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Saudis Export Terror As A Payoff
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Re: Saudis Export Terror As A Payoff
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posterdot
Re: Saudis Export Terror As A Payoff
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10/31/01 7:27 PM
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Turkistan Newsletter Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:07:49
Turkistan Bulteni ISSN:1386-6265
Uze Tengri basmasar asra yer telinmeser, Turk bodun ilining torugin
kem artati, udaci erti. [Bilge Kagan in Orkhon inscriptions]
<<>><<>><>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<><<
Seattle Times
Monday, October 29, 2001
The reluctant Saudis: Royal family increasingly nervous about keeping grip
on power at home
By Seattle Times news services
Six weeks after suicide hijackers created havoc in the United States, Saudi
Arabia Washington's most strategic Persian Gulf War ally is proving to
be a much more reluctant coalition partner than it was a decade ago.
The eager acceptance of U.S. troops on Saudi soil in that war contrasts
starkly with the kingdom's foot-dragging this time around.
It has pointedly declined to let coalition forces use Saudi soil for the
campaign against Afghanistan. It has also withheld its endorsement of the
U.S. military campaign to crush Saudi exile and terrorist suspect Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaida network.
Terrorism suspects have been arrested in more than 40 countries since Sept.
11, but no such arrests have been announced so far in Saudi Arabia,
believed to be the home of at least half of the suicide hijackers and many
more suspects.
The kingdom's image suffered again when Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal gave New York City a charitable donation of $10 million, only to
have Mayor Rudolph Giuliani return the check because the prince had linked
the attacks to "our Palestinian brethren ... slaughtered at the hands of
the Israelis."
Tensions escalated further earlier this month when the U.S. Embassy in
Saudi Arabia warned thousands of Americans in the country to be more
cautious after a bombing in a Khobar shopping area that killed an American
and another foreigner.
Saudi Arabia has cooperated, to some extent. It broke diplomatic relations
with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban on Sept. 25 for harboring bin Laden, whom
it had six years earlier stripped of Saudi citizenship. It has also
condemned the Sept. 11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as
terrorism, while reluctantly conceding that some of the suicide hijackers
were indeed Saudi citizens.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have sparred over how to respond to
terrorism before. The royal family, sensitive to perceptions of Western
domination, was irked when the FBI tried to ferry in teams of investigators
after the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, an American military complex
in Saudi Arabia, that left 19 U.S. servicemen dead.
And this summer, Saudi officials were angered again when a federal grand
jury took them by surprise and indicted 13 Saudi fugitives and a Lebanese
man in June for the Khobar bombings.
Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counterterrorism operations for
the CIA, complained that the United States is getting "zero" support from
its presumed ally.
Cannistraro, who closed a 27-year career with the CIA in 1990, maintains
contacts in Saudi Arabia. He believes Saudi money flowing to al-Qaida is,
"at a minimum, tens of millions a year. ... The amounts of money from Saudi
businessmen going to the al-Qaida organization accounts for much of the
resources the al-Qaida has."
Since the attacks, the Bush administration has frozen the assets of the
Wafa Humanitarian Organization and those of six Saudi citizens, five of
whom later appeared on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists. But Prince
Nayef, Saudi Arabia's interior minister, has said Saudi authorities have
been unable to establish links between accounts in the kingdom and bin Laden.
Investigators also have found evidence of an active branch of al-Qaida
operating mainly in southwestern areas of the kingdom, where people have
also been linked to the October 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole
in a Yemeni port.
The bin Laden operatives are thought to have assembled a core of young
Saudi men who in most cases acted not as pilots but as "muscle" to seize
control of the U.S. airliners Sept. 11, according to one U.S. official, who
declined to elaborate.
Robert Wihbe, a Mideast specialist and former Department of Defense
consultant who in 1997 wrote a report titled "Succession in Saudi Arabia:
The Not So Silent Struggle," said support for bin Laden's message and
resentment of the United States run deep there. He said those realities are
not lost on members of a royal family whose grip on power could be loosening.
"In Saudi Arabia, he (bin Laden) has, no doubt, tremendous support within
the ... clergy," Wihbe said.
"There is tremendous support for him in the middle class, in the
professional class and in the armed forces."
"It's a problem," said Robert Baer, a former CIA officer in the Middle
East. "Saudi Arabia is completely unsupportive as of today. The
rank-and-file Saudi policeman is sympathetic to bin Laden."
Cannistraro said the situation is far more problematic. He noted that Turki
bin Faisal, the veteran head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, was
ousted in late August by the head of the country's military, Crown Prince
Abdullah.
"He was sacked with no explanation," Cannistraro said, adding that the
newly installed Saudi intelligence chief, Nawwaf bin Abdal-aziz, has "no
background in intelligence whatsoever."
Cannistraro said that in years past, Saudi intelligence "penetrated
al-Qaida several times," including in Afghanistan. The change in the
leadership of Saudi intelligence, he said, is "hurting us badly."
The intricacies of U.S.-Saudi dealings are of immense sensitivity to both
President Bush and to King Fahd, the 80-year-old monarch who has headed the
Persian Gulf state since 1982.
For Fahd and the greater Saudi royal family, there is fear of terrorism, if
not revolution. For Bush and the United States, there is concern that
unrest in Saudi Arabia would end American access to state-of-the-art
military facilities, notably Prince Sultan Air Base. About 6,000 U.S.
troops remain in Saudi Arabia a remaining hedge against Saddam Hussein of
neighboring Iraq.
And then there is the oil. According to the American Petroleum Institute,
the U.S. now imports about 60 percent of its oil, with 23 percent coming
from Persian Gulf countries, including 14.7 percent from Saudi Arabia.
For nearly 30 years, Saudi Arabia has stood as America's best friend among
oil producers in the volatile Middle East. When other nations angled to
precipitously drive up oil prices, the Saudis stood for stability and at
times increased production.
According to experts, the recent abrupt change in behavior can be explained
in large measure by the inroads made into the conservative kingdom by bin
Laden's brand of radical Islam in the decade since Saudi Arabia embraced
the 1990-91 Gulf War coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi invasion.
As caretakers of Islam's two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, the rulers
of Saudi Arabia have banned nonbelievers, known as infidels, from even
stepping foot inside the cities. Members of the country's puritanical
Wahhabi sect, the country's designated protectors, reportedly are on edge
because the infidels have been at the door for a decade or more.
The radical position was marked out by Saudi clerics such as Sheik Safar
Hawali, regarded as a major influence on bin Laden. In a sermon before the
start of the Gulf War, he said: "We have asked the help of our real enemies
in defending us. The point is that we need an internal change. The first
war should be against the infidels inside, and then we will be strong
enough to face our external enemy. Brothers, you have a duty to perform.
The war will be long. The confrontation is coming."
That type of rhetoric has been stricken from the kingdom's "official Islam"
as much as possible. Hawali was jailed for five years in the 1990s along
with two other dissident sheiks and has had restrictions placed on his
preaching since being released in 1999.
Ever since King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud unified the county in 1932, the
Wahhabis have been the ruling Saud family's most significant base of
support through a social contract of sorts that allowed the sect to impose
its strict form of Islam throughout the country. In exchange, the princes
dabbled with the privileges of modernity that their oil fortunes have
bought, often abroad.
Bin Laden has long been a folk figure for the Wahhabis, ever since the son
of a wealthy construction family took part of his fortune to Afghanistan in
the 1970s to train alongside mujahedeen fighters, then allied with the
United States, against encroaching Soviet-inspired communism.
Today's Taliban include the sons of those fighters, and religious experts
say the Wahhabis and the Taliban share many of the same austere
interpretations of Islam that seem medieval elsewhere in the Muslim world,
such as veiling their women, banning movies and restricting education.
Since soon after the Gulf War, bin Laden has been among the royal family's
most outspoken critics, raging first at the U.S. troop presence in the
Arabian Peninsula and later targeting the United States for what he charges
are its hegemonic policies in the Middle East.
The fact that Afghanistan, a Muslim country, is under attack also makes
Saudis uneasy.
Several Western reports have quoted an 80-year-old blind Muslim cleric,
Sheik Hamoud bin Oqla al-Suaibi, as issuing a menacing fatwa, or Islamic
edict, that some say is directly linked to the West's Afghan war. This is
what it said: "Whoever backs the infidel against Muslims is considered an
infidel."
Political scientist Walid Kazziha of the American University in Cairo says
it has been believed for years in Gulf countries that "the Americans
overstayed their visits. They are no longer welcome guests. They are
roaming the Gulf freely, and I estimate that there is not a single Saudi
that doesn't believe the revenue from their oil is going to pay for that
fleet."
Whatever discontent arose at the time of the Gulf War was stifled by the
Saudi princes, who argued that the U.S. presence was simply for protection
and that U.S. forces would not be around for long.
But today, some U.S. troops remain in Saudi Arabia, and now Washington is
waging a less defined war not to liberate land but to punish bin Laden
and topple the Taliban.
That has left the royal family seeking a balance between trying to contain
internal discontent while suffering the same verbal assaults from al-Qaida
spokesmen who label the rulers unbefitting protectors of the peninsula
through their long oil alliance with the United States, which brought them
their wealth.
In the absence of polls in the autocratically run kingdom, it's hard to
quantify bin Laden's support. But Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the McLean,
Va.-based Saudi Institute, an independent human-rights watchdog, says bin
Laden's extreme views on Islam appeal to some even in the Saudi hierarchy.
More alarming, he says, is that young, increasingly disaffected Saudis are
being drawn to the extremist cause.
Of Saudi Arabia's 15 million citizens, 43 percent are under 14, and the
population is growing at more than 3 percent a year. Oil wealth is no
longer enough to keep Saudi Arabia in comfort; unemployment is estimated at
14 percent.
"Now they don't have the money to buy people out," said Al-Ahmed, a
longtime critic of the Saudi ruling class.
"So they have to do something else. They have to either give people more of
a voice in the government or they have to use force."
Compiled from Knight-Ridder Newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, The
Washington Post and The Associated Press
Poster George
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"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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TODAY'S NEWS, USA, S. AMERICA, UN, ETC.
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CHITCHAT ABOUT ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING
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LIBERTARIAN OR CONSERVATIVE? OR BOTH?
AYN RAND/JOHN GALT & Ayn Rand's Ideas: An Introduction
MILITARY, CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL
NEED HELP WITH A COMPUTER PROBLEM?
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WHAT'S COOKING?
ARTS FORUM
FAIRTAX TO REPLACE INCOME TAX?
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Saudis Export Terror As A Payoff
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