How long are we sheeple going to keep witnessing this crap with nothing but an "oh, well"?

JOJ

30 November 2002
Frontpage
FEATURES
Bush and the Saudi princess

Mark Steyn says that the President’s cozying up to the Saudis is making a mockery of the war on terrorism
New Hampshire
I always like the bit in the Bond movie where 007 and the supervillain meet face to face — usually at the supervillain’s marine research facility or golf course or, in this latest picture, his Icelandic diamond mine. Bond knows the alleged marine biologist is, in fact, an evil mastermind bent on world domination. The evil mastermind knows Bond is a British agent. But both men go along with the pretence that the other fellow is what he’s claiming to be, and the exquisitely polite encounter invariably ends with the mastermind purring his regrets about being unable to be more helpful. ‘But perhaps we shall meet again, Mr Bond,’ he says, as the Oriental manservant shows 007 to the door.

It must have been a bit like that when Prince Bandar and his family dropped by the Bush ranch at Crawford a couple of months ago. Bush must have known for the best part of a year that in the run-up to 11 September Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, had been making regular transfers from her Washington bank account to a couple of known associates of the terrorists. Bandar must have known Bush knew. Each party knows the other party knows they’re engaged in a charade, but they observe the niceties, with Laura showing Princess Haifa the ranch, Bush hailing the ‘eternal friendship’ between the Saudi and American people, and Bandar regretting, as the Saudis always do, that they’re unable to be more helpful.

It would be nice if George W. Bond would kick over the cocktails and lob a grenade into Oilfingers refinery, but instead he and the sheikhs are still teasing each other. In this latest curious episode, the official explanation, if I can type it without giggling, goes something like this: Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gets a letter from a woman in Virginia she’s never heard of complaining about steep medical bills. Being a friendly sort of princess, she immediately authorises the Riggs Bank in Washington to make payment by cashier’s cheque of several thousand dollars per month to this woman, no questions asked. How come I can never get hold of a princess like that when I need one?

Of the $130,000 she receives from the benevolent ambassadress, Majeda Ibrahin signs at least some of the cheques over to a friend of hers, who’s married to a guy in San Diego who’s helping two of the 11 September plotters. Pure coincidence, say the smooth-talking Saud princelings put up on the talk-show circuit since Newsweek broke the story at the weekend. Could happen to any good-hearted princess. How did Omar al Bayoumi, the penultimate recipient of the royal largesse, get to hook up with the two terrorists anyway? Well, there’s another amazing coincidence. Omar happened to be at the airport in Los Angeles, heard a couple of fellows speaking Arabic, struck up a conversation with them and waddayaknow, one thing led to another, they seemed like decent coves and so, even though he’d never met ’em before, before you know it he’s throwing ’em a big welcome party in San Diego and paying up the first couple of months’ rent for them on the apartment next door to his. How was he to know Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhamzi had just jetted in from an al-Qa’eda training camp and would go on to hijack Flight 77 and plough it into the Pentagon? Just one of those things, coulda happened to any guy who wanders round airport concourses looking for perfect strangers to cover the accommodation expenses of.

Meanwhile, Majeda Ibrahin, the woman the princess was sending all that money to, turns out to be married to Osama Basnan, another buddy of the al-Qa’eda duo, and one who subsequently celebrated 11 September as a ‘wonderful, glorious day’. But here’s an odd little thing: Mr Basnan is known to have been in Texas in April when Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage flew in to the state to see Bush at the ranch. Just another coincidence? Well, sorta: he’s supposed to have had a meeting in Houston with some big-time Saudi prince who deals with ‘intelligence matters’. This seems an unusual degree of access for some schlub from San Diego who’s in the US illegally, as it transpires. He is variously described as a Saudi government agent and al-Qa’eda sympathiser, as if these positions are mutually exclusive.

The reaction of the government-controlled Saudi press is that this is all a lot of hooey put about by ‘circles linked to the Zionist lobby’. According to Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef, ‘these are nothing but lies’; not the facts of the case — the Saudis don’t dispute those — only their meaning. The official line is that it’s just one of those cultural differences between the West and Islam: it’s very common, we’re told, for House of Saud bigshots to help out their financially strapped subjects. As it happens, Majeda Ibrahin is Jordanian. But it would be interesting to know how many others, Saudi or Jordanian, were getting $130,000 from Princess Haifa in this period. Couple of dozen? Two or three? The US has no banking confidentiality worth speaking of: I’ll bet the feds had traced the money trail back to the princess’s Riggs Bank account within a few days of 11 September, and I’ll bet they know where any other monthly payments were going. As things stand, whether intentionally or not, there’s a reasonable probability that funds from the ambassador’s wife helped pay for the scheme that murdered thousands of Americans. And that the President knew this when he lunched with her at Crawford a few weeks ago.

The Saudi embassy say they’ve only received queries about this matter from the media, not from the FBI. Odd that. The federal government claims it needs vast new powers to track every single credit-card transaction and every single email of every single American, yet a prima facie link between the terrorists and Prince Bandar’s wife isn’t worth going over to the embassy to have a little chat about. I doubt very much whether Princess Haifa is deliberately bankrolling al-Qa’eda, but I’m not so sure one could make the same confident claims of those embassy staffers running the begging letters past her. And, even if their hands are clean, the widespread support for Osama among Saudis at home and abroad means it’s only a degree or two of separation from hardcore terrorists via their supporters to the Saudi royal family. The fawning legions of ex-ambassadors to Riyadh have been all over the TV assuring us that, oh, no, al-Qa’eda hate the House of Saud and want to overthrow it. But, interestingly, though Osama’s boys are happy to topple New York landmarks, slaughter Balinese nightclubbers, blow up French oil tankers, kill Philippine missionaries, take out Tunisian synagogues and hijack Moscow musicals, you can’t help noticing they do absolutely zip against the regime they allegedly loathe. There are 6,000 Saudi princes, but none of ’em ever gets assassinated. And, if anything mildly explosive goes off in the Kingdom, it somehow manages to get blamed on Western bootleggers. Statistically speaking, if you’re looking for the spot on the planet where you’re least likely to be blown to shreds by an al-Qa’eda nutcake, it’s hard to beat Riyadh. If al-Qa’eda hated the rest of us the way they supposedly hate King Fahd and co., the world would be as harmonious as a Seventies Coke commercial.

Clearly, the House of Saud has come to an arrangement with al-Qa’eda, and this arrangement involves, among other things, money. More interesting is why the administration insists on pretending otherwise. On 20 September, George W. Bush said, ‘You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.’ A couple of weeks later, a small number of us began pointing out the obvious: the Saudis are with the terrorists. But the US–Saudi relationship is now so unmoored from reality that it’s all but impossible to foresee how it could be tethered to anything as humdrum as the facts. Seven of the nine biggest backers of al-Qa’eda are Saudi, and Riyadh has no intention of doing a thing about it; but the White House insists, as it did on Monday, that the Kingdom remains — all together now — ‘a good partner in the war on terrorism’. Fifteen out of the 19 terrorists were Saudi, but the state department’s ‘visa express’ programme for young Saudi males remained in place for almost a year after 11 September and, if it weren’t for public outrage, Colin Powell would reintroduce it tomorrow. The overwhelming majority — by some accounts, 80 per cent — of the detainees at Guantanamo are Saudi, but the new rules requiring fingerprinting of Arab male visitors to the US apply to Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Algerians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, but not Saudis. You can pretty much bet they’ll be fingerprinting British and Australians before the Saudis. In his interview with The Spectator, my old friend Ghazi Algosaibi, the much-missed ambassador to the Court of St James’s, was doing so many gags it was easy to overlook the most telling nugget. Asked by Boris Johnson why so many Saudis were among the 9/11 killers, Ghazi replied with disarming candour. ‘The answer is easy,’ he said. ‘It was much easier to get a visa for a Saudi.’ In other words, the murderers took advantage of the privileged access Saudis have to the United States. Given that Muslims from Eritrea to Afghanistan now have even more onerous entry requirements, come the next atrocity the Saudis are likely to score a perfect 19 out of 19. This privileged access to America begins with Prince Bandar.

The humdrum rank of ‘ambassador’ hardly begins to cover the special status the prince enjoys in Washington. For one thing, the title implies a posting, and Bandar isn’t going anywhere: he’s the longest-serving ambassador in town; he’s held the job for two decades and he’s still only in his early fifties; he has more homes in America than most Americans do; he’s seen Reagan, Bush Sr and Clinton come and go, and he’s figuring on seeing the back of George W. too. By comparison, American ambassadors in Riyadh are passing fancies. At the specific request of the Saudi government, no Arabic speakers are appointed to the post, a unique self-handicap by the US. Their chaps in the Kingdom spend a couple of years out there getting everything explained to them by the royal inner circle, and then they come home and serve out their day’s shilling for the House of Saud on Middle Eastern think-tanks lavishly subsidised by Riyadh. That’s the way Bandar likes it. ‘If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office,’ he once said, ‘you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.’ Just so. The columnist Matt Welch observed a while back that, if you close your eyes, America’s ex-ambassadors sound like they’re Saudis. Effectively, there’s no US ambassador to Saudi Arabia but a whole platoon of Saudi ambassadors to the US — Prince Bandar and full supporting chorus.

And what was he doing with Bush at the ranch in September? Most heads of government don’t get invited to Crawford. As I’ve said before, Australia’s John Howard, unlike Crown Prince Abdullah, is a real ally in the war on terror, but he’s still waiting for ranch privileges; Alberta, not Saudi Arabia, is America’s principal foreign source of energy, but premier Ralph Klein can’t get past the assistant deputy under-secretary. Meanwhile, Bandar, a humble ambassador from an economically moribund theocratic dictatorship, gets received like a head of state. Nothing quite explains the administration’s willingness to assist the Saudis in making a mockery of America’s war on terror. Even murkier rumours that the royal house has the goods on Bush and Cheney for some dark oil-biz shenanigans can’t account for the scale of the administration’s denial. We have a huge Saudi-financed pile of American corpses, the Saudis are openly unco-operative, and meanwhile back at the ranch it’s ribs with Princess Haifa.

As for Bandar, he seems far more likely than most Washington diplomats casually ensnared in some embarrassment to have had a reasonable idea of just who exactly his wife was mailing cheques to. For two decades, he’s swanked around the capital as a deal-maker with a long reach extending way beyond the accepted role of a diplomat; as Bandar’s publicity has it, it was he who negotiated a Sino-Soviet missile deal that caught the US on the hop, he who hand-picked Robert McFarlane as Reagan’s national security adviser, he who helped Chad ward off a potential invasion by Libya (really), he who determined the post-Soviet character of Afghanistan. That last one he doesn’t talk about so much these days. But that’s the kinda guy he is: the Taleban’s Talleyrand, the cosmopolitan front man for the exporters of feudalism. Even without his wife’s bank statements, it’s simply not credible that the global fixer isn’t completely aware of his family’s and his country’s complicity in Islamist terror. Instead of pondering a ‘90-day ultimatum’ to the Saudis, the administration should remove the symbol of the diseased relationship. If the Pakistani ambassador’s wife had been funnelling money to al-Qa’eda supporters, they’d both be on the plane home. The day Bandar is, we’ll know Bush is serious. One day the Democrats will stop sleepwalking over the cliff and realise that this is Bush’s weak spot, and they’ve got incriminating pictures and all that sycophantic audio. And, if the Dems don’t realise it, then John McCain will, shortly before he runs for president.

© 2002 The Spectator.co.uk

-- Anonymous, December 19, 2002

Answers

Way back when with George the I I had a hunch he and the family was really dirty. Since then the internet arrived and I've become a little more informed and it has confirmed my hunch in spades.

I also have a hunch Saudia Arabia is paying protection money to El Queada. It seems Osama is no fan of the Saudi family or government--- but hey, what the hell, its easy to forget the highminded rhetoric when someones greasing your palm to the tune of Million$$$.

Shrub has the bubbas so convinced hes the next best thing to sliced bread he can do anything and they'll praise and protect him. The party loyalists are committted to the party, not the nation, as evidenced by some of the threads on Homesteading today.

The trouble is, despite the idea that where theres smoke theres usually fire, the oligarchic pr machine easily disuades most people from really thinking about this stuff and if on the off chance that issues like this were to gain steam, the pr machine would muddy the waters enuf that nothing would get done.

-- Anonymous, December 19, 2002

Yes, the US -Saudi butt-kissing is disgusting. The unbelievable hypocrisy of demonizing Iraq and the Taliban while treating Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive, fundamentalist regimes in the world, like a good buddy is sickening.

-- Anonymous, December 19, 2002

Here's an excellent article on Shrub, written while he was running for prez. A good psychological assessment. Long, but worth it.

An Accidental candidate"

-- Anonymous, December 19, 2002

More sick jokes! And colin powell has the audacity to complain about 'omissions'!! It just keeps getting more unbelievable every day!

America tore out 8,000 pages of Iraq dossier Posted on Sunday, December 22 @ 08:38:56 EST ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- By James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot, Glasgow Sunday Herald

The United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council.

The full extent of Washington's complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq.

Last week, Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan accepted that it was 'unfortunate' that his organisation had allowed the US to take the only complete dossier and edit it. He admitted 'the approach and style were wrong' and Norway, a member of the security council, says it is being treated like a 'second-class country'.

Although Powell called the Iraqi dossier a 'catalogue of recycled information and flagrant omissions', the non-permanent members of the security council will have no way of testing the US claims for themselves. This will be crucial if the US and the UK go back to the security council seeking explicit authorisation for war on Iraq if breaches of resolution 1441 are confirmed when the weapons inspectors -- this weekend investigating 10 sites in Iraq, including an oil refinery south of Baghdad -- deliver their report to the UN next month.

A UN source in New York said: 'The questions being asked are valid. What did the US take out? And if weapons inspectors are supposed to be checking against the dossier's content, how can any future claim be verified. In effect the US is saying trust us, and there are many who just will not.'

Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co- ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.'

Although the five permanent members of the security council -- the US, the UK, France, China and Russia -- have had access to the complete version, there was agreement that the US be allowed to edit the dossier on the ground that its contents were 'risky' in terms of security on weapons proliferation.

Yesterday, US President George W Bush announced that a planned trip to several African countries, scheduled for January, had been cancelled. As he gave the go-ahead to double the current 50,000 US troops deployed in the Gulf by early January, he used his weekly radio address to say that 'the men and women in the [US] military, many of whom will spend Christmas at posts and bases far from home' were the only thing that stood between 'Americans and grave danger'.

An equally pessimistic view of the immediate future came from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II promised the Catholic church would not cease to have its voice heard and would offer prayers 'in the face of this horizon bathed in blood'.

Despite the prayers, the US military isn't expecting peace. Yesterday, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was asked if US forces were ready if called upon immediately. General Myers simply said: 'You bet.'

The language coming from Baghdad was equally gung ho. The Iraqi newspaper Babel, owned by Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday, likened US and UK political leaders to ruthless Mongol conquerors of the past.

-- Anonymous, December 23, 2002

So what do you think about what North Korea's been up to lately, especially now that they've kicked out their UN inspectors? Have the powers that be been so focused on Iraq that they've neglected the real danger? I've been on a week-long news fast so I'm just starting to get back up to speed today.

-- Anonymous, December 27, 2002

No Korea is sticking out its tongue at George et al. Including them in an "axis of evil" was another brilliant foreign policy move by own cowboy prez. They actually DO have nuclear weapons, and can easily make more, and are sending a message to georgie to lay off North Korea, cuz they can actually fight back. George isnt interested right now though; he wants to devastate helpless, oil-rich nations first.

Russia, China and Japan say diplomacy is on order; Georgie says "I will not negotiate."

What an idiot.

-- Anonymous, December 27, 2002

ATTENTION PEACE-LOVING CITIZENS OF THE WORLD!

Join us in challenging rogue states run by military fanatics who produce and conceal weapons of mass destruction.

Rooting Out Evil is sending a weapons inspection team to the United States to inspect the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons produced and concealed by the Bush regime.

And we want you to join us - in person or in spirit.

Become an Honorary Weapons Inspector And Support Our Mission Into The USA!

rooting out evil

-- Anonymous, January 08, 2003

Link to a very basic list of intriguing 'coincidences' about 9/11:

Big Oil

-- Anonymous, January 08, 2003

Bush heading for record US deficit By Simon English in New York (Filed: 13/01/2003)

America is veering towards the biggest hole ever in its government finances as the cost of tax cuts and increased military spending threaten to unsettle the world's largest economy.

Wall Street analysts say the US budget deficit could rise this year to $350 billion, easily exceeding the $290 billion recorded in 1992, the last year that George Bush senior spent in office.

Although experts say the size of the debt is not yet a cause for panic, political opponents are already using the numbers to criticise America's current president, drawing parallels with the economic difficulties that caused his father to lose an election.

more...

-- Anonymous, January 13, 2003