(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A U.S. federal judge has allowed the FBI to keep secret the names of “high-profile individuals” involved in its investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while requiring the bureau to disclose the names of others.
The judge’s ruling last week stems from a request the FBI made in June to limit the disclosure of evidence in the long-running 9/11 civil litigation. The FBI’s move to suppress 9/11 evidence came days before a bombshell 60 Minutes report revealed that the FBI had been hiding footage of a Saudi Arabian official Omar al-Bayoumi “casing” Capitol Hill in June 1999—months before al-Qaeda made the decision to include Washington DC in its terrorist plot.
Specifically, plaintiffs and the FBI had been arguing over the disclosure of “30 high priority names” from the bureau’s investigation.
According to plaintiffs, “those 30 individuals are at the center of the events, transactions, and relationships concerning the support network established and led by Saudi Arabia’s officials.”
The FBI argued that the disclosure of those people might lead to harassment.
The judge struck a compromise—allowing the FBI to redact the names of its informants and witnesses among those 30 individuals, while forcing the bureau to disclose the others.
“Names of certain individuals that are merely discussed in FBI materials, but who are not themselves investigative sources or witnesses, may be publicly disclosed,” U.S. Judge George Daniels said in his July 29 order.
Meanwhile, last December a military judge at Guantanamo Bay ordered the FBI to produce 3,000 pages of documents about al-Bayoumi, who was a subject of FBI investigations for more than 20 years because he was the handler for two of the plane hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In that case, the Justice Department struck plea deals with the Gitmo defendants—but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin overturned them shortly thereafter.
Shockingly, information from the Gitmo litigation states that at least two FBI agents said the CIA had attempted to recruit al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.
Families of 9/11 victims have lamented that alleged terrorists at Gitmo are being able to access more information about the incident than they are.
“The defense counsel for those accused of mass murder on 9/11 is getting more access to documents than the terror victims themselves,” a man who lost his father from 9/11 told the national security podcast SpyTalk.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
