CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — Terry Strada lost her husband, Tom, in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Seeing the fall of the Afghan government and the resurgence of the regime that harbored the masterminds behind the attack has been gut-wrenching.
“I am appalled, and I am horrified,” she said on “The Donlon Report.” “I’m horrified for the Afghan people and I’m horrified for the rest of the world.”
Strada said even knowing the leader behind the plot, Osama bin Laden, was dead did not give her solace because new plots could threaten other families.
She’s spent the last 20 years fighting for answers to how the hijackers could live in America and carry out the attacks. She said intelligence problems in 2001 prove anything is possible.
“We don’t have any reason to believe that these cells don’t still exist, or that they couldn’t easily pop up again,” she said.
She’s taken her quest for information to the nation’s capital, where she’s part of a group pushing the government to declassify 9/11 documents she said could be covering up Saudi Arabian support for the terrorists.
A long-running lawsuit accusing Saudi Arabia of being complicit in the attacks advanced significantly this year with the questioning under oath of former Saudi officials. Those depositions, however, remain under seal and the U.S. has withheld a trove of other documents as too sensitive for disclosure.
There’s a bill in the Senate, the September 11th Transparency Act, that has bipartisan support.
“There’s an accountability mechanism within this bill, that now they have to report every single reason that they’re going to do something like keep it from us or classify it to the United States Congress,” Strada, who supports the bill, said. “So, we need the president to call on this bill and get it on his desk as fast as possible.”
Loved ones have told President Biden not to attend a 9/11 anniversary event if he does not work to declassify the documents.
The bill was introduced by Democrats and has at least two Republican supporters, but it’s unclear if it has enough votes to pass.
The Justice Department said this month that it would work toward providing families of 9/11 victims with more information about the run-up to the attacks as part of their lawsuit against the Saudi government, but Strada said the documents they offered were “cherry-picked.”