MIDDLE EAST

Saudi Backgrounder

Wednesday, 7 May, 2003
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REPORTER: MARK DAVIS: For the United States, the Saudi royal family have delivered oil, profits and stability, but they're hardly the kind of company that America professes it likes to keep. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship with an over-indulged and ever-expanding royal family at its head. Some 10,000 princes are now living off the State. It has virtually no popular representation, a brutal fundamentalist legal system fond of beheadings, amputations and floggings and one of the world's most miserable records on the rights of women, not dissimilar to the Taliban, who the Saudis supported for many years, just a lot richer. As long as the oil flowed, a blind eye could be turned to Saudi Arabia until September 11, 2001. 15 of the suicide attackers were Saudis. Osama bin Laden's network sprung from there and evidence mounted that Saudi Arabia was the financial lifeblood of al-Qa'ida and other fundamentalist terrorist groups. Paid for by billionaire princes - part protection money, part religious dues.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI, MAYOR OF NEW YORK (September 2001): Seven buildings all together are down.

New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, became something of a folk hero when he handed back a $10 million donation to the victims of September 11 from a Saudi prince who said US policies in the Middle East were partly to blame.

RUDOLPH GIULIANI, MAYOR OF NEW YORK (September 2001): There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000-5,000 innocent people.

The response of Washington officials was for more understated and far more complicated. Many of the current administration made their private fortunes from long and profitable dealings with the Saudi regime and the US economy was still deeply reliant upon Saudi oil.

GEORGE W. BUSH, US PRESIDENT: The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

As America launched its war on terror, an axis of evil was publicly nominated but, behind the scenes, the evidence against and anger about Saudi Arabia was mounting. The first cracks in Washington occurred last August when a report from the Rand think-tank to a top Pentagon advisory board was leaked to the press. The briefing accused the Saudis of being “active at every level of the terror chain” from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader. Secretary of State Colin Powell immediately contacted Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal to assure him that the Rand report did not reflect the views of the White House. But today, just eight months later, the report is not looking so extreme. It urged America to disengage from Saudi Arabia and confront it as its main enemy in the region, militarily if necessary - a task that is now a little easier with Iraqi oil in hand.

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