Link To 9/11 Hijackers Found In Sarasota

[Gold9472]

More secret 9/11 documents identified, but FBI has yet to turn them over to judge

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/3...dentified.html

By Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers
Posted on Wednesday, 04.30.14

Contradicting an earlier assertion made under oath by a senior FBI official, an attorney for the Justice Department said Wednesday that the FBI has identified four more boxes of “classified” 9/11 documents held by its Tampa field office.

The government, however, has yet to comply with a federal judge’s orders Friday that it turn over copies of that massive9/11 file — now said to total 27 boxes — for his personal inspection.

U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch issued those orders in a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by BrowardBulldog.org seeking records about the FBI’s investigation into apparent pre-9/11 terrorist activity in Sarasota.

In an email to the news organization’s attorney, Thomas Julin, Miami Assistant U.S. Attorney Dexter Lee said the government was prepared to file the documents with the court last Friday “as ordered.” The Justice Department, however, determined that Zloch’s chambers do not have a safe with “storage capability for classified documents.”

“The plan at present is to deliver the safe [which can hold four boxes] on Thursday, May 1, 2014, along with the first four boxes of classified materials,” Lee said. “When the court has completed its review of the four boxes, chambers will be contacted and I will deliver four more boxes, as well as retrieving the material already reviewed.”

Lee said, too, that he will deliver to the court on Friday CD ROMs containing scanned versions of the classified documents.

POSSIBLE DELAYS
The government’s piecemeal document delivery plan deviates substantially from Zloch’s orders, which require the production of photocopies of the FBI’s entire 9/11Tampa file all at once. If approved, it would delay the production of records to the judge for inspection by weeks or months.

The existence of four additional boxes of 9/11 records could add to any delay.

Lee’s disclosure about the additional four boxes calls into question the accuracy of the sworn declaration submitted to the court two weeks ago by FBI records section chief David M. Hardy.

Hardy told the court that the entire Tampa 9/11 “sub file” was “comprised of 23 boxes of records” including “a substantial, but undetermined amount of material classified at the ‘secret’ level.” Prosecutor Lee did not explain why the file is now said to be 27 boxes.

The FBI probe that is the focus of the Freedom of Information lawsuit focused on a Saudi family with ties to the Royal Family and apparent connections to some of the 9/11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, and former Broward resident and currently suspected al Qaeda leader Adnan Shukrijumah.

The investigation began after neighbors in the upscale south Sarasota gated community of Prestancia called authorities to report that Abulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, had suddenly moved out of their home two weeks before 9/11, leaving behind cars, furniture, clothing and food in the kitchen.

Sources have said agents later found gatehouse logs and photographs of license tags and phone records showing that Atta, Shukrijumah and others had visited the al-Hijji’s home.

Al-Hijji, who later worked for the European subsidiary of the state oil company Saudi Aramco, told London’s Daily Telegraph last year that he condemned the terror attacks and had no involvement in them. The FBI has said publicly that its Sarasota investigation found no evidence connecting the family to either the hijackers or the 9/11 plot.

The FBI, however, kept the investigation secret until BrowardBulldog.org first disclosed it in September 2011.

Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, has said that the FBI did not disclose the existence of the Sarasota investigation to either the Joint Inquiry or the subsequent 9/11 Commission.

The FOIA lawsuit was filed in September 2012 after the FBI denied administrative requests for the release of its records about the matter. In March 2013, the government unexpectedly released more than two-dozen heavily censored records that nevertheless undercut the bureau’s previous public denials.

The documents state that the Sarasota Saudis had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.” One document lists three individuals, with names blacked out, and ties them to the Venice, Fla., flight school where suicide hijackers Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained.

Last week, the government provided 27 pages of classified documents to Judge Zloch that bear the blanked-out case number affixed to the April 16, 2002 FBI report disclosing the family’s “many connections” to terrorists.

The judge’s order directs the government to immediately produce any documents responsive to the news organization’s Freedom of Information request. Attorney Julin has asked the government to say whether any of those 27 pages are responsive and nonexempt, and if so to make them public.

The prosecutor said he’s working with the FBI to respond to Julin’s inquiry.

[Gold9472]

Attorney says four more boxes of records tied to Saudis found

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article...o-Saudis-found

Published: Thursday, May 1, 2014 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 at 11:50 p.m.

An attorney for the U.S. Justice Department reversed sworn court testimony by stating that the FBI had recently identified four previously unknown boxes of potentially relevant documents.

Previously, in a lawsuit against the agency brought by news organization the Broward Bulldog and its editor, Dan Christensen, it was asserted that only a limited number of documents pertaining to the Saudi family and Sarasota existed.

Attorney Dexter Lee also appeared to countermand a federal judge's order that all known materials -- now 27 boxes of documents -- be delivered to the federal court in Fort Lauderdale by last Friday.

Judge William Zloch ordered the FBI to deliver the documents after granting the agency an extension to comply with a ruling to turn over all relevant materials in the case.

But the Justice Department waited until Wednesday -- five days after that deadline -- to inform the Bulldog's attorney that it intends to deliver the documents to the judge piecemeal, and only after a secure safe is installed in the judge's chambers.

The Bulldog's attorney, Tom Julin, said he received word from Lee via email.

"One can imagine many scenarios that would pose difficulties," said Julin. "They are giving him a safe that only holds four boxes. What they are saying is, once he has notified us that he has reviewed the four, we will take those back and give him a fresh four."

In joining the case in mid-March, the Herald-Tribune and the Miami Herald cited articles written about the family and their home in the Prestancia neighborhood of Sarasota, and how additional information about them would serve the public interest.

To date, the FBI has turned over 35 pages of heavily redacted documents in the lawsuit -- out of tens of thousands of pages it acknowledges were part of its Florida inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

On April 18, the agency turned over another 27 pages for the judge alone to view -- documents that were determined by the FBI to be exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests and the Bulldog lawsuit.

Many of the documents are thought to contain information about the Prestancia home, which was then owned by Saudi businessman Esam Ghazzawi and his wife, Deborah.

Ghazzawi is known to have connections to the Saudi royal family.

For the six years before 9/11, the home was occupied by their son-in-law, Abdulaziz Al-Hijji, and their daughter, Anoud.

The Al-Hijjis came to the FBI's attention after the couple returned abruptly to Saudi Arabia two weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., leaving behind clothes, food, children's toys and cars.

Federal agents also linked phone calls from the Prestancia home -- some dating back a year before the attacks -- to known 9/11 suspects, the Bulldog has reported.

The calls were made to, or received from, alleged terrorist ringleader Mohammed Atta and 11 other terrorist suspects, the Bulldog reported.

Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had learned to fly at the former Huffman Aviation flight school at the Venice Municipal Airport.

Terrorist Ziad Jarrah also took flying lessons nearby, at the Florida Flight Training school.

Al-Hijji family members have denied any relationship to the terrorists.

[Gold9472]

Keeping the FBI honest
Judge wisely cautious about documents on Sarasota Saudi family

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article...the-FBI-honest

Published: Thursday, May 1, 2014 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 at 6:34 p.m.

A federal judge recently gave the FBI more time to submit records related to a Saudi family's mysterious departure from Sarasota two weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But, to his credit, Judge William Zloch did not cut the agency any slack.

Zloch, a district the Southern District judge denied the FBI's request to turn over records only in their electronic form.

The Southern District judge preserved his order that the FBI produce, for his inspection, records in a digitized, searchable format. He also demanded that the agency submit, for the court's review, "hard copies" of the documents.

Good, sharp decision.

The FBI had proposed, according to Herald-Tribune reporter Michael Pollick, to send the hard-copy records to an unidentified location in Virginia for transformation into a digital format. However, Zloch wisely required the agency to provide him copies of the originals -- perhaps, we suspect, to ensure that all of them are included in the digitized format.

In other words, the judge took a prudent step to ensure that records -- which he previously deemed "incomplete" -- didn't become even less complete in digital format.

Records with 'gaps'
According to the court's docket, the FBI delivered 27 pages of records, in hard-copy form, on April 28. The FBI has until Friday to provide the digitized versions.

After the records are received by the court, Zloch will review them privately to determine if they are exempt, by law, from public disclosure.

The judge's skepticism of the FBI's willingness to comply with his orders and his insistence that the agency turn over records in multiple forms is warranted. As we noted in an earlier editorial, Zloch determined that the FBI previously:

• Provided records with "apparent" and unexplained chronological "gaps."

• Presented to the court documents that "seem incomplete."

• Submitted "summary documents" that "do in fact seem to contradict each other."

Zloch has steadily sought to require the FBI to adequately search for, find and release to the court documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

In September 2011, two independent reporters writing for BrowardBulldog.org wrote that a family from Saudi Arabia, who lived in Sarasota County's prestigious Prestancia development prior to September 2001, had connections with individuals associated with the Sept. 11 terrorists.

The report, reprinted three years ago by the Herald-Tribune, cited documents showing phone calls to the house were made by hijackers who trained in Venice to fly airplanes.

The report also said the family was visited by people using a car licensed to Mohammed Atta -- who crashed the first plane into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Agency's credibility in question
Judge Zloch, a Reagan appointee, has repeatedly ruled that the FBI is not complying with the Freedom of Information Act. The "gaps and consistencies" in documents provided to the court "underscore the need for a more thorough search," Zloch wrote in an order issued April 18.

The FBI has maintained that the family was not "related to any threat nor connected to the 9/11 plot." Yet neither the FBI nor anyone else has explained why the family, closely related to a prominent Saudi financier, abruptly left its Prestancia home two weeks before 9/11 -- leaving clothes in closets, food in the refrigerator and three cars in the driveway and garage.

The agency's credibility in this matter is not helped by the fact that its investigation of the family was not reported to Congress or mentioned in the independent 9/11 Commission report.

It can be said that the Herald-Tribune has a dog in this hunt. Halifax Media Holdings, which includes the Herald-Tribune, and the Miami Herald have filed "friend of the court" briefs in support of the plaintiffs.

Zloch has emphasized that the efficacy of the investigation is not the matter before his court. The focus is, he wrote, on whether the FBI has submitted the documents required by federal law.

We'll soon learn, based on Zloch's actions so far, whether the FBI considers itself above -- or subject to -- the law.

[Gold9472]

Documents cite ‘many connections’ between 9/11 figures, Florida family

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/0...types=og.likes

By Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers
BrowardBulldog.org

The Justice Department Friday made public four new, heavily censored documents confirming that by 2002 the FBI had found “many connections” between 9/11 terrorist figures and the Florida family of “an allegedly wealthy international businessman” with ties to the Saudi Royal family.

“On or about 8/27/01 his family fled their house in Sarasota leaving behind valuable items in a manner indicating they left quickly without prior preparation,” says an FBI “case narrative” written on April 16, 2002.

The name of the international businessman, Esam Ghazzawi, is blanked out in the narrative. Ghazzawi’s name, however, is included on another page — an FBI form that accompanied a letter acquired by FBI agents in Tampa as “evidence” in July 2002. Details about the letter were not released.

The release of Ghazzawi’s name is the first time the government has confirmed Ghazzawi’s involvement in the FBI investigation that lasted until at least 2004, yet was never disclosed to the 9/11 Commission or congressional investigators.

Ghazzawi, advisor to a senior Saudi prince, owned the upscale south Sarasota home where his daughter, Anoud, and her husband, Abdulaziz al-Hijji lived prior to 9/11. Law enforcement sources have said that after 9/11 investigators found evidence — telephone records and photographs of license tags and security gate log books — showing that hijack pilot Mohamed Atta, former Broward resident and fugitive al Qaeda leader Adnan Shukrijumah and other terror suspects had visited the home. The home is about 10 miles from the Venice airport, where Atta and the two other hijack pilots trained.

The four pages were released amid ongoing Freedom of Information litigation brought by BrowardBulldog.org after the FBI declined to release any records about the matter.

In April, Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch ordered the FBI to conduct a thorough search of its records to identify documents about the once-secret probe. The judge said the Justice Department had failed to convince him that the FBI’s prior searches had been adequate.

With Friday’s action, a total of 39 pages have been released since the lawsuit was filed in September 2012. That includes four pages that were censored in their entirety.

The FBI withheld certain information from the just-released documents, saying disclosure would constitute “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” or reveal techniques and procedures of law enforcement.

The four pages released Friday were all declassified shortly before their release.

FBI records chief David M. Hardy said in a declaration under oath that the bureau has processed the Tampa field office’s complete “sub file” on 9/11 and is in the process of turning it over to the judge as ordered. Hardy said the file consists of 80,266 pages, divided into 411 “individual documents sections,” burned onto three CDs in a searchable format.

The documents, and parallel hard copies, were provided for Judge Zloch’s private inspection. He will then decide whether any of those documents are releasable under the Freedom of Information Act.

[Gold9472]

Judge peruses Southwest Florida's 9/11 secrets

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article...9708?p=1&tc=pg

By Michael Pollick
michael.pollick@heraldtribune.com
Published: Saturday, May 17, 2014 at 6:04 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, May 17, 2014 at 6:04 p.m.

The FBI is so concerned about keeping “Secret” 9/11 documents just that — a tighly held secret —that it pushed last month to have a special safe installed in a federal judge’s chambers.

The agency pressed for U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch to install the special vault to keep some delicate materials under wraps: the 80,266 pages of investigative material into a Saudi family that left Sarasota abruptly before 9/11.

The vault idea was a step beyond the already-tight security at the Tampa federal courthouse.

The FBI’s Tampa field office had stamped the documents — supposedly that office’s entire file of investigations into the terror attacks — as classified and “Secret” shortly after its investigation concluded.

“The file itself, as received, was classified at the ‘Secret’ level as it contains classified material at the ‘Secret’ level interspersed throughout,” David M. Hardy, an FBI section chief in charge of records management in Winchester, Virginia, wrote to the judge on May 9.

The Fort Lauderdale news organization Broward Bulldog has been battling the FBI and the Justice Department in federal court to get access to the documents on that Sarasota family, along with materials on related investigations.

The Bulldog has been joined by both the Herald-Tribune and the Miami Herald as so-called “friends of the court.” The two papers have emphasized that there is a compelling public interest in gaining more clarity on exactly what federal investigators discovered in Southwest Florida. The region was, among other things, the site of flight training by 9/11 hijackers.

Underlying the delivery of the documents and the supposed need for a vault to keep them secure is a larger issue about the classification of the material itself: Who can do that, and when?

“One of my concerns about this whole process is how opaque it is,” Bob Graham, a onetime senator, told the Herald-Tribune this past week.

“My experience has been that often classification has more to do with covering up mistakes and avoiding embarrassment than it does with any reasonable definition of national security,” said Graham, who co-chaired a congressional committee that independently investigated the terror attacks.

“Having seen some of the documents now being withheld, I would state with high confidence that they are more likely to have been withheld because of embarrassment at agency actions, rather than any reasonable standard of national security.”

The current system for classifying material was established in 2009 under Executive Order 13526 by President Barack Obama.

It supplanted a series of earlier executive orders on the same topic governing how material can be tagged as secret.

There are a handful of grounds on which the government can classify a document as a matter of national security: by claiming pages contain military plans, foreign government information or “scientific, technological or economic matters relating to national security.”

In the case of the Saudi family and the subsequent FBI inquiry, the agency has said the material relates to “intelligence activities, sources, or methods, or cryptology.”

That could mean the FBI has, or had, an agent or a confidential informant who requires protection, or it could refer to the bureau’s system for detecting patterns in telephone calls.

In the case of the Saudi family, it is believed the 9/11 terrorists phoned the residents of the Sarasota house, located in the Prestancia neighborhood, in the months leading up to 9/11.

The executive order provides the government with immense power to classify what it deems secret without review.

“Typically the ones who have the authority are the ones who have the information,” said Sheryl Shenberger, director of National Archives National Declassification Center in College Park, Maryland.

But there is room for the judiciary to move, too.

“Federal judges do have the authority to order declassification of government documents, but they rarely do it,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

“Usually they just order new reviews, and almost every time there is a new review, plaintiffs get additional documents.”

The lawsuit involving the FBI and the Saudi family began in 2012, after the Bulldog’s Dan Christensen published a story tied to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The bureau and Justice denied the validity of the story, which asserted that the Saudi family in Prestancia was connected to at least three of the terrorists who had trained at Venice Airport to fly planes into the World Trade Center and other targets.

The Bulldog countered with a Freedom of Information Act request for documents from the agency’s analysis. After being told that no documents existed that could be released, the news organization sued the FBI and the Justice Department.

In April, Judge Zloch ordered the FBI to deliver paper files and digital copies to his chambers, to determine if the FBI was satisfying Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Broward Bulldog.

At issue was whether the three 9/11 terrorists who’d received flight training at Venice Airport had a U.S. support system that might have included the Saudi family.

In leaving Sarasota two weeks before the attacks, the family left food in the refrigerator, cars in the driveway, clothes in closets and an open, empty safe.

“In order for the Court to conduct its review in this case, it must know whether such documents exist,” Zloch wrote in an April 4 order.

But Hardy, the FBI’s records section chief, cautioned that much of the material presented to the judge could be classified — based on the agency’s determination.

Personnel in Virginia “took the file as they found it and did not undertake a process to segregate unclassified material from classified material,” Hardy wrote to the judge.

Instead, they divided the pages into 411 document sections. At the beginning of each section they prepared a set of cover sheets to tell the judge which parts were “Secret” and which were unclassified.

Most of the files likely were determined to be classified immediately in the wake of the attacks and subsequent investigation, analysts note. But at least one file that had been deemed classified was declassified in March 2013, five months after the FOIA suit began.

Dated April 16, 2002, the document is marked SECRET at the top, followed by the name of the agency.

At the bottom is a separate coding system that explains when and why it was determined that the document should remain SECRET.

DATE: 03-14-2013

REASON: 1.4(C)

DECLASSIFY ON: 03-14-2038

The 1.4(C) refers to an agency code that pertains to cryptology and other sensitive areas related to national security.

The document was significant, though, because it contradicted the FBI’s assertion that the Bulldog’s Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit was baseless.

“Further investigation of the (redacted) family revealed many connections between the (redacted) and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 09/11/2001,” the document read.

Another declassified document refers to an agency file on Esam Ghazzawi — a highly influential Saudi businessman who owned the Prestancia house. For about six years prior to 9/11, the home had been occupied by his daughter and her husband, Abdulazziz Al-Hijji.

The Al-Hijjis have vehemently denied any involvement with the terrorists.

The Bulldog’s attorney says the murky nature of the classified documents only adds to the intrigue.

“We don’t understand who is classifying these documents,” said Tom Julin, the Miami lawyer representing the Bulldog and Christensen.

“There is no indication of the reason they were classified. It calls into question whether they were properly classified in the first instance.”

Whether the documents were classified properly is critical, because it would give the judge room to ask for further review.

So while Judge Zloch might not declassify “Secret” documents, he could rule the FBI’s decision to classify some documents in error and find that an exemption to keep documents from the public does not apply.

“ ‘I really want the document’ is not a compelling argument,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on National Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

“But it looks like the plaintiffs were successful in persuading the judge that he needed to look more closely at the government’s position,” Aftergood said. “And that is already a huge breakthrough.”