Just days after the September 11 attack on the United States, British authorities seized evidence from the home of a Saudi national, Omar al-Bayoumi. He had ties to two al-Qaeda hijackers—and, among other things, set them up with a place to live in San Diego. In recent months, some of this evidence has become public for the first time.
It indicates that al-Bayoumi had calculations to help a plane hit a target on the horizon. An FBI report—declassified by the Biden administration in 2021—found that al-Bayoumi was an agent of Saudi intelligence. And this June, the American TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes aired a video that al-Bayoumi filmed outside the U.S. Capitol. It appears to show him scoping out the area for a potential attack.
After the raid on al-Bayoumi’s home, the Brits handed over their material to the FBI—but the FBI never shared it with the 9/11 Commission, which concluded there was no proof of Saudi complicity. Tom Kean, the commission’s chairman, commented on the recent revelations, “The FBI said it wasn’t withholding anything, and we believed them.” Why would this happen?
Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University and the author of The Declassification Engine. As Connelly sees it, American intelligence has a classification problem. The U.S. government is keeping so many secrets that, at this point, not even the president knows the extent of it. In fact, he says, this secrecy regime is so vast that no one can keep track of it. Part of the problem is that American government officials have every incentive to classify cavalierly rather than carefully. Electronic communications have meanwhile only complicated the problem—as more and more classified material piles up every day. Now, even rudimentary oversight is impossible. While conspiratorial fantasies have long been common in the United States, this can’t be helping. And if the American people are going to keep their government accountable, Connelly says, they’ll have to figure out how to reestablish their ability to know what their government does …
Gustav Jönsson: Why did it take so long for the American people to learn about this new 9/11 material?
Tomas Martinez
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