Even five months later, the events of Sept. 11 are still a major topic for discussion. This is particularly so in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which has jumped to prominence for being home to 15 of the 19 hijackers. The Arabs in general — and especially the Saudis — believed initially that the 15 were not Saudi; it was theorized that they had stolen Saudi passports or that the US authorities were mistaken in identifying the 15 as Saudis. The recent statement by Interior Minster Prince Naif to the Associated Press, however, has put an end to all speculations. Prince Naif made it clear that all the 15 suspects were indeed Saudis and that their relatives had been so informed. The Saudi people’s rejection of, and refusal to believe in, the involvement of their compatriots in the criminal acts in the United States grew undoubtedly from a conviction that Saudis, even the smallest number, would never commit crimes of so great a magnitude. The denial by the Saudi people was based on the hope that all the reports were mistaken.
That has all changed now as the relatives have been informed and the police are convinced of the accuracy of the names and the other information. The period of doubt has ended. Those who dispute the identities of the suspects should accept the official statement and stop their baseless speculating.
There is a vast difference between information and opinion. People may differ in identifying the causes, justifications, relevant details and accuracy of information but under no circumstances should they invent new stories about the attacks. The information collected by the US authorities is the result of painstaking investigations conducted by hundreds of experts on the identities, areas of origin and antecedents of each involved individual. Their business transactions, the courses they attended and the trips they took for several years have all been laboriously recreated by those experts in the US.
A number of Western media personnel have been in the Kingdom since the media uproar about the Kingdom began. It is good that the Kingdom’s doors have been thrown open for the skeptical foreign media people to see and write about what is happening in the Kingdom instead of writing what they imagine about some distant place with which they are unfamiliar and uninformed.
I told one of the visiting Western journalists that our doubts about the accuracy of the terrorists’ identity was in fact a positive thing. What I meant was that the disbelief reflected the strong disapproval by the Saudi public of the criminal acts. Saudis wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from the acts and those who committed them. After all, such acts were foreign to their religion and all their traditions. This was the root cause of the early denial.
Now the situation has changed and we are no longer free to doubt their involvement if, as has been shown, they were indeed guilty of the attacks. We cannot live in denial. Of course we cannot force anyone to believe what he refuses to believe. In the US there are people who insist that the singer, Elvis Presley, is still alive though he died and was buried 35 years ago. They believe that reports about his death are lies spread by some interested parties.
However, reasonable people, particularly those working in the media, should accept the officially acknowledged facts. They should not deny facts because putting negative things right is possible only if the negative things are acknowledged. And acknowledging them may involve admitting that what we wish were true is in fact not true.
