A Legal
Counterattack
Saudis hire some of the toniest U.S. law firms to defend them against the
landmark $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the victims of 9-11. So why is the
plaintiff’s counsel ecstatic? Plus, new heat on radical imam
April
16 — After
months of working below the radar, a huge U.S. legal team hired by the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia has sprung into action and begun a major counteroffensive
against a landmark lawsuit seeking $1 trillion in damages on behalf of the
victims of the September 11 terror attacks.
THE OPENING DEFENSE SALVO in what
promises to be a bruising legal battle was fired last week when a trio of
lawyers from Baker Botts, a prestigious Houston-based law firm, filed a motion
on behalf of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi defense minister. The
motion attacked the 9-11 lawsuit as a “broadside indictment of Saudi government,
religion and culture.” It also argued that, as the third-ranking official of a
foreign government, their client is immune from any U.S. legal action and that
he should therefore be dismissed from the case altogether.
But in laying out their arguments, Sultan’s U.S. lawyers also presented
highly detailed new evidence of the Saudi government’s role in funneling
millions of dollars to a web of Islamic charities that are widely suspected by
U.S. officials of covertly financing the operations of Al Qaeda and other
international terrorist groups.
Backed up by stacks of court affidavits and copies of cancelled checks,
the Baker Botts team openly acknowledge in their brief that Sultan has for the
past 16 years approved regular payments of about $266,000 a year to the
International Islamic Relief Organization—a large Saudi charity whose U.S.
offices were last year raided by federal agents. Sultan also authorized two
additional grants totaling $52,000 to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth,
another Saudi-based group that has drawn the scrutiny of U.S. antiterrorism
investigators.
Sultan authorized these payments as the head of two Saudi government
councils, one of which, the “special committee” of the Council of Ministers,
gives him sole power to disburse funds that further the “national and foreign
policy of Saudi Arabia.” As such, the lawyers write, the payments are “clearly
an official act” and therefore outside the scope of U.S. courts.
But lawyers for the families of 9-11 victims sounded positively ecstatic
over the filing. In their view, Sultan’s high-priced legal team had handed them
powerful ammunition to argue that the Saudi defense minister, at a minimum, has
turned a blind eye to a mountain of evidence that international terrorists had
penetrated charities like the IIRO and subverted them for their own purposes.
“This is a perfect play into our hands,” said Ron Motley, the colorful
tort lawyer who is heading up an army of litigators who are representing the
families of 9-11 victims. “We smoked out the prince.”
By claiming his conduct was official policy and then introducing
affidavits from officials of the charities to back it up, Motley said, the
defense lawyers have opened up their client and his supporting witnesses to
“discovery”—pretrial proceedings in which plaintiff’s counsel can grill them
about their claims and the extent of their knowledge of how the royal funds were
spent. Motley said the filing may eventually open up the kingdom itself to be
named as a defendant in the case.
Whether or not that ever transpires will depend on U.S. Judge James
Robertson, who is overseeing the sprawling lawsuit and who so far hasn’t tipped
his hand. But the recent flurry of legal maneuvering only underscores the
enormous stakes in the proceedings.
Lawyers for the defendants have derided the entire 9-11 case as a
fanciful concoction of conspiracy theories and speculative musings that bear
little, if any, relationship to the actual events of 9-11. They also say that
much of the complaint involves matters that do not belong in a U.S. courtroom,
such as the claim that members of the Saudi royal family are anti-American, seek
to export “Wahhabi ideology”—the country’s puritanical brand of Islam—and that
Prince Sultan has “publicly accused the ‘Zionist and Jewish lobby’ of
orchestrating a media blitz against the Saudi Kingdom.”
“Surely,” the lawyers for Sultan write in their brief, “the plaintiffs
do not contend that an American court can or should pass judgment on the
religious beliefs or practices of Saudi Arabia or determine whether its
government is “anti-American.”
But however persuasive (or not) those arguments are, there may be a host
of other factors that influence how the case plays out. Despite initial feelers
by lawyers for the Saudis, few now expect the State Department to intervene with
Judge Robertson to ask that the case be dismissed. (It’s a political nonstarter,
lawyers on both sides say.) In the meantime, although President Bush and his
senior aides have publicly praised the Saudis for their “cooperation” in the war
on terror, officials at the Treasury and Justice departments have privately
expressed deep frustration over the failure of the Saudi government to impose
stricter controls over their Islamic charities and turn over crucial evidence
about the murky flow of money to Al Qaeda.
Motley’s team and their investigators have been working closely with
some of those government officials. A few of those officials, sources say, see
the 9-11 lawsuit as a useful tool to turn up the public heat on the Saudis. In
that sense, there is a growing view among U.S. counterterrorism officials that
it might be a good thing for the case to proceed—no matter how embarrassing it
might prove to the Saudis.
To keep that from happening, sources close to the case say, members of
the Saudi royal family and the country’s wealthiest businessmen—many of whom are
defendants in the case—have offered up seven-figure retainers to some of the
toniest and most politically connected law firms in the country.
Baker Botts, Sultan’s law firm, for example, still boasts former
secretary of State James Baker as one of its senior partners. Its recent alumni
include Robert Jordan, the former personal lawyer for President Bush who is now
U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
An internal list of other law firms retained in the case, reviewed by
NEWSWEEK , reads like a veritable “who’s who” of the U.S. legal community. Among
those firms and their Saudi clients are: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (Prince
Mohammed al Faisal); Kellog, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans (Prince Turki al
Faisal); Jones, Day (the Binladin Group); Ropes & Grey (Khaled bin Mahfouz);
White & Case,(the Al-Rajhi Banking Group); King & Spalding (the Arab Bank and
Youssef Nada); Akin Gump (Mohammed Hussein Al-Almoudi); and Fulbright & Jaworski
(Nimir Petroleum.)
But legal sources say some high-priced firms and their senior partners
have been wary of the Saudi overtures—despite offers of retainers that, in some
cases, have ranged as high as $5 million. One former Clinton administration
official at a big law firm said he was personally approached to represent a
high-ranking Saudi prince in the case but turned it down. “I kept asking myself,
‘do I want to be representing the Saudis against the 9-11 families—especially
after all the trouble we had getting cooperation from the Saudis on terrorism’,”
the official said. “I finally just said no.”
