Pinning the blame for 9/11: A Phila. law firm wages an epic legal battle to win billions from Saudi Arabia.
Among the companies represented in the lawsuit are Chubb, Ace, Allstate, One Beacon, and nearly three dozen other insurers.
“Our concern was whether there was a viable case to be made against the defendant,” Cozen said, “and whether the defendant could pay.”
Among the suit’s key assertions:
Senior Saudi officials and members of the royal family or their representatives served as executives or board members of the suspect charities when they were financing al-Qaeda operations. Overall, the Saudi government substantially controlled and financed the charities, the lawsuit alleges.
The charities laundered millions of dollars, some from the Saudi government, into al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and provided weapons, false travel and employment documents, and safe houses.
Regional offices of the charities employed, in senior positions, al-Qaeda operatives who helped coordinate support for terror cells.
Although the lawsuit argues that the Saudi government “intended” the 9/11 attacks to happen, the public record supporting that allegation is thin, and lawyers suing the kingdom have yet to generate direct evidence that any senior Saudi official conspired with al-Qaeda to attack the United States.
Instead, the lawsuit compiles hundreds of incremental disclosures from U.S government and other sources and weaves them together to form one basic assertion: Al-Qaeda’s development from ragtag regional terrorists into a global threat was fueled by Saudi money, some of it from the government.
And the charities, the lawsuit contends, were the money’s conduit.
The organization then leapfrogged to attack Western targets, including two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the U.S. destroyer Cole, and finally the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Cozen is suing under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which protects foreign governments from being sued by U.S. citizens except in rare circumstances. While the standard is extremely high, federal courts have permitted lawsuits in cases where foreign countries engaged in