9/11 families, betrayed again
s one who lost her husband on Sept. 11, 2001, and has devoted her life to the pursuit of truth and justice for those attacks, I have worked for decades to bring those foreign nations to justice for their roles bolstering Al Qaeda and enabling the murders of our fellow Americans.
In the aftermath of 9/11, we brought civil suits against those nations that provided material support to Al Qaeda, most prominently Saudi Arabia, but also the Republic of Sudan. We included Sudan because it gave safe harbor to Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorists, enabling them to grow that organization into the international terrorist enterprise it would become. Sudan’s support for the radical jihadists caused the U.S. government to give it the deserved title of “state sponsor of terrorism.”
We have been determined to hold terror sponsors to account in court for our loss and suffering. We fought to pass the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which enabled our lawsuits against those nations that had not been formally designated as state sponsors. Because Sudan had been designated, though, our rights to sue were already vested and we were doggedly gathering evidence, prepared to pursue discovery and prove our cases if and when Sudan had the courage to appear in court and mount a defense.
This month, however, we barely survived an effort by our own government to wipe out our rights altogether, and it was only thanks to congressional allies led by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez that we prevailed. The threat was an effort by the Trump administration to trade away our right to hold Sudan accountable for an unrelated foreign policy priority. It was a shameful, pitiful fiasco that the public should better understand, to ensure that it never happens again.
The Trump administration’s gambit began to take shape in 2019, when the Sudanese military overthrew dictator Omar al-Bashir. The new regime asked the Trump administration to remove it from the state sponsor of terrorism list, and our government began negotiating terms for the removal. Specifically, the government sought to ensure compensation for some of the terrorism victims of Al Qaeda who had unrelated, non-9/11 claims against Sudan — specifically, those related to the bombings of the U.S.S. Cole and U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At no time did our nation’s diplomats contact the 9/11 families or seek to act on our behalf.