US JUDGE LETS THE SAUDIS GET AWAY WITH THEIR PART IN 9-11 ATTACKS

In a very disappointing ruling, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by families of 9-11 victims against the House of Saud:

Saudi Arabia was dismissed Tuesday as a defendant in lawsuits brought by the families of nearly 3,000 victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks by a judge who said lawyers had failed to show sufficient evidence linking the country to the attacks.

US District Judge George Daniels said in a written ruling that lawyers for the plaintiffs had failed to show facts sufficient to overcome Saudi Arabia’s sovereign immunity. He also dismissed as a defendant the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia & Herzegovina on the grounds that the charity is an instrument of Saudi Arabia and thus covered as well by sovereign immunity.

The judge wrote that evidence would have to show that Saudi Arabia or its officials took actions to support the terrorist plot. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia.

Among evidence rejected by the judge as insufficient were the recent claims of a man who became known as the “20th hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui claimed a Saudi prince helped him financially in 2001 when he was studying at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, and also funneled a large amount of money to some of the 19 men who hijacked planes on September 11.

Moussaoui was in custody on September 11 and pleaded guilty in April 2005 to conspiring with the hijackers to kill Americans. He is serving a life sentence at the high security Supermax prison — known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

Yet the judge dismissed that vital evidence? Daniels is a disgrace, and has let some of the leading enablers of al Qaeda get away with their own parts in one of the worst tragedies in modern history. The war against jihadism can't be won this way.