9/11 & Saudi ArabiaJudge puts 9/11 victims’ suit against Saudi Arabia on a faster track

Last year Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), opening the door for families of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and insurance companies to take Saudi Arabia to court for the role Saudi government officials may have played in the attack.

The Manhattan federal courts will next year issue rulings which will indicate whether JASTA was a symbolic gesture – or a move which has reshaped the legal landscape.

Timothy Litzenburg, a Richmond, Virginia, lawyer whose firm represent several family members of 9/11 victims, rushed to court hours after Congress overrode President Barack Obama’s veto.

“We thought maybe we could do the first trial,” he said. Litzenburg now predicts that since the lawsuits have been consolidated before a New York federal court, it may well take a decade or more before there is a resolution for more than a dozen lawsuits filed against Saudi Arabia.

ABC News reports that U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn on Thursday tried to put the litigation on a faster track, telling dozens of lawyers at a Manhattan conference that she believes some of the lawsuits could be combined because they make identical or similar claims. She noted the latest lawsuit had been filed just hours earlier.

James Kreindler, a plaintiffs’ lawyer in one new lawsuit, told her he expects the lawsuits may be combined into two legal actions, perhaps within a month.

At the Thursday meeting, Michael Kellogg, a lawyer representing Saudi Arabia, complained that lawyers for plaintiffs were unfairly using mostly the same plaintiffs in 9/11 cases brought fourteen years ago to make new claims against Saudi Arabia.

“They’ve added a number of different allegations, which will complicate the process,” he said.

Obama explained that he had vetoed the measure because it could expose the U.S. government to lawsuits around the world.

JASTA weakens the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which usually protects governments from lawsuits, by creating an exception which allows litigants to sue governments if employees of that government supported a terrorist attack which killed U.S. citizens on American soil.

Legal analysts told the Independent that pre-JASTA efforts to hold Saudi Arabia – government officials, banks, charitable organizations — responsible for the 9/11 attacks have failed in American courts, and that some of these cases were thrown out not only for reasons having to do with sovereign immunity.

In 2008, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that four Saudi princes could not be held liable in the 9/11 attacks even if they were aware that charitable donations to Muslim groups would be funneled to al-Qaeda.

The court said the plaintiffs would have to prove the princes knowingly engaged in actions aimed to harm U.S. citizens.

A lower court, in refusing to allow the suit to go forward, cited the 9/11 Commission, noting that the Commission found no evidence that Saudi officials funded or supported the 9/11 Terrorists.