America is shaking in its boots, at Osama bin Laden's next "surprise", and at the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons within the next five to ten years, and carry-out Ahmadinejad's threat to obliterate Israel off the map, and Bush-Cheney and McCain-Palin would like nothing better than to strike them a blow today, if they could. But, I'm going to submit to you today that the greater threat is not Iran at all-it's the Saudis! But most people are willingly ignorant of the facts concerning the Saudi Royal family's financing of the Islamic fundamentalist organizations, who have already declared war on the west, and have killed thousands of American lives. I believe, however, it's our "staunch allies" the Saudis, not the "Axis of Evil" Iranians who are the greatest threat to our nation's security today.
This is not a popularly held belief, and I've never been one to carry the water for the popular opinions most hold, and I'm not going to start now, just because we import millions of barrels of their oil each year and we--meaning our government--really doesn't want to anger them, and risk them shutting off the faucets of sweet crude.
When it comes to them financing the very ones who kill our brave troops every day, I really don't care how angry they get. I accuse them today of financing Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the other survivors of the very same terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and who are waging war with us right now!
If it is indeed proven that they have been financing our enemies, then that means they have, in effect, declared war upon us already and are neither our friends nor allies, but mortal enemies. So I don't pal around with terrorists-or their enablers!
And if they have been financing the terrorists with our government's knowledge, and the facts suggest exactly that, and our own government has done nothing to stop them, then that makes them complicit enablers, and in my opinion traitors.
And there's no amount of money, no amount of oil, and no amount of "friendship" that ever makes that ok!
Let's examine some of the facts from snipets of articles that I've assembled here. I think we're going to find that the Saudis are not the allies in the GWOT most people believe they are, which makes the millions upon millions of dollars they funnel to the terrorists prima facie evidence, that they are themselves part of the terrorist network which is at war with America!
The Saudi Connection
"How billions in oil money spawned a global terror network".
By David E. Kaplan
Posted 12/7/03
[snipet from the first paragraph of the article published by U.S. News and World Report]
"The CIA's Illicit Transactions Group isn't listed in any phone book. There are no entries for it on any news database or Internet site. The ITG is one of those tidy little Washington secrets, a group of unsung heroes whose job is to keep track of smugglers, terrorists, and money launderers. In late 1998, officials from the White House's National Security Council called on the ITG to help them answer a couple of questions: How much money did Osama bin Laden have, and how did he move it around? The queries had a certain urgency. A cadre of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists had just destroyed two of America's embassies in East Africa. The NSC was determined to find a way to break the organization's back. Working with the Illicit Transactions Group, the NSC formed a task force to look at al Qaeda's finances. For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda's cash. The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden's money--his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan--were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was "a constant fundraising machine." And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia. America's longtime ally and the world's largest oil producer had somehow become, as a senior Treasury Department official put it, "the epicenter" of terrorist financing. This didn't come entirely as a surprise to intelligence specialists. But until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials did painfully little to confront the Saudis not only on financing terror but on backing fundamentalists and jihadists overseas. Over the past 25 years, the desert kingdom has been the single greatest force in spreading Islamic fundamentalism, while its huge, unregulated charities funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to jihad groups and al Qaeda cells around the world. Those findings are the result of a five-month investigation by U.S. News". [...]
http://www.usnews.com/...
Not only did the Saudis fund the al-Qaeda organization terrorists, the 9/11 Commission Report stated that there "wasn't conclusive evidence" of Saudi governmental complicity, 15 of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, but it should also be noted that the report also never categorically denied or debunked the Saudi funding of it. They just glossed over it, saying "there was no paper trail". I address that down below.
It's common knowledge the Bush's have been friends with the Saudi Royals for many years, that they flew the bin Ladens out of the US after 9/11 to protect them from certain backlash here for what OBL did after 9/11, and know very well how the money flows in international banking systems, but turned right around and sold them advanced weapons technology anyway, as reported by CBS last year in the article published August 1, 2007 below:
Selling Out To Saudi Terrorists
"The Nation: Saudis Fund Terrorism, But Get Military Equipment From U.S.".
Aug. 1, 2007
(The Nation) This column was written by Robert Scheer.
"Go figure: From the White House comes the news that self-styled anti-terrorism crusader George Bush wants to sell $20 billion in high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the financing, and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, for the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
The justification can't be that this is yet another boondoggle for the military-industrial complex — the big winner in the war on terror — so we are told instead that the Sunni-dominated Saudi kingdom needs this weaponry to withstand a future challenge from those dastardly Shiite fellows in Iran.
Yes, the very same extremists whose surrogates are now, as a consequence of the U.S. invasion, pretending to be the indigenous government of Iraq. Recall that the Shiite militants who rule Tehran, along with the Sunni nuts around Osama bin Laden, were both the sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein. Now both of those forces are the main players, according to the Bush Administration, vying for power in "liberated" Iraq, and our president is in the inane position of playing one group of fanatics against the other in the name of securing Iraq as a democratic haven". [...]
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Watch the video and you decide for yourself.
Accompanying Video URL:
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Let's examine what the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security says about the Saudi influence on funding the terrorists. They don't have a dog in this fight and I consider them an impartial source:
The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security is a non-profit public educational organization focusing on energy security. IAGS seeks to promote public awareness to the strong impact energy has on our economy and security and to the myriad of technological and policy solutions that could help us move into an era of enhanced energy security, and increase peace, prosperity and stability in the world.
This is how they explain the terrorist organizations' funding apparatus:
"How does it work? Take Saudi Arabia for example. This Gulf monarchy is a rentier state in which no taxes are imposed on the population. Instead, Saudis have a religious tax, the zakat, requiring all Muslims to give at least 2.5 percent of their income to charities. Many of the charities are truly dedicated to good causes, but others merely serve as money laundering and terrorist financing apparatuses. While many Saudis contribute to those charities in good faith believing their money goes toward good causes, others know full well the terrorist purposes to which their money will be funneled.
What makes penetration and control of money transactions in the Arab world especially difficult is the Hawala system--the unofficial method of transferring money and one of the key elements in the financing of global terrorism. The system has been going for generations and is deeply embedded in the Arab culture. Hawala transactions are based on trust; they are carried out verbally leaving no paper trail. [...]
Barrels and bombs
It is no coincidence that so much of the cash filling terrorists' coffers come from the oil monarchies in the Persian Gulf. It is also no coincidence that those countries holding the world's largest oil reserves and those generating most of their income from oil exports, are also those with the strongest support for radical Islam. In fact, oil and terrorism are entangled. If not for the West's oil money, most Gulf states would not have had the wealth that allowed them to invest so much in arms procurement and sponsor terrorists organizations". [...]
http://www.iags.org/...
Did you get that? It's a laughable system is based on "honor" with "no paper trail"!
And now for the coup d'grace, without belaboring the point any further, here's the icing on the cake. As of September 11, 2007, ABC News reports in the following article, that the Saudi elite of the elite are supporting al-Qaeda! ABC writer Brian Ross writes here:
"U.S.: Saudis Still Filling Al Qaeda's Coffers".
September 11, 2007 5:40 PM
Brian Ross Reports:
"Despite six years of promises, U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia continues to look the other way at wealthy individuals identified as sending millions of dollars to al Qaeda. If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury in charge of tracking terror financing, told ABC News.
Despite some efforts as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, Levey says Saudi Arabia has dropped the ball. Not one person identified by the United States and the United Nations as a terror financier has been prosecuted by the Saudis, Levey says.
"When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terrorist organizations, and knowingly done so, then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism because it is," Levey says.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/...
So the evidence of Saudi financing and outright collusion with terrorist organizations is as clear as it is damning! With friends like them, we sure don't need any more enemies. The next time you hear the Bush-Cheney-McCain-Palin neocons talk about Iran being a dire threat to us and Israel, in the next five to ten years, just remember, our so-called allies, the Saudis, and I'm not charging the Saudi Royal family with some sordid conspiracy theory to attack us on 9/11, but they did turn a blind eye,if not overtly protect the terrorists with regard to the wealthy financiers by extension, who have been right in the mix, funding terrorist organizations every day for the past 20 years the whole time. True friends don't enable their friend's sworn enemies.