijackers and who left their Sarasota home in a hurry just days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our guest wrote last week about the latest on his attempt to get the government to release documents.

“A federal judge has ruled the FBI unlawfully withheld from the Florida Bulldog key sections of records of its investigation of a Saudi family that fled Sarasota two weeks before the 9/11 attacks – leaving behind cars, clothes, furniture, food and other belongings.The Bulldog sued the FBI for the records in 2012 after reporting that Abdulaziz and Anoud al-Hijji, who lived in a gated community near Sarasota, had ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers, an al Qaeda figure and the Saudi royal family. The Bulldog, working with Irish author Anthony Summers, had revealed that the FBI had investigated the family in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but never disclosed its investigation to Congress or the 9/11 Commission.

The FBI responded quickly to that Bulldog report from 2011 with press releases denying its investigation had found any connections between the al-Hijjis and the hijackers, and claiming it turned over its work to Congress.  The Bulldog suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) then forced the FBI to cough up records of the investigation.

The FBI turned over to the Bulldog just 81 pages of heavily-censored memos and notes, a fraction of the paperwork that’s typically generated in such investigations.  An April 16, 2002, memo included in the release showed, however, that at least one unnamed FBI agent had found “many connections” between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 hijackers.  The FBI blacked out the entire last paragraph of that memo on national security grounds.

Abdulaziz al-Hijji’s father-in-law is Esam Ghazzawi, a rich Saudi Arabian businessman with ties to the kingdom’s ruling House of Saud and international and American political leaders.” Source: https://www.floridabulldog.org/2019/08/u-s-judge-orders-release-of-records-that-may-tie-saudi-royals-to-9-11/

Dan Christensen joins us live.