BEDMINSTER, New Jersey — After nearly 21 years and what seems to be an endless river of pain, this is what the 9/11 story has come to.
Three relatives of victims of America’s deadliest terror attack — a wife who lost her husband; a mother who lost her son; a son who lost his father — stood Tuesday on a patch of grass by the local public library in this community of rolling hills and horse pastures. Two miles away sat a golf course owned by former President Donald Trump.
It was 9:20 a.m. The humidity and 90-degree temperatures of recent days had softened. But tempers still steamed over Trump’s decision to host a golf tournament financed by Saudi Arabia despite new declassified FBI files with evidence that at least a dozen Saudi officials provided financial and logistical support to the team of Islamists who pulled off the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The LIV Golf tournament, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, begins Thursday with a one-day pro-am competition, followed on Friday by a three-day, 54-hole tournament featuring such stars as Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed.
The LIV Golf series, which features several tournaments in the coming months, culminating at Trump’s Doral course in Miami, describes itself as “golf as you’ve never seen it.” That may be one of the most prophetic understatements of sports — in this case, with the additional controversy of 9/11 and Saudi Arabia’s alleged links to Islamist terrorism lurking in the shadows.
None of the golfers signed up to play have commented in depth about accusations that they are wrongfully taking money from a regime that also supported the 9/11 attacks, in which 19 operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network — 15 of whom were Saudi citizens — hijacked four commercial jetliners on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The hijackers crashed two jets into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth into a farm field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
On Tuesday, on the lawn outside Bedminster’s Clarence Dillon Public Library, here was Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, in the rubble of the trade center’s twin towers, which collapsed after the hijacked jets crashed into them. Only four days before Tom perished, Strada, who lived at the time in nearby Basking Ridge, gave birth to the couple’s youngest child.
“Offensive, disrespectful,” Strada said of the golf tournament, which is paid for in part with some $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
“A multibillion-dollar public relations stunt,” she added — all aimed to “sports-wash” the Saudi connection from 9/11.
‘Golf, but louder’
Two miles down Lamington Road, past the Rocking Horse Farm and a sign that advertised sheep and lambs for sale, you heard another story at Trump’s golf course. It was the story of a business transaction, with scores of workers making final arrangements for the LIV Golf tournament.
Some workers drove golf carts. Others checked on the LIV marketing signs that proclaimed “Golf, but louder” and “Don’t blink.” The front steps of the mansion, where Trump posed between American flags with prospective Cabinet members in the weeks after he won the presidential election in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton, were now adorned with signs offering instructions for caddies.
Trump was not there. On Tuesday, he flew to Washington, D.C. — his first trip to the nation’s capital since leaving office 18 months ago — for a speech at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank formed by a group of his former aides to promote his policies.
In his speech, Trump, who has hinted that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024, did not talk about Saudi Arabia’s link to 9/11. But in an interview beforehand with the Wall Street Journal, Trump praised what he believes is positive publicity for Saudi Arabia for funding the LIV Golf series.
“I do think that the publicity that they’ve gotten, more than anything, has been a great thing for them,” Trump told the Journal. “I think the publicity they’ve gotten is worth billions of dollars. It’s one of the hottest things to have happened in sports, and sports is a big part of life.”
Of the 9/11 victims and their relatives, Trump said: “I don’t know much about the 9/11 families, I don’t know what is the relationship to this, and their very strong feelings, and I can understand their feelings. I can’t really comment on that because I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, and what they’re saying who did what.”
A week ago, amid growing criticism of the Saudi link to the LIV tournament, Trump posted a message for pro-golfers: “Take the money” from LIV. Trump did not address the Saudi connection to 9/11.
But on Monday, in response to a letter mailed to Trump at his Bedminster golf course by 9/11 victims’ relatives, a woman identifying herself as an aide to the former president called Brett Eagleson, who lost his father, Bruce, in the rubble of the trade center and has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump and Saudi Arabia.
“I was riding my lawn mower,” said Eagleson, who lives in Middletown, Connecticut. “The call came from a blocked number. I thought it was spam. I took it anyway.”
Eagleson told NorthJersey.com in an interview that he did not “catch the woman’s name.” He said she told him that Trump wanted him to know that 9/11 victims were “very near and dear to him.”
If that’s so, Eagleson said, he wonders why Trump would play host to the LIV Golf tournament, knowing that it is sponsored by the official Saudi investment fund.
Eagleson said the Trump aide told him the “LIV contract was binding.”
“Trump is known for breaking contracts,” Eagleson said. “The call was essentially a b.s. call that left me more frustrated than ever. Clearly we are not getting through to the president.”
Celebrities claim ‘fake outrage’
Trump is not the only source of frustration for 9/11 families, though.
Former basketball star Charles Barkley, who is openly marketing himself as a possible TV analyst for upcoming LIV Golf tournaments, told a Philadelphia sports talk radio interviewer on Saturday that the relatives of 9/11 victims and other critics of the Saudi support for LIV Golf were expressing “fake outrage.”
“All this noise I hear about sports-washing and blood money — I think these people are so disingenuous with their fake outrage,” Barkley told radio host Howard Eskin. “Everybody in sports has taken blood money.”
Eagleson quickly fired off a response to Barkley.
“Your comments on Saudi Arabia 9/11 LIV outrage are ignorant,” he said, sharing his sentiments with NorthJersey.com. “Perhaps you think our outrage is fake because you haven’t seen the dead bodies. Unfortunately, I haven’t either as my dad was burned alive when the towers fell on him. We never recovered his remains. Never got to say goodbye.”
Barkley did not respond. He is scheduled on Thursday to headline the LIV-sponsored pro-am tournament.
What took place Tuesday morning in Bedminster — and in the previous weeks — illustrates the continuing disconnect between those who want to pull back the layers of secrecy that have long clouded the 9/11 story and those who want to move on — or conveniently forget.
What troubles many 9/11 victims and their relatives is the thousands of pages of newly released evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 attacks. This includes reports that Saudi officials — including at least one connected to the Saudi intelligence service — helped several of the 11 Islamists who carried out the attacks and hid in North Jersey before that fateful day, renting apartments, opening bank accounts and even joining local gyms.
To highlight some of this evidence and criticize the golf tournament at Trump’s course, a group of relatives of 9/11 victims, including Dennis McGinley of Haworth, who lost his brother, Dan, of Ridgewood, filmed a TV commercial in which they referred to the Saudis as offering “blood money.”
“This golf tournament is taking place 50 miles from Ground Zero,” McGinley said in the 30-second spot, which is scheduled to be broadcast on the Fox network and cable channels catering to golf fans. Ground Zero was the nickname given by rescue workers to the seven-story pile of rubble left behind after the collapse of the trade center’s twin towers.
Standing on the lawn outside the Dillon Library in Bedminster on Tuesday, Alison Crowther wondered when the full truth about the attacks that killed her son, Welles, will be known.
Crowther drove nearly 70 miles from her home in Upper Nyack, New York. She pleaded with a gaggle of TV crews and other journalists to plumb the newly released FBI files that offer a compelling litany of evidence that links at least a dozen Saudi officials — including a former ambassador to the U.S. — to the 9/11 attacks.
Crowther even brought a red bandana to remind onlookers that her son, Welles, became known as the “man in the red bandana” after he was spotted leading office workers to safety on Sept. 11, 2001.
After helping one group of workers out of the burning South Tower, Welles went back inside to search for others. But the tower collapsed.
She pulled the bandana from her purse and stared at it silently for a few seconds.
“Sometimes I think our government is more interested in protecting everyone else and has forgotten us,” she said.
A few steps away, Matthew Bocchi of New Vernon sat silently in a chair as he waited to speak. He was just 9 years old when his father, John, died at the trade center’s North Tower.
Bocchi pulled out his wallet and showed a photo of his father — then just 38, and, like his son now, sporting a bushy head of jet-black hair.
“People say I look like him,” Bocchi said.
The memories, he said, keep him strong. And while the LIV Golf tournament is certainly distressing — and Trump’s lack of response disheartening — Bocchi said he plans to keep pressing for the full truth on the 9/11 attacks.
Moments later, he rose to speak to the crowd. He told of what it was like to watch the video footage of the burning towers on that fateful September Tuesday in 2001. He spoke of what it was like to grow up without a father. He accused the golfers who play in the LIV tournament of taking “blood money.”
Then he paused and looked at the crowd. An even larger group of relatives of 9/11 victims plans to meet on the lawn at the library on Friday when the tournament begins.
“We, as 9/11 families, are not going away,” Bocchi said.
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.
