On March 28, a New York federal judge issued a major ruling helping to hold Saudi Arabian defendants accountable for the 9/11 terror attacks. The pre-trial ruling on behalf of family members of 9/11 victims largely reversed a previous ruling granting defendants sovereign immunity. Also, the ruling thwarted the Saudi government, whose Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited U. S. power brokers the past week to discuss major arms and oil deals and strategic interests.

The victory for 9/11 family members stemmed from their determination with the support of grassroots truth-seekers and several bold congressional leaders who ultimately won majorities for a recent law, JASTA. Several of these figures are shown in the adjoining photo during at 2016 press conference on Capitol Hill. They include 9/11 widow Terri Strada (national chair for 9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, her daughter Kaitlyn and the three main congressional supporters of the families in their fight for the legal right to obtain suppressed records implicating Saudis. MSNBC interviewed Terry Strada March 30 in the segment: Judge Allows Suit Alleging Saudi Arabia Financed 9/11 Attacks To Move Forward.

The guest column below is by a grassroots supporter of the families and full disclosure, Les Jamieson, a founder of the website HR 14 that advocated for years for release of a suppressed "28-page" segment of the 2002 9/11 report from the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

This column, which originally appeared at the 9/11 Truth Action Project site, is part of ongoing coverage by the Justice Integrity Project. An appendix below provides links to recent and background materials.  

By Les Jamieson

Since 2002, the 9/11 families have been litigating against Saudi Arabia and related entities whom they've charged with responsibility in the 9/11 attacks, according to Jersey widow, Lori Van Auken.

For years, the complex case has dealt with major setbacks, mainly due to rulings that went along with the Saudi defense team's claims that the plaintiffs had insufficient evidence and that Saudi Arabia was protected by sovereign immunity.

Declassification of the 28 pages on July 15, 2016 and passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) that September changed everything. A convergence of events leading to the 15th anniversary of the attacks brought momentum that even the power of the security state could not withstand.

Within a month after passage of JASTA, families filed an amended complaint that reinstated Saudi Arabia, plus two additional family lawsuits. Then an appeal by the plaintiffs in response to release of Saudi Arabia was won. However, the Saudi defense team moved for dismissal again. These events culminated in a hearing in January.

On Wednesday, March 28, Judge Daniels, who had previously released the Saudi's from the lawsuit, has denied their motion to dismiss and ruled in favor of the 9/11 families.

The tide has turned. The suit against Saudi Arabia can finally move forward to the discovery stage, which is what they sought to avoid at all costs. Now a family of oil billionaires and their official entities with the power to affect the global economy and balance of power in the Middle East, will be held to account.

Aerial photo by Digital Globe showing at center about half of the gun control protesters from Third to Sixth Streets on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, DC, with the main sound stage shown as a white rectangle on the Avenue at photo's bottom center near Third Street.

Led by schoolmates of shooting victims, hundreds of thousands of gun protesters packed Pennsylvania Avenue facing the Capitol Building in downtown Washington, DC March 24 during the March for Our Lives, a powerful, well-planned and otherwise impressive challenge to the nation’s political establishment.

Extensive news coverage (excerpted in an appendix below) showed how huge attendance, enthusiasm and eloquent speakers created strong momentum for gun control and other political activism.

This commentator will leave those overviews to others, aside from the excerpts below.

My focus will be to draw on experience organizing many annual trade association conventions and other events, including some in the nation’s capital, to focus more narrowly on the exceptional logistics that contributed to the march’s success.

I observed a number of these factors also as a participant. My office at Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue NW was almost at the center of the parade route. I had planned merely sample the street scene, much like almost innumerable other parades and protests on that route (including the presidential Inaugural every four years).

But by the end, I found myself inspired to retrieve a discarded sign from a sidewalk near the Trump International Hotel at 11th Street and talk to passersby for more than two hours about the relevant issues, as indicated at right.

The sign that I was holding at left says "When the kids act like leaders and the leaders act like kids, you know change is coming."

Most striking on the scene was the eloquence of the event speakers and the enthusiasm of the large crowd. Not every advocate in life is going to be a strong public speaker. But these young speakers were either exceptionally inspired to rise to the occasion or somehow vetted in advance by the organizers.

Even more remarkable for a civic gathering, the talks were brief and the overall program actually ended about five minutes earlier than the scheduled end at 3 p.m. (following a noon start). 

Nearly a score of conference speakers last weekend presented powerful evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and to maintain a cover-up that exists to the present.

Speakers documented again and again how a massive cover-up that began immediately after the president’s death has continued despite a unanimous congressional vote in 1992 on the so-called “JFK Act” that required release of all relevant documents by a deadline of last October.

Co-keynoter Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., drew on six decades of medical training and practice to denounce yet again what he described as scientifically impossible official findings of the 1964 Warren Commission.

The Commission and its supporters claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin who killed Kennedy by firing three shots from the sixth floor of an office building located behind the president during a motorcade through downtown Dallas.

Wecht, an eminent forensic pathologist, medical school professor, author and former coroner portrayed above right in a file photo by Noel St. John at the National Press Club, showed that extensive scientific evidence as well as common sense indicate that Oswald (shown in a passport photo below left) could not have fired the fatal shot and wounding Texas Gov. John Connolly in several places with the same bullet — and so there must have been a conspiracy.

“What the hell is the problem?” Wecht said of efforts by the CIA and other federal officials to suppress in violation of the 1992 law relevant witness, medical and other records. “Just put the goddamn stuff out there!”

Concurring in that view was co-keynoter Roger Stone, the noted political operative and best-selling author of a book arguing that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the murder and a cover-up.

Joseph Siegelman, son of a former Alabama governor convicted in one of the nation's most notorious political prosecutions in recent American history, last week announced his candidacy to become their state's next attorney general.

The young Democratic attorney faces many obstacles in the deep Red state before emulating his father — former Gov. Don Siegelman, now 71 and recovering from emergency open heart surgery Feb. 9 — in winning their state's top elective law enforcement post. The elder Siegelman, shown at right with his son, was Alabama attorney general for a term in the late 1980s before election as lieutenant governor for two terms.

Don Siegelman won election as governor in 1998, serving a term from 1999 to 2003 while undergoing non-stop attack from Republican prosecutors beginning with his first months in office. His conviction and imprisonment on what independent investigators but not courts have shown to have been trumped up corruption charges resulted in his imprisonment and the devastation of the Alabama Democratic Party. Among other results , the prosecution thwarted both his re-election and plan to run for the presidency.

His son, managing partner of a Cochran Law Firm office in Birminghan, faces a long shot but highly dramatic and nationally important race to overcome a Democratic opponent in a June primary and, in November, the winner of a four-person Republican primary.

Although Joseph Siegelman will doubtless continue to frame his race in terms of justice for all Alabamians his father's conviction is known to virtually every voter. It is not just an implicit part of the current candidacy but will surely weigh on the minds of voters. 

Commentators will note, as here, that political figures from the long-running prosecution are still part of Alabama's landscape on both Republican and Democratic sides of the attorney general race. 

That's most visible in the GOP candidacy of Alice Martin (shown at right), one of the elder Siegelman's prosecutors when she was the presidentially appointed Bush Administration U.S. attorney for Alabama's Birmingham district and prosecutor of Siegelman on corruption charges that were dropped in 2004 after Chief U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon repeatedly disallowed prosecution tactics.

But there's more, much more, to the upcoming race, including divisions among Democrats and Alabama's ongoing massive problems with public corruption.

The latter were underscored most recently by a three-month jail sentence on Feb. 15 for former House Majority Leader Micky Hammon, prompting legal blogger Roger Shuler aptly to opine: Ex-Alabama Rep. Micky Hammon gets three months in prison for essentially stealing more than $50,000, showing our justice system is hopelessly broken.

By Wayne Madsen and Andrew Kreig

New information has emerged in the joint Wayne Madsen Report/Justice Integrity Project investigation of the "Maria" case. Maria was temporarily held for ransom in 1993, according to witnesses speaking to police.

As we previously reported, Katie Johnson alleged in federal lawsuits that Donald Trump and his friend, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, raped her when she was 13  in New York City in 1994. Johnson's alleged also that the two men raped a 12-year old — only identified as "Maria." Our investigation discovered that Maria had been abducted from Waterbury, Connecticut in March 1993 when she was 11.

Eventually, Maria ended up at "parties" at a midtown Manhattan townhouse owned by Epstein's billionaire friend Les Wexner where underage girls were allegedly sexually assaulted by Trump and Epstein.

We previously reported (including via the graphic at right showing the mansion and file photos of Trump and Epstein) that Maria's kidnappers were involved in a child trafficking ring that provided abductees to wealthy individuals like Trump and Epstein. Lawyers for Trump and Epstein have sought to deny or otherwise downplay the claims.

Our new information is that Maria was reported missing by her late mother to the Waterbury Police on March 20, 1993, at 11:30 pm. However, Maria was actually abducted the previous day, March 19, authorities said, creating a gap betweenthe kidnap and the mother's report of it to authorities.

Update: The New Yorker, Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity, Ronan Farrow, Feb. 16, 2018. One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.

Maria was last seen on March 19 by a young girl in the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. The girl said she saw Maria talking to a man who turned out to be a Colombian national known by the nickname of "Papito," which means "little daddy" in English. Later, the man claimed that he once lived in Maria's neighborhood but he was not in Waterbury at the time of the alleged conversation with Maria but was in New York "with his family."

The Waterbury Police Department missing person report states that Maria was last seen outside of Nash's Pizza, a corner eatery located in the neighborhood where she lived with her mother and step-father.

By Andrew Kreig and Wayne Madsen

Recent claims that Donald Trump paid hush money before the 2016 election to porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up a 2006 affair underscore far more sinister events.

Such a payoff would show not simply Trump’s low morals and high arrogance — but also his propensity for outright crime in ways potentially damaging to the United States and many of its residents.

These grim possibilities are especially relevant to our recent exposé “Welcome to Waterbury,” which drew on 2016 lawsuit allegations that Trump and his billionaire friend Jeffrey Epstein in 1994 raped “Maria,” age 12, and “Jane Doe,” age 13, also known as Katie Johnson, in a New York City luxury townhouse then being used by Epstein. Details are here in the Wayne Madsen Report and the Justice Integrity Project (JIP).

Today, we compare those claims by underage girls with the ones by Stormy Daniels, as reported by, among other places, In Touch magazine in column last week.

The In Touch cover story, illustated at left, was based on her blunt recollections of sleeping with Trump and otherwise socializing with him shortly after his wife Melania gave birth to son Barron in March 2006, according to the Daniels account years ago. In Touch did not publish it at the time but did so this month to follow up the Wall Street Journal’s report on Jan. 12 that Daniels received $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election from Trump attorney Michael Cohen via a company temporarily created to make the payment, thus obscuring its origin and purpose.

Cohen and Daniels (born Stephanie Clifford) later denied an affair or hush money. More generally, Trump and his representatives have issued blanket denials against all of those nearly 20 women who have alleged sexual harassment or assault. The many news reports of such accusations and denials include Donald Trump says women who accuse him of sexual assault are lying and The 19 Women Who Accused President Trump of Sexual Misconduct. 

To explore this further, we examine more closely the Daniels and Maria/Jane Doe stories. An extensive appendix below illustrates both Trump-related news coverage of these points, as well the emerging #MeToo movement protesting rape, harassment and cover-up by powerful men victimizing women and, in some cases, underage children of both sexes.

To buttress Trump's denials, he allegedly used his celebrity status (much like he described in the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced during the presidential campaign, as illustrated by the screenshot with Arianne Zucker and Billy Bush) to do what he wanted. The stories demonstrate that Trump has an established system whereby his minions can threaten and/or bribe his targets to cover up crimes or infidelity.

But the true danger is not the superficial embarassment that Trump might experience. Instead, the threat to the nation is what blackmailers, global and national, might extort from Trump and his administration to keep his secrets.