Saudi Stench
By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 9, 2002
Last week's federal raid of a Massachusetts software firm raises many questions about U.S. security - not least about our "allies" in Saudi Arabia.
The firm, Ptech Inc., is said to have held millions of dollars in contracts with clients including the White House, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force, and the Internal Revenue Service. Yet investigators believe top investor Yasin al-Qadi was a major financial backer of al Qaeda.
Earlier in the week, Saudi spin sheikh Adel al-Jubeir, who dislikes revealing the names of Saudi terrorists, let slip that Al-Qadi's assets are under scrutiny by his government. In November, a long Wall Street Journal article described Al-Qadi's involvement in moving money around various U.S. sites and his ties to fund-raising for Hamas, another Saudi-backed terror group. But there are significant holes in recent media coverage of Al-Qadi.
To begin with, Yasin al-Qadi is not a new figure in the investigation of Saudi-backed terrorism. His name surfaced only weeks after Sept. 11. As described in my new book "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror," Al-Qadi gave a long interview to a Saudi newspaper in which he admitted his acquaintance with Osama bin Laden, but had another, much more interesting name to drop: that of Vice President Dick Cheney. On Oct. 14, 2001, Al-Qadi told the newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, "I spoke to
at length and we even became friends. I also got to know former U.S. President Jimmy Carter." The interview bore the headline "Yes, I Know Bin Laden and U.S. Vice President is My Friend."
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