Terror Watch: A Legal Counterattack

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.