WASHINGTON — A bill that would expose Saudi Arabia to legal jeopardy for any role in the Sept. 11 attacks passed the Senate unanimously on Tuesday, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.
The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.
Obama administration officials have lobbied against the bill, and the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they might be in danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and administration officials while in Washington in March.
Many economists are skeptical that the Saudis would deliver on such a warning, saying that the sell-off would be hard to execute and would do more harm to the kingdom’s economy than to America’s.
Questions about the role Saudi officials might have played in the terror plot have lingered for more than a decade, and families of the Sept. 11 victims have used various lawsuits to try to hold members of the Saudi royal family and charities liable for what they allege is financial support for terrorism. But these moves have been mostly blocked, in part because of a 1976 law that gives foreign nations some immunity from suits in American courts.
But the Senate bill carves out an exception to the law if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens inside the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.
The administration has warned that any weakening of the sovereign immunity law could put American troops, civilians and corporations at legal risk if other nations decide to retaliate with their own legislation. Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said last month that President Obama would veto the bill if it reached his desk in its current form.
The legislation is moving through Congress as the Obama administration is considering whether to declassify a portion of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi government officials and other Saudi citizens living in the United States had a hand in the terror plot.
Those conclusions have yet to be released publicly, but recently the National Archives posted on its website a separate document that appears to be a glimpse into what is inside the still classified 28 pages of the report.
The document, dated June 6, 2003, is a series of memos written by Sept. 11 Commission staff members compiling numerous possible connections between the hijackers and Saudis inside the United States.
The document was first disclosed publicly by 28pages.org, an advocacy website devoted to declassifying the redacting section of the congressional inquiry.
The Sept. 11 commission, which began its work after the congressional inquiry, examined the Saudi role in the attacks but found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda or the 9/11 plotters.
Last month, commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton issued a statement that the 28 pages of the congressional report “were based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material that came to the FBI” — much of it that the Sept. 11 commission ultimately found inconclusive.
“Accusations of complicity in that mass murder from responsible authorities are a grave matter. Such charges should be levied with care,” they wrote.