Debate comes to LIV tournament at Trump course

Nearly 50 miles of worn highways, rusting bridges, crowded urban neighborhoods, peaceful woodlands and quiet horse farms separates the 16-acre Manhattan postage stamp of terrorism known as Ground Zero from the sprawling 520-acre golf course in New Jersey owned by former President Donald Trump.

But in the coming days, those pieces of landscape are likely to be joined together in a deeply emotional debate over America’s deadliest terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Trump has rented out his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for another leg in the LIV Golf series, which is financed in part by $2 billion from a special so-called wealth fund controlled by the Saudi Arabian government with reported payouts to some top players of up to $150 million and undisclosed millions for Trump.

This big-money tournament, scheduled for July 29 to 31 at the Trump National Golf Club, comes amid a steady torrent of newly declassified FBI reports, showing that a dozen or more Saudi officials — including one member of the Saudi royal family — provided logistical help to 19 radicalized Islamists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.

The fact that a former president is hosting the tournament — and stands to profit from it — has reopened deep wounds among many relatives and friends of 9/11 victims.

“We’ve had to grow a tough skin over the last 20 years, but this is cruel and callous,” said Dennis McGinley of Haworth, New Jersey, 56, a financial adviser who lost his brother Daniel, of Ridgewood, New Jersey, in the rubble of New York’s World Trade Center that came to be known as “Ground Zero.”

“Forget that it’s unpresidential,” McGinley said of Trump. “It’s so hurtful to the 9/11 community.”

McGinley’s brother Marty, 60, of Westwood, New Jersey, also a financial adviser, agreed. “We’ve taken so many punches in the gut,” he said. “But, my God, I can’t imagine this happening.”

Backlash and optics crisis for Trump

Already, the so-called “9/11 community,” the loose-knit but remarkably loyal group of thousands of victims’ relatives, survivors and advocates, is planning at least two press conferences in the days leading up to the golf tournament in Bedminster. Other plans under discussion by the group involve lining roads with placard-carrying protesters, buying space on highway billboards and showing up at hotels where golfers may be staying.

For Trump, the optics of any kind of protest near his golf course would be yet another blow to his efforts to rehabilitate his political career and reestablish himself as a major promoter of golf and respectable business figure.

Trump’s Bedminster club, regarded as one of the top golf courses in America, had been selected to host the PGA Tournament this year. But the PGA switched to another course after Trump made bigoted remarks during his first presidential campaign in 2016 and after evidence emerged that he incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Earlier:Mike Kelly As questions on Saudi links to 9/11 swirl, why is Trump hosting LIV Golf tournament?

Mike Kelly:The FBI begins to open its files on Saudi links to 9/11. What do they show?

Trump reportedly welcomed the LIV Golf series this year, viewing it as a way to exact revenge against the PGA. That strategy may now backfire — not just for Trump but for the LIV Golf series, which was viewed as an effort by Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its own image in America.

An email and a phone call requesting comment from Trump were never answered. The chief lawyer representing Saudi Arabia against allegations of its reported links to the 9/11 attacks also did not respond to a phone call requesting comment.

The story of how a small but influential cadre of Saudi officials supported a ragtag band of operatives from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network in 2001 has quickly become one of the most diplomatically delicate and anger-inducing pieces of the 9/11 narrative.

That the story now circles back to Trump, who openly talks of running again for president while also relying on the Saudi-sponsored LIV Golf series for some much-needed profits for his struggling golf empire, has fueled an already explosive series of events. The Saudi government’s wealth fund also invested $2 billion in a company started by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

‘Blood money’ amid aspirations to return to power

After hiding out for months in North Jersey, Southern California, Virginia and Florida — and setting up bank accounts and gym memberships and taking flying lessons — the 9/11 plotters hijacked four commercial jetliners on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a suicide-murder pact, fueled by what is viewed as a warped interpretation of Islamic theology, the hijackers crashed two jetliners into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon in Northern Virginia and a fourth into a farm field in Pennsylvania. The seven-story rubble pile at the site of the trade center became known as Ground Zero.

Nearly 3,000 people perished in the attacks.  And more than 700 of those who died resided in New Jersey, including in the wealthy towns around Bedminster that were home to many in the financial industry who worked in the trade center. 

Brett Eagleson, of Middletown, Connecticut, who lost his father, Bruce, in the collapse of the trade center in Manhattan, called the decision to hold the tournament in New Jersey “insane.”

“The fact that Saudi Arabia would have the audacity to host a golf tournament in the backyards of 700 people who were murdered in New Jersey is wrong,” Eagleson said.

Jim Riches, a retired New York City deputy fire chief who sifted through the crumpled steel and pulverized concrete for months at Ground Zero before finding the body of his firefighter son, Jimmy, said any golfer who plays at the LIV tournament on Trump’s course is accepting “blood money.”

“Three thousand people died,” Riches said. “And these people ignore that so they can get $1 million?”

“There are no words to describe how wrong this is,” said Mark Rossini, a retired FBI agent assigned to the CIA group in 2001 that tracked the 9/11 terrorists. “The fact that it is all about money shows what kind of society we are.”

Terry Strada, who lost her husband at the trade center and gave birth to her youngest son, Justin, only four days before the attacks, knows Trump’s course in Bedminster all too well. She lived only minutes away in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, until moving to Florida last year.

Strada’s deceased husband, Tom, a Cantor Fitzgerald executive and accomplished golfer who considered turning professional before embarking on a career in finance, played Trump’s course. So did Strada. And when son Justin survived brain cancer as an adolescent, Strada held a fundraiser for cancer research at Trump’s club that raised $50,000.

“President Trump should know better than anyone how corrupt the Saudi kingdom is and their history with terrorism financing and their culpability in the 9/11 attacks,” said Strada, who now chairs the advocacy group, 9/11 Families and Survivors United. “For Trump to host this tournament shows his level of ignorance on the importance of holding the kingdom accountable for the support network they put in place to carry out the attacks. His lack of empathy towards the victims’ families and survivors is striking. It’s not only painful. It’s insulting.”

Trump finds an unlikely defender

If Trump has an unlikely defender of sorts now, it might be Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor who went on to chair the 9/11 Commission.

Kean, a Republican who openly broke with Trump and refused to vote for him during his presidential campaigns, reiterated in an interview this week his long-standing belief that evidence of Saudi government links to the 9/11 attacks are not as conclusive as many 9/11 victims’ relatives believe. But Kean is miffed that Trump is hosting the Saudi-sponsored golf tournament so close to New York City and Ground Zero — and only a 10-minute drive from Kean’s home in Far Hills, New Jersey.

“I don’t think there is a lot of morality in sports,” Kean said. “As far as the former president goes, I don’t support him much. The Saudis have a horrible human rights record.  On that basis alone, he shouldn’t be dealing with the Saudis.”

Exclusive from Mike Kelly:Tom Kean calls on Biden to release all secret files on possible Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks

For years, the rumors of Saudi links to the 9/11 attacks were mainly discussion points among a select group of terrorism experts, journalists and a hardy band of 9/11 survivors and relatives of victims who filed a federal lawsuit in New York accusing the kingdom of playing a role in the attacks. 

Facts were scarce. Congressional investigators and the 9/11 Commission found enticing but mainly circumstantial evidence of Saudi involvement in the attacks.

Meanwhile, the FBI and the CIA had put a lid on its investigative reports, claiming that national security would be violated if its investigation of Saudi Arabia was made public. As a result, firm conclusions were difficult to reach, especially considering that the Saudis were considered the Muslim world’s most stable and loyal U.S. ally.

Could the tournament spur change?

For two decades, the questions of Saudi Arabia’s link to 9/11 seemed trapped in political amber, never gaining much traction.     

Now 9/11 victims’ relatives and survivors — and their advocates — hope that will change.

Recent FBI documents show that two key members of the 9/11 terrorist team were greeted after arriving by plane in Los Angeles by two officials with links to Saudi intelligence services and the Saudi government agency that promotes a fundamentalist form of Islam that lined up with bin Laden’s theology. The two terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, barely spoke English and certainly did not know how to navigate American life.

But they nevertheless were able to find apartments, open bank accounts, rent cars, make phone calls and eventually make their way to North Jersey, where nine other members of the terrorist plot eventually showed up — all of them hiding in apartments and cheap motels in Paterson, Wayne or Little Ferry for varying lengths of time before Sept. 11, 2001.

Many 9/11 victims’ relatives and others had long suspected that the terrorists were helped in some way, either by unwitting locals or by a far more sophisticated network. How else would they find places to live? Or know how to rent postal boxes?

But evidence was sketchy — until last September, when President Joe Biden, under pressure from victims’ families who warned the president they would protest his appearance at the annual 9/11 ceremonies in New York, ordered the release of thousands of pages of previously secret FBI documents.

Besides the pair of Saudi officials in Los Angeles, the documents offered evidence linking the 9/11 plotters to several officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., including Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, the longtime ambassador to the United States and a confidant to President George W. Bush.

Complicating matters even more this month, Biden embarked this week on a trip to the Middle East that reportedly includes a meeting with Saudi officials. The trip is meant to show Biden as a diplomat, trying to forge a more secure peace in the Middle East between Israel, Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region, and to increase oil production and lower gasoline prices in the U.S. in the months before the congressional midterm elections this November.

Also lurking behind the diplomatic curtains are increasing questions about the Saudi links to 9/11 and the brutal 2019 murder in Turkey of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist.

Khashoggi lived in Northern Virginia and, as this columnist reported, had met with an investigator representing lawyers for 9/11 victims and their relatives in their massive federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.

While U.S. intelligence officials have linked Saudi Arabia to Khashoggi’s murder, the issue has never been completely addressed by Biden — or Trump.

This month, however, that issue — and the question of Saudi involvement in 9/11 —will be part of the chatter at Trump’s Bedminster golf club.

The golfers seem to want to avoid the issues. So does Trump — and even Biden. 

But the victims of 9/11 and their relatives won’t let them — especially Terrease Aiken.

Aiken, now 29 and an actress and filmmaker living in Dutchess County, New York, was only 8 when her father, Terrance, died during his first week on a job in an office at the trade center.

Aiken wants Trump to remember that. But she doubts he will.

“At the end of the day,” Aiken said, “this golf tournament shows that Trump clearly values his business relationships over his country.”

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com as well as the author of three critically acclaimed non-fiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com