Testifying before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 2003, Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, said he had helped oversee the 1999 delegation and had been briefed after the diplomats returned.

"We didn't have as many facts as we should have," Winer said of the charities.

"But we went to the Saudis as a government, shared with them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place, and ultimately nothing happened."

After 9/11, the U.S. Treasury Department designated as terrorism supporters many of the charities, banks and alleged financiers that U.S. officials listed on their trips to Riyadh.

The Philippines, 1990s

The director of the Philippine branches for a time was Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law and a senior al-Qaeda member, according to the department.

Treasury designated the Philippine and Indonesian IIRO branches as terrorist financiers two years ago for funneling money to al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

At that time, the department also designated Abd Al Hamid Sulaiman al-Mujil, an IIRO official in Saudi Arabia who channeled money to those branches, as a terrorist financier.

Mujil, according to Cozen's lawsuit, traveled regularly to meet with bin Laden; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks; and al-Qaeda financiers.

Mujil also "provided donor funds directly to al-Qaeda," Treasury said.

The Cozen lawsuit also cites a 1996 CIA report that said the IIRO had financed six militant training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Since filing their lawsuit in 2003, the Cozen lawyers obtained a declassified memo by Matthew Levitt, a former deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis in the Treasury Department, concluding that the IIRO supported terrorists from the early 1990s through the first half of 2006.

Before the lawsuit was filed, it might have been plausible to argue, as the Saudi Embassy in Washington once did, that the IIRO had no affiliation with the government.

But since then, investigators have found an IIRO report showing that members of the royal family play a supervisory role in connection with some of the local offices of the IIRO in Saudi Arabia.

Making much the same point, albeit for different reasons, the IIRO has argued that it cannot be sued because it is an agency of the Saudi government and thus enjoys immunity.

Sarajevo, October 2001

At the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they seized computer hard drives with before-and-after pictures of the twin towers; pictures of the bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa; photos of the Cole after a bomb ripped a four-story gash in the destroyer's side, killing 17 U.S. sailors; materials for forging State Department identification badges; and files on pesticides and crop-duster aircraft - potential weapons.

An organization founded and chaired by Saudi Prince Salman, which had represented itself as a humanitarian mission to aid refugees and orphans, seemed instead to be a haven for extremists.

Five months later, during a March 2002 raid in Sarajevo on another Islamist charity founded in Saudi Arabia, the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), the FBI and Bosnian police uncovered what one prosecutor called "the one and only al-Qaeda archive."

That archive is now part of the Cozen lawsuit.