Passage of the legislation puts Congress on a collision course with President Barack Obama on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the attacks.
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“This legislation would change long-standing, global law regarding sovereign immunity”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said back in May, after the Senate unanimously approved the bill. “That continues to be true”. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a sponsor of the Senate bill.
“The legislation gives access to the courts, to the rule of law, ” said Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Texas.
The Senate bill would revise immunity laws now sheltering Saudis from American lawsuits in US courts, making it possible for the families to get justice in USA courts.
Saudi Arabia has long denied such allegations and campaigned hard against the bill – but supporters shrugged off that pressure, arguing that if Saudis had done nothing wrong, they had nothing to worry about.
The bill give’s victims’ families the right to sue in United States court for any role that elements of the Saudi government may have played in the 2001 attacks that killed thousands in NY, the Washington DC area and Pennsylvania. Currently, such a suit would be impossible under USA law.
Fifteen of the nineteen men who hijacked four planes and flew them into targets in NY and Washington in 2001 were Saudi citizens, though Riyadh has always denied having any role in the attacks.
Saudi Arabian officials have said they will sell $750 billion in USA assets if the bill becomes law. Opponents of the bill said it could strain relations with Saudi Arabia and lead to retaliatory laws targeting United States citizens or corporations in other countries.
However, an alleged 28 classified pages from a 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 were rumored to contain direct evidence of this Saudi involvement.
Ties between Saudi officials and terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks were exposed when United States lawmakers released 28 secret pages of a congressional investigation. According to the newspaper The Washington Post, Saudi officials put pressure on congresspeople in recent weeks to avoid approval of that measure and threatened to withdraw millions of USA dollars from the U.S. banks and sell an important group of assets of the United States if the document becomes a law.
“I know that the advocates of this legislation have suggested that they have taken into account our concerns by more narrowly tailoring the legislation”. “But, unfortunately, their efforts were not sufficient to prevent the longer-term, unintended consequences that we are concerned about”.
“In fact what they [Congress] are doing is stripping the principle of sovereign immunities which would turn the world for global law into the law of the jungle”, Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said in May in a statement”.
With Sen. Charles Schumer as an original co-sponsor of the bill, the Senate unanimously passed its version in May.
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The House passed the legislation by voice vote on Friday, months after the Senate OK’d the measure back in May. In September, U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of NY said the court lacked jurisdiction. There’s strong bipartisan support for the bill in Congress, and lawmakers appear to have the votes to override a potential veto.
