AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. On Friday, memorials were held to mark 25 years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93 which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.

In New York at a ceremony at ground zero, family members of the victims read the names of those killed. During the ceremony, one widow, Terry Strada, accused U.S. officials of concealing the role of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Terry Strada’s husband Tom Strada worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower. In a moment, Terry Strada will join us live, but first let’s turn to her remarks on Friday.

TERRY STRADA: And my husband Tom Strada, you are missed more with each year that passes, but how can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder? Yes, we finally made it into a court and have proved that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism around the globe and then sent its agents to support the radical Islamic hijackers so they could attack you and all of our loved ones. But for 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families. They withheld evidence. They vetoed JASTA. They broke promises both public and private. It has been one betrayal after another. President Trump can still change that. Tell the Saudis to stop lying. Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this—all of the pain, all of the destruction—that we have all been suffering through. Vice President Vance, thank you for being here today. Please carry that message back. Stand with the families. Stand with the survivors. Stand with Americans. As my husband Tom would have said, that is always the right thing to do. God bless all of us. God bless America.

AMY GOODMAN: The words of 9/11 widow Terry Strada speaking Friday at a ceremony in New York marking 25 years since the attack on the World Trade Center. During the ceremony, a man who identified himself as the nephew of 9/11 victim Lisa Marie Terry also mentioned the Saudi connection.

NEPHEW OF LISA MARIE TERRY: —aunt, Lisa Marie Terry. For 25 years, the deep state has hidden the truth about what happened that day 25 years ago. President Trump, you are our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it.

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined now by Terry Strada. Her husband Tom died in the World Trade Center attack. She is the national chair of 9/11 Families United and is also part of a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia. Terry, thanks so much for being with us. And even 25 years later, our condolences on the death of your husband and so many others.

TERRY STRADA: Thank you, I appreciate that. And thank you for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t we start off by talking about your call on Friday—and it was quite unusual for—while people were naming those who died 25 years ago—demanding that—calling out Trump and Vice President Vance and demanding that the Trump administration recognize Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks. What do you want recognized?

TERRY STRADA: I want the truth to be recognized. We have already taken an abundance of evidence into a courtroom. A federal judge has ruled in our favor that the evidence is credible and that we can go to trial with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I really wasn’t calling out President Trump; I was calling on him to help us. I was calling out the Bush administration, the Obama administration and the Biden administration for withholding evidence, for breaking promises to us. They are the ones that began the decades-long cover-up of the role that the kingdom played and they are the ones that have harmed the families all these years.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the lawsuit, who brought it and what it is calling for?

TERRY STRADA: The families brought the lawsuit on in 2002. That is when we filed a lawsuit against Saudi officials, Saudi state-run banks, state-run charities. Over time, through discovery, the evidence all pointed back to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—the _kingdom_—for the role that they played, that their agents were directly involved with providing the support network that was needed here in the United States for Al Qaeda to carry out the treacherous attacks of September 11. So we are holding the kingdom accountable for attacking America. And because that evidence has now been in a courtroom, it is the president—current President Trump’s—responsibility to tell the kingdom that the evidence points directly at them and that they can no longer hide and that they need to confront the evidence and work things out with the families. Enough is enough.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to an interview we did 15 years ago. In 2011, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham appeared on Democracy Now! He served as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and headed the congressional joint inquiry into the deadly hijackings. At the time of the 2011 interview, Senator Graham was calling on President Obama to reopen the investigation into the September 11 attacks.

BOB GRAHAM: The FBI, although they were asked to provide the congressional inquiry all the information they had about 9/11, did not tell us about these extensive contacts in San Diego. It was because we had a very curious and effective investigative team which went to San Diego and was able to uncover the relationship between, particularly, a key Saudi agent living in San Diego and the first two hijackers to have entered the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Senator Graham, about the 9/11 Commission and the suppressed pages of that commission, what you believe is in them, and if it links to the Saudi royal family?

BOB GRAHAM: The suppressed pages were in the congressional joint inquiry. We worked diligently throughout 2002 to gather as much of the information as we could and to make recommendations. We had an 800-plus-page report, one chapter of which—which related primarily to the role of the Saudis in 9/11—was totally censored. Every word of that chapter has been denied to the American people. One of the reasons that I wrote a novel Keys to the Kingdom was because I felt that that was a means of beginning to tell the American people some of the things which they have not been able to be told because of the degree of cover-up that has surrounded the Saudi activities in the United States prior to 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Florida senator Bob Graham speaking on Democracy Now! 15 years ago. He died in 2024. Ten years ago, in 2016, the Obama administration declassified the 28 pages of the 9/11 report examining the Saudi role. He was the Florida senator. You are in Jupiter, Florida, Terry Strada. Can you talk about what you have learned since and more about what was in those documents?

TERRY STRADA: Right. I worked alongside former Senator Bob Graham to ensure that those 28 pages were declassified. But when President Obama declassified them, he still withheld about three pages worth of the most critical information that we needed. So while it was a good thing, it wasn’t everything. And what he held back was to protect the Saudis. This has been the pattern of every administration. But before we get to what the 28 pages revealed—under the Bush administration, Director Mueller, FBI, withheld the most damning evidence that the agents of the kingdom were directly involved in the September 11 attacks. He withheld it from the San Diego field office that was investigating Omar al-Bayoumi and the connection to the Saudis. They also withheld it from the 9/11 Commission. So the 9/11 Commission had a report from the joint inquiry with an entire chapter excised, and then they had the 9/11 Commission and the FBI did not give them the evidence.

That evidence now has been uncovered. We had to go to the Metropolitan Police services in London because that is where all of this evidence was confiscated 10 days after September 11. And sadly and unfortunately and really cruelly, they withheld it for 20 years. It wasn’t until our lawsuit pried it open through discovery. So that’s the problem that we had with the Bush administration.

The Obama administration gave us the 16 pages—or, gave us the 28 pages—still redacted. But the most egregious thing under that administration was when Secretary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, she worked with the Supreme—or, I’m sorry—she worked and denied our lawsuit being heard by the Supreme Court. She made every effort she could to block that and she was successful. That’s another harmful thing to the community. Then President Obama vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. We worked on that bill for seven years. The purpose of that bill was so that the victims could walk into a courtroom and show our evidence. We’ve always wanted to be heard on the merits. President Obama didn’t think that was a good thing, however Congress came back and overwhelmingly overrode his veto.

So we have just had these blocks, these hurdles, these damaging decisions made by those administrations. That’s why I said what I said on Friday morning. Because they were all there. It was the perfect opportunity to look at all of them and say, “What you did was wrong, but we have managed to get it into a courtroom anyway, and now we need President Trump to act on it.”

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the four living presidents all before you as you made that comment.

TERRY STRADA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So this is clearly a bipartisan affair. I want you to stay on with us as we talk to the ProPublica reporter Tim Golden, but I wanted to finally ask you, why do you think the U.S. has protected Saudi Arabia all these years?

TERRY STRADA: They have just chosen the Saudi-U.S. relationship over the 9/11 community and over the American public. They have just chosen over and over again to protect it rather than let the truth be told, rather than deal with it. They’ve all—I don’t know the reasons—they don’t—they’ve never, ever given an opportunity to sit down and talk to any of us. I mean, we tried so hard with President Obama when he was going to veto the bill. He would not even speak to a member of Congress. He wouldn’t speak to a senator. He wouldn’t speak to someone in the House of Representatives. He ignored everyone and just went ahead and vetoed the bill. So, why they do it? That’s a good question that the media really should be asking them now and really should be asking hard questions of President Trump. And now that the evidence is in a courtroom and a federal judge has ruled in our favor, what does he plan to do? That’s the question. What is the U.S. government, what are our policymakers going to do, now that the truth is exposed?

AMY GOODMAN: Terry Strada lost her husband Tom Strada on 9/11. He worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. My high school classmate, Chris Quackenbush, also worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and died on that day along with so many others.