The Vinnell Corporation, an American mercenary company is the only thing keeping the Saudi ruling family in power.
Without them the Saudi ruling family would have been replaced decades ago by the Saudi people. Any Saudi not included part of the ruling family is automatically considered an Al-Qaeda sympathizer. Can't give them guns. Thats why they need the American mercenaries.
Ever notice most of the Saudi fighter pilots are all family members too. That isn't because they tend to be the best suited pilots. Its because they are the only Saudis who can be trusted enough with that kind of weaponry.
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http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/the-saudi-question/whos-who-the-house-of-saud/prince-bandar-bin-sultan-bin-abdul-aziz-al-saud/2877/Who's Who: The House of Saud: Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud Prince Bandar is the child of Prince Sultan and one of his servants, but under Sharia, the Islamic law that governs Saudi Arabia, all sons are considered born equal and are to be afforded similar status. Though Bandar spent his early years living apart from his father, when he was eleven he and his mother were both invited to live with the royal family. At the time, the young prince was not considered one of the most promising Saud sons, but his grandmother saw that the boy was sharp and determined to create his own opportunities. Later, as a young man, he also won the attention of his uncle, King Fahd.
After pursuing a career as a fighter pilot, Prince Bandar turned to public policy, studying at Johns Hopkins University. In 1983, King Fahd appointed him ambassador to the United States. Bandar soon became known on Capitol Hill for his flashy style, and more importantly, his smooth political dealings as a Washington insider. In early 2001, Prince Bandar helped broker President Clinton’s failed eleventh hour plan for peace in the Middle East. Today, Bandar is known to have close personal and political ties with President Bush, and he purportedly enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. However, the ambassador’s intimate relations with the current administration have proven controversial on more than one occasion: In April, 2004 it was reported that Bandar assured President Bush that he would work to keep oil prices low leading up to the presidential election in November.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0513-06.htmMercenaries Inc.: How a U.S. Company Props Up the House of Saud Published in the April, 1996 issue of The Progressive
by William D. Hartung
We were shocked and saddened to hear about the attacks in Saudi Arabia and the deaths of at least 91 people there, including ten Americans.
But the fact that one of the targets was a U.S. private military corporation called Vinnell raises serious questions about the role of "executive mercenaries," and corporations who profit from war and instability. This is the second time in eight years that Vinnell's operations in Saudi Arabia have been the target of a terrorist attack. In 1995 a car bomb blasted through an Army training program Vinnell was involved with. The following year, Bill Hartung, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute wrote this article for the Progressive magazine.
The sanitized version of American foreign policy asserts that the United States is hard at work promoting democratic values around the world in the face of attacks from totalitarian ideologies ranging from communism during the Cold War to Islamic fundamentalism today. Every once in a while an incident occurs that contradicts this reassuring rhetoric by revealing the secret underside of American policy, which is far more concerned with propping up pliable regimes that serve the interests of U.S. multinational corporations than it is with any meaningful notion of democracy. The November 13, 1995 bombing of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) headquarters and an adjacent building housing a U.S. military training mission is one such incident.
President Clinton tried to paint the bombing as just another senseless act of terrorism perpetrated by armed Islamic extremists, but the target was chosen much too carefully to support that simple explanation. The Saudi National Guard is a 55,000 man military force whose main job is to protect the Saudi monarchy from its own people, using arms from the United States and training supplied by roughly 750 retired U.S. military and intelligence personnel employed by the Vinnell Corporation of Fairfax, Virginia. A January 1996 article in Jane's Defence Weekly describes the SANG as "a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of Saud, the royal family's defence of last resort against internal opposition." The November bombing -- which killed five Americans and wounded thirty more -- was certainly brutal, but it was far from senseless. As a retired American military officer familiar with Vinnell's operations put it,
"I don't think it was an accident that it was that office that got bombed. If you wanted to make a political statement about the Saudi regime you'd single out the National Guard, and if you wanted to make a statement about American involvement you'd pick the only American contractor involved in training the guard: Vinnell."
The story of how an obscure American company ended up becoming the Saudi monarchy's personal protection service is a case study in how the United States government has come to rely on unaccountable private companies and unrepresentative foreign governments to do its dirty work on the world stage, short-circuiting democracy at home and abroad in the process. In the wake of the Iran/contra scandal and the end of the Cold War, many observers of U.S. foreign policy have assumed that this penchant for covert policymaking has been put aside, but Vinnell's role in Saudi Arabia puts the lie to that comforting assumption.
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