The 9/11 evidence we buried didn’t protect us —it – Latest News
On July 31, 2024, Terry Strada sat in a courtroom in decrease Manhattan and watched the faces of two terrorists who carried out the assaults that killed her husband and practically 3,000 others. Tom Strada went to work on the morning of Sept.11, 2001, and by no means got here home. He died on the 104th flooring of the North Tower.
In the years since, his widow has performed what the federal government wouldn’t: pursue the complete reality of who facilitated the assaults that killed him.
As national chair of 9/11 Families United, Terry has navigated classification battles, diplomatic stonewalls, and the actual cruelty of a system that mourns publicly and conceals privately. The evidence she noticed had been seized within 10 days of the assaults and withheld for over 20 years.
“To think they had all this evidence and that I am only seeing it in full 23 years later was overwhelming. In one video, Bayoumi is casing the US Capitol, filming entrances, exits, and security posts while calmly narrating the scene. Tears ran down my cheeks,” Terry informed me.
As national chair of 9/11 Families United, Terry Strada has navigated classification battles, forcing long suppressed evidence to return to mild. Robert Miller
“We lived through the unimaginable, only to be forced to relive it every day since, fighting for justice and demanding the truth that should have been ours from the beginning.”
In August 2025, a federal decide ruled the 9/11 households’ lawsuit in opposition to Saudi Arabia might proceed to trial. It took 24 years.
That delay just isn’t incidental to this story. It is the story.
Months earlier than the 9/11 hijackers arrived (above, Mohammed Atta, proper, and Abdulaziz Alomari at Portland, Maine’s International Jetport), the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs officers carried out reconnaissance alongside the precise routes the hijackers would later take. Getty Images
Terry Strada together with her husband Tom, who died on the 104th flooring of the North Tower.
For years, Sept. 11 was narrated as institutional failure: alerts missed, dots not linked, a system overwhelmed. That framing was too forgiving. The file exhibits one thing more troubling: repeated choices to not observe the place evidence led.
When two future hijackers arrived in California in early 2000 talking nearly no English, Omar al-Bayoumi co-signed their lease, opened a bank account, deposited practically $10,000, and launched them to a help community that grew to become their operational infrastructure. A declassified FBI report confirmed he was paid as a co-optee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency.
Months earlier than the hijackers arrived, Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs officers carried out reconnaissance alongside the precise routes the hijackers would later take, in response to a newly filed Second Circuit submission. The Kingdom then more than doubled his wage, backdating the increase with a fabricated promotion.
At the FBI’s request, London’s Metropolitan Police seized eighty videotapes and hundreds of paperwork from Bayoumi’s Birmingham condo. Copies have been despatched to the FBI’s New York workplace however by no means totally analyzed or disseminated. The San Diego discipline workplace — closest to the investigation — by no means acquired them. Scotland Yard anticipated his extradition. Instead, he was launched, and in 2002 returned to Saudi Arabia.
Some failures have been lapses in coordination. Others have been decisions.
On Oct. 17, 2003, a assembly came about at a convention palace in Riyadh. A 9/11 Commission memorandum printed by the Florida Bulldog describes the assembly: Philip Zelikow, the Commission’s govt director, and officers of the Mabahith, Saudi Arabia’s home intelligence service. The memorandum was filed beneath the heading AFTER-MDR-BAYOUMI-EXONERATION. It data what Saudi intelligence wished: Bayoumi cleared earlier than the report went to print. Months later, the part detailing Saudi connections was rewritten, its most damaging materials eliminated.
Chairman Thomas Kean (left) at a 2004 information convention to release the 9/11 Commission Report. Getty Images
America didn’t fracture as a result of it confronted the reality too aggressively. It fractured as a result of it didn’t.
President Bush visited a mosque to declare, “Islam is peace.” The gesture was not fallacious. But confronting perpetrators and defending the harmless have been by no means mutually unique — cautious avoidance of naming who enabled the assaults grew to become the moral stance.
That inconsistency created a permission construction by which judgment grew to become selective and violence weighed otherwise relying on who dedicated it. The ethical inversions after Oct. 7, 2023 — the rationalizations for violence, the erasure of distinctions between sufferer and perpetrator — didn’t come up in a vacuum. They stuffed a void left by a story untold.
When accountability is selective, reality turns into negotiable. And a nation that can’t inform the reality about its enemies finally loses the power to call them in any respect.
In this video grab taken from the Al-Jazeera satellite tv for pc tv station, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, one of the 9/11 aircraft hijackers, reads a assertion by which he mentioned he was educated by suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. AL-JAZEERA/AFP through Getty Images
“Accountability is deterrence,” Strada mentioned. “The truth is our best weapon. If we don’t confront it, history will repeat itself. I will continue the fight for it to be told.”
In a healthy republic, grieving households wouldn’t bear this burden. It took 20 years of litigation to floor it — not as a result of the federal government launched it, however as a result of the households compelled it. That just isn’t vindication. It is a starting.
Telling the reality just isn’t solely a ethical obligation. It is, as these households have confirmed, a prerequisite for national security.
Tali Gillette is an investigative researcher and author overlaying national security, accountability, and American coverage and tradition. She interviewed Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, for this text.
