A newly-released 25-year-old video of a Saudi man touring the U.S. Capitol and other Washington, D.C. locations has renewed the anger of former CIA officer and NewsNation national security contributor Tracy Walder.
“I was very enraged to see this video,” Walder told “NewsNation Prime” about the footage shot by Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi man believed to have ties with Saudi officials and the people linked to the 9/11 hijackers.
“The really could look like an innocuous tourist video,” said Walder. “But when you look at the subtitles and you look at what they’re talking about, this is a video in which they are clearly casing from a tradecraft perspective. There’s no way around this.”
“This is not just another tourist video.”
Investigators working with 9/11 Families United sent NewsNation the video after a judge released it by court order. It has been referenced in a civil lawsuit against Saudi Arabia from victims’ families, a legal pursuit that aims to hold the kingdom liable for its alleged role in 9/11.
Saudi Arabia has denied that Bayoumi was ever an agent and has long denied any involvement in the plot to hijack American passenger jets and crash them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s believed a fourth plane was bound for the U.S. Capitol before a passenger revolt caused it to crash in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Angering Walder even more: her memories of meetings in the days after 9/11 “with members of the Saudi government denying all involvement in this attack. It really is enraging to see this unfold in front of my face, and then to be lied to by the government in the meetings.”
Walder said the Saudis were very cooperative at the time. “I think they knew that they probably had a problem on their hands. 15 of those hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.”
The video has been in FBI custody since just a few days after the attacks. British police found it in Bayoumi’s apartment in Birmingham, England, along with an address book that lawyers for the 9/11 families claim contained phone numbers for Saudis working for the government at the time.
A judge released it last week, despite appeals from the FBI and the Justice Dept. to keep it sealed.
Going forward, Walder says there’s no question that the families of those killed on 9/11 deserve justice but can’t say for certain that she believes the Saudi government was involved. The U.S. commission that investigated 9/11 concluded that the terror group Al-Qaida was solely responsible for the attacks.
“If we really follow the money, I think that will tell us a lot about (the intel officer who took the video). He was being paid by the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. He was working on behalf of Saudi intelligence. So, I think it’s going to become very difficult at some point for the Saudis to say that they had no knowledge of this,” said Walder.