There’s a lot going on in the world right now, so it’s not surprising some news slips through the cracks. Still, it’s amazing that explosive new information about an allied government’s complicity in one of the worst attacks on US soil in history has simply come and gone with barely any notice.

Last week, the FBI quietly declassified a 510-page report it produced in 2017 about the 9/11 terrorist attack twenty years ago. The disclosure is in accordance with President Joe Biden’s September 2021 executive order declassifying long-hidden government files about the attack, which many hoped would reveal what exactly US investigators knew about the Saudi Arabian government’s possible involvement.

They weren’t let down. These most recent revelations revolve around Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national working in San Diego for a Saudi government–owned aviation company he never actually turned up to. Al-Bayoumi had long been the subject of suspicion, both because of his ties to extremist clerics and due to the strange coincidences that surrounded him, from the job he never worked to the fact that he just happened to meet two of the future hijackers in a restaurant by chance — before finding them an apartment in San Diego, cosigning their lease, acting as their guarantor, paying their first month’s rent, and plugging them into the local Saudi community.