If they are successful, this would be the first time in Obama’s presidency.
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The House of Representatives on Friday, passed the bill by voice vote, without objections, after the Senate passed it unanimously in May.
“That’s not an effective, forceful way for us to respond to terrorism”, spokesman Josh Earnest said, adding that the text, which has raised major concerns among Washington’s Gulf allies, has yet to reach the president’s desk.
Obama has served the longest period without a veto override of any president in more than a century.
Saudi Arabia is a longstanding U.S. ally but it was also home to 15 of the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which killed almost 3,000 people.
While the 9/11 Commission found him to be an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” with Islamic extremists, the new document says that Federal Bureau of Investigation files indicated al-Bayoumi had “extensive contact with Saudi government establishments in the United States and received financial support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense”.
Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a six-nation union of Arab states dominated by Saudi Arabia, said that the law was, “contrary to the foundations and principles of relations between states and the principle of sovereign immunity enjoyed by states”, Reuters reported Monday. The bill would revise immunity laws now sheltering Saudis from American lawsuits in USA courts, making it possible for the families to finally get justice, and its passage comes right around the 15th anniversary of the attacks.
The bill was inspired by victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and its passage was timed to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the attacks on Sunday.
That position seemed at least somewhat validated when the French parliament member Pierre Lellouche, who serves as chairman of the rough equivalent in France of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would pursue legislation that would permit French citizens to sue the United States with cause. “I hope for their sake that the administration will rethink vetoing this bill”. Fifteen out of nineteen of the men that hijacked commercial airliners and used them as missiles to take down the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon were Saudi subjects.
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The Constitution gives the president 10 days after receiving a bill to veto it before it automatically becomes law.
