Today, Explained - Joe Biden’s Saudi vacation

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Candidate Biden said he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” on the world stage. Now President Biden is traveling there, asking for the kingdom’s help on gas prices. This episode was produced by Jon Ehrens and Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Victoria Dominguez and Amina Al-Sadi, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why I'm Going to Saudi Arabia is the title of President Biden's weekend op-ed in The Washington Post. It's a little weird. You have the president of the world's greatest superpower writing in The Washington Post an article in defense of his trip before he even goes. It's kind of like a why I'm going to sub stack. The president writes that he's been tough on the kingdom and on its ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, a dogged and unrepentant violator of human rights. But Biden's in a tricky position. Obviously, oil prices are really high.

This is contributing to inflation. It's contributing to the bad economy. And it might contribute to a real shellacking at the midterm election for Democrats. Coming up on Today Explained explained the president in the kingdom. The all new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. President Biden might have scores of geopolitical and diplomatic reasons to visit Saudi Arabia, but there is one big reason that the American public cares deeply about. Gas prices. Jonathan Geyer is a senior foreign policy writer at Vox covering Joe Biden and the world. Jonathan, what's going on with this trip? Biden and his administration are just doing everything they can to lower oil prices. The turmoil of Russia's war on Ukraine has obviously contributed to prices. Saudi Arabia is kind of caught between in't get that much lower in response to this trip, it's I mean, the United States produces a lot of oil itself. It produces a lot of natural gas.

What exactly can Saudi Arabia do for the United States that the U.S. can't do for itself? The narrative that the U.S. has become energy independent has been a little bit overblown. I mean, prices are still determined by this international market. And what MBS and the Saudi government can do is increase production a couple million barrels a day. It's not a whole lot, but it might be enough with other factors and other efforts to help lower prices a little bit. The bigger issue here, though, has to do with refineries. There's just not enough oil refineries right now due to a whole load of reasons. Building a refinery is a multi-billion dollar investment. It may take a decade.

We haven't had a refinery built in the United States since the 1970s. That's why it just seems a little questionable why the president would want to go all in, backtracking on some promises on the campaign as president, and go meet with MBS hat in hand, as so many people have described it, when the result may not be that fruitful when it comes to oil prices. Let's talk about how Joe Biden has talked about Saudi Arabia in the past.

Looking at what Biden has said as vice president, as presidential candidate, you get the sense he's very conflicted about Saudi Arabia. He's very critical of them, called them a pariah on the campaign trail. And I would make it very clear, we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them. We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. This was largely because Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, had ordered the assassination of a U.S. resident, Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post columnist. Really heinous, brutal murder. He was strangled as soon as he entered the building by a team of Saudi assassins, who then dismembered his body.

A lot of people consider MBS the reason why there's been a prolonged, really devastating war in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have died. The fighting around Hodeidah's port and the incessant Saudi-led bombardment, aid agencies say, has created a perfect storm, one that leaves the parties to the conflict and their international backers with blood on their hands and even as vice president he says you know the Saudis weren't always that helpful they're not helpful in in dealing with other US interests in the Middle East we have not remained silent with Saudi Arabia. And I certainly haven't remained silent with Saudi Arabia.

Jonathan, how unusual, though, is it really for a U.S. president to campaign saying one thing and then become president and have to do something completely different? Well, Biden is unusual because he came in as the statesman president. I mean, no one since George H.W. Bush has had this much experience on the world stage, Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As vice president, he was kind of Obama's Middle East fixer. So this isn't just any old presidential candidate making promises. When Joe Biden says he's going to make Saudi Arabia a pariah, you kind of imagine he's going to go for it. President Biden keeps insisting, including in a kind of vaguely worded op-ed in the Washington

Post, that this visit is actually about security. So what's in play security-wise? The Biden administration is trying to put forward a new security architecture, new security deals that put Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab countries together in a fight against Iran. And it looks like the Biden administration's really doubling down on that, much to the anger of human rights activists, who are very quick to point out that many of these Arab states are anything but democratic. Has the White House released an itinerary of what the president will be doing? Like, will he and Mohammed bin Salman be sitting down one-on-one? What will this visit look like exactly?

So Biden has had this really kind of confusing policy up until now that he would not meet directly with MBS. Mr. President, will you be open to meeting with the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, if you do end up going to Saudi Arabia? Look, we're getting way ahead of ourselves here. The problem with that is he's going to meet with him in this visit, and it really looks like a about-face and a walk-down. Now, there have been some incredible scenes reported.

The Wall Street Journal showed this scene of Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, meeting with MBS. And MBS showed up in gym shorts and was screaming at Jake Sullivan. I mean, I can't emphasize enough that MBS is erratic. He's paranoid. Some intelligence experts I've spoken to compare him to Saddam Hussein. The number two official in Saudi intelligence who, you know, fled the country, is now fearing for his life, called him a psychopath in 60 minutes. I am here to sound the alarm about a psychopath killer in the Middle East with infinite resources, who poses threat to his people, to the Americans, and to the planet.

MBS is a really frightening character, and he's not somebody you want the U.S. president to be meeting with. But now, with this trip, it's all but inevitable. I wonder about Mohammed bin Salman and how it plays for him at home. If he makes agreements with Joe Biden on security, on oil, on increasing oil production, does he risk losing anything? Making agreements with the American president who called his country a pariah, who has gone after him personally? Well, I think it's worth keeping in mind just how popular MBS is in Saudi Arabia, because in parallel to these heinous human rights violations he's conducted

in the world and in his own country, arresting feminist activists, all sorts of members of his royal court, all sorts of prominent businessmen, MBS has also presided over a great reform culturally of Saudi Arabia, opening it up to concerts and movie theaters and women driving. Now, you could say a lot of this is superficial, but for a very young country, and Saudi Arabia is a very young country population-wise, he's very popular. And I think there is a huge respect and affinity for America, not just its Hollywood pop culture and all that. But look, America had Saudi Arabia's back in the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein very well could have invaded Saudi Arabia. These relations between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., they go back to FDR. In cordial conversation with Colonel Eddie as interpreter,

the Saudi Arabian king and American president discuss mutual problems of trade and relations with Saudi Arabia. This is a really longstanding partnership, and it's been a cornerstone of U.S. policy. The difference here, though, is MBS himself. I mean, he is a pariah. No Saudi leader has ever been willing to target his own cousins, his own royal family, and send them to jail. The former crown prince, we haven't heard from him since there was a coup several years ago in which

MBS came to power. Media reports suggest at least 20 princes, officials, and army officers have been arrested in the kingdom's latest purge. They include former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. I mean, this is really unprecedented stuff. And what's so surprising to me is, look, the U.S., we sanction Russian oligarchs. We sanction all sorts of people that cross U.S. policy. But we have yet to directly sanction MBS, even though we know all this is happening. And quite the opposite, you know, President Biden is off to go meet with him.

I really feel like the question is, what's best for U.S. interests? What's best for human rights? What's best for global security? And it's not clear that doubling down on a relationship with a leader like MBS is good for the short, medium or long term goals of this country. It may be good, for example, for Israel's security. And there's a lot of prioritization on the U.S. side of bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia closer. I think countering Iran is a huge priority. And as I said, you know, Russia is now this global boogeyman. China is the Cold War of the future, or maybe the present. And all this requires partnerships with countries that are somewhat unsavory, like Saudi Arabia. But by bringing Biden closer to the personage of MBS, it's not the about face that's so bad. It's MBS himself that really poses a huge, huge threat to global stability. Thank you. pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. So earlier I said that most Americans are interested in Saudi Arabia for one reason, gas prices. But there is another group of Americans who are fixated on the kingdom. Brett Eagleson is one of them. I lost my father in 9-11 when I was 15 years old. He was just a great human being.

He was a great leader, had an amazing sense of humor. I don't think I ever met anyone that didn't like him. And, you know, he died a hero that day. He did. He'd gone back upstairs in the South Tower to get a box of radios that he thought might help the fire department. He never made it out.

When news broke that 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were Saudi, it didn't quite register in Brett's teenage mind. For the initial years after 9-11, you know, I was focused on doing everything that a normal kid should be doing. I was in high school more concerned about putting one foot in front of the other and studying hard so I can get into a college and all the things that a teenage boy would be interested in, sports, friends, girls, family. So I sort of tried to block out as much as I could about 9-11 and just sort of try to keep with the family and keep distracted and just put my head down and finish high school. While he was trying to finish high school, other families of 9-11 victims started the process to take legal action against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in federal court. They alleged those 15 hijackers weren't just random Saudi citizens, but that the Saudi

government had helped facilitate the attack. Brett grew up. It wasn't until then that I really started to look back on what did happen that day and what do we know and what does our government know. I think I always had questions about how 19 individuals with no knowledge of English, no money, no flood experience, how 19 of these people could have banded together and pulled off the most devastating and consequential attack in the U.S. history. How did that happen without any help from anyone? Two investigations were going on separately. The FBI was conducting a rather secretive investigation into the Saudi government's role, and the legal teams representing the 9-11 victims' families were also investigating. They planned to sue Saudi Arabia. But because they were civilians, they had to rely on what information was public. At the time, there were documents that were publicly available still. I mean, I'll even source right to the 9-11 Commission report where they say that they

found significant evidence that Saudi Arabia was sponsoring this sort of radical form of Islam called Wahhabism all over the world. There were a lot of mentions of Saudi Arabia within the 9-11 Commission report. So they say all the evidence that they have, they say everything that they find, but they didn't go far enough and say that the institution of Saudi Arabia sponsored 9-11. So the starting point was from the publicly sourced and the publicly available information

that was produced through the 9-11 Commission report. The families reach a conclusion. The Saudi government was definitely involved. They've done their own research. Similarly, the FBI reaches a conclusion. The Saudi government was involved. And at that point, your recourse is to sue the government of Saudi Arabia.

But U.S. law doesn't allow you to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. But U.S. law doesn't allow you to sue the government of Saudi Arabia because of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. This is a law that says, basically, you can't sue most countries except if a country is on the state sponsors of terrorism list, and Saudi Arabia is not. So then the only thing you can do, I assume, is get that law changed. We had to pass a law called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Congress has done something today that they have never done to you before.

You vetoed a bill that would have allowed 9-11 families to sue Saudi Arabia. They today overrode your veto that That has never happened to you before. Your reaction? I think it was a mistake. And what that law did is it created a loophole in the existing law. What we're saying is that no matter where the attack is planned, whether it's planned from overseas or the plan here in the United States, that a lawsuit can be brought.

It would allow you to bring a lawsuit against a country that is not on the state sponsors of terrorism list, but you have credible evidence that that foreign sovereign killed or harmed Americans on American soil. With the law now changed, the families filed suit in 2017 in federal court in the Southern District of New York? But Brett and the other 9-11 families knew that they'd need access to the FBI's investigation to win their lawsuit. We had seen redacted versions of FBI reports. We had former FBI agents give us sworn affidavits that we were able to use publicly. We had a whole host of stuff, but we didn't, at the time, we didn't think we had enough.

They subpoenaed the U.S. government for those files, and they won. But it took years and three U.S. presidential administrations. We reached out to then-candidate Biden during his campaign trail, and we asked if he would help us, and we presented our case to some of his officials. Biden responded with a letter written to the 9-11 family members saying that if he were elected president, he would instruct his attorney general to bring us peace and bring us closure and, to the greatest extent possible, declassify once and for all, all the government's investigative files on 9-11. So he gave us that campaign promise, which we were elated to have, and we all became Biden fans overnight because of that. And the family sort of gave him the benefit of the doubt. We wanted to give him some time to get into office. He had a whole host of problems going on

at that point. It wasn't until about August of that year that we found out that President Biden was going to be making an appearance at Ground Zero to honor and mark the 20th year anniversary of 9-11. We had this idea. First responders, survivors and the families of 9-11 victims are telling the president of the United States to stay away from next month's 20-year memorial events unless he fulfills a promise. And we were not going to let another anniversary go by with politicians saying how much 9-11 means to them and how they grieve with us and how they should never forget and how important this day is, knowing that behind closed doors, they're blocking justice to the families.

They're not doing what the families want. They're demanding that President Biden declassify evidence that they believe may show a link of the terror attacks and the Saudi Arabian government. So that certainly got the attention of the White House and the attention of the president. And a few days before 9-11, the president issued an executive order saying that he was directing the DOJ and the FBI and the CIA to do a declassification review of all the documents that had been produced by these government agencies and entities. And that the goal was to declassify and give to the 9-11 families and give to the public, to the greatest extent possible, the most amount of documents that they were able to share with us.

We got our first document on September 11th, and it was a document that said, I'll paraphrase it a little bit, but it was an FBI document. It's called the 2016 Operation Encore Review Report. It's an analytical level document. And for those that are not in the intel world, what that kind of means is that it's signed off by multiple layers and multiple levels. So when you have a document that's called a summary document or an update to an investigation, the FBI concludes that as true. Brett, you and the other families, what is the status of your lawsuit now? What are you suing for? And when should our listeners expect to see this go to court? How will this work? We just concluded discovery. We finished up our expert depositions, our expert reports.

We have presented that all to the judge. We suspect that the Saudis are going to try to wiggle their way again out of the lawsuit, but it would just be incredible after everything that we've produced and after all the FBI documents that we have, it would be incredible if a judge were to allow them to dismiss their case. So we suspect that in the next couple of months, we'll start having some pretrial motions, and we think that we'll be in court early part of next year. What is one concrete thing that you want to come out of this so that 10 years down the line, you can say, I am satisfied. This is what I wanted. It is enough. I want the record to be rewritten. You know, when I think about my daughter,

she's two years old, and I have a son now that's three months old. When they learn about 9-11 in school, I want the Saudi role to be front and center. And I'll be satisfied when the story or the narrative is changed from the fact that 19 hijackers with no knowledge of how to fly a plane were directed by Osama bin Laden from a cave 5,000 miles away were able to pull off the most devastating attack in American history. I'll be satisfied when that's rewritten to say that the hijackers, the 19 hijackers, had support from a Saudi support network here in the United States, which is what allowed them to be successful. President Biden needs to remember his campaign promises made to us. And I understand that the president needs to go to Saudi Arabia. I don't think we're mad at that point, right? We know that he has to go there.

There are a whole host of things he needs to address. The carpet bombing of Yemen is one of them. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is another. The potential to bring peace between Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia, these are all huge, huge issues. We have gas at $5 a gallon in some parts of this country. President Biden is the head of state. He is supposed to go there. In fact, you know, I encourage him to go there. But at the same time, when you do go there, Mr. President, you need to think about the 9-11 families and you need to think about the evidence that your own FBI has produced to you per your executive order that says 21 years ago,

there were bad people within that government that led to 9-11. Today's show was produced by John Ahrens and Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checking on this one was a group effort, Get Well Soon, Laura. It was engineered by Paul Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.