The Saudi Connection-How billions in oil money spawned a global terror net

[drdon326]

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031215/usnews/15terror.htm

It was Bosnia, though, that finally caught the sustained attention of the CIA. In the early '90s, the ethnic-cleansing policies of the Serbs drew hundreds of foreign jihadists to the region to help defend Bosnian Muslims. Saudi money poured in, too. Saudi donors sent $150 million through Islamic aid organizations to Bosnia in 1994 alone, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh reported. But large sums were winding up in the wrong hands. A CIA investigation found that a third of the Islamic charities in the Balkans--among them the IIRO--had "facilitated the activities of Islamic groups that engage in terrorism," including plots to kidnap or kill U.S. personnel. The groups were a who's who of Islamic terrorism: Hamas, Hezbollah, Algerian extremists, and Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, whose spiritual head, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, later earned a life sentence for plotting to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks.

snip

But by 1994, Riyadh was starting to get complaints--from the French interior minister about Saudi funds reaching Algerian terrorists and from President Clinton about their funding of Hamas, whose suicide bombers were wreaking havoc on the Middle East peace process. More concerns surfaced in the Philippines, where an investigation of an al Qaeda plot to murder the pope and bomb a dozen U.S. airliners led to the local IIRO office. Its director was a brother-in-law of bin Laden's, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, who was busily funneling cash to the region's top Islamic guerrilla groups, Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

snip

There was more. In the Middle East, the CIA learned, Saudi donations were funding as much as half of Hamas's budget and paying off the families of suicide bombers. In Pakistan, so much Saudi money poured in that a mid-level Pakistani jihadist could make seven times the country's average wage. Jihad had become a global industry, bankrolled by the Saudis. Daniel Benjamin, the NSC's counterterrorism director, knew that Palestinian terror groups had used local charities, but that was nothing like what the Saudis had wrought. "The structure was not astonishing," Benjamin says. "The ambition and scale were."

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long but fascinating.

the saudi scam is now coming home to its own country.

[pistoff democrat]

1. Where do I begin?

Well, first of all, I was going to say this does not belong in I/P, but then I noticed ME in your last paragraph...so I guess you snuck in a far-fetched connection.

Then, I was going to say that The Bushes and the Saudi royal family have been so close for so many years, but then I realized it might sound like Bush isn't too keen on the Israeli side of things.

Well, but now I remember. When that dirty rotten repig Rudy Giuliani threw that $10,000,000 check back in Prince Bandar's face and Cynthia McKinney (still a possibility for a Green Party presidential run in 2004!) said she'd like it for her community please...never mind the Arab slave trade in Africans...well, I knew I had you there.

See, Rudy doesn't like the Saudis. And the Saudis don't like the Israelis. But the Bushes like the Saudis. And McKinney likes the Saudis.

You know what? This I/P business isn't so clear-cut after all!

:pals: :yourock: