The Saudi reckoning

An exhausting decade and a half after the worst terrorist attack in American history, victims’ families are finally able to pursue in U.S. courts the foreign-government enablers of the carnage. May the 1,500 plaintiffs who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001 and just filed suit against Saudi Arabia find whatever measure of justice the courts can deliver.

Last year, overriding President Obama’s veto, Congress passed a law permitting legal action against nations accused of sponsoring terrorist attacks in the United States.

Which means Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, must finally answer for its nefarious record of support for the murderous Al Qaeda and the poisonous ideology that is its oxygen.

With devastating detail, the civil complaint filed Monday charges that Saudi royals funded nine “charities” that propped up Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist network for decades prior to 9/11.

Three of the charities, it alleges, bankrolled the Afghan terrorist training camps attended by the 19 hijackers in Afghanistan.

Also: officials from Saudi embassies supported two of the hijackers for 18 months before 9/11 — helping them find apartments and pay their bills.

As there’s never been a suit like this filed before, the odds are long that the good guys will prevail. The Saudis will surely resist cooperating with the vital fact-finding in the legal discovery process, and with any verdict that goes against them.

But accountability — a concept alien to the Saudi royal family — is somewhere on the horizon.