There was a dairy on the rec list that disappeared, I'm not sure why. Anyway, this is what it talked about:
The condemnation by the Saudi monarch comes as the Iraqi news agency disclosed the amount of money transferred by Saudi government officials to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
....
Saudi officials are also reported to send explosives and weapons to the terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz is said to be the main guilty behind the case.
The report came as earlier last week, Saudi army officer Abdullah al-Qahtani was arrested in Iraq over charges of planning a terrorist attack during the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
After September 11, there was a piece on PBS Frontline about the Saudis and how integral they are to the spread of international fundamentalist terrorism. From Vali Nasr, a University of San Diego Professor:
All of these groups are rooted in a network of seminaries, or as the term is called in the local vernacular, "madrassa." My argument was that the main source of funding for these groups is Saudi Arabia. In fact, this whole phenomenon that we are confronting, which Al Qaeda is a part of, is very closely associated with Saudi Arabia's financial and religious projects for the Muslim world as a whole.
This as more of an indirect link, rather than the very direct one alleged in the report by Saudi intelligence.
Now, why these people join Al Qaeda is because, in Saudi minds as well as in most Muslim thinking in the region, the United States is part of Saudi's domestic politics. U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia are viewed as, I would say, the "Republican Guards" of Saudi Arabia. It is the Saudi regime's last line of defense.
Average Muslims on the street don't believe we're there to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraq. We're there to protect the Saud family from its population. If the population wants to change a regime, it believes it has to go through the United States. And that's where the dots come together.
Thanks to our addiction to oil, we have dropped the ball in Saudi Arabia, according to former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke:
If you believe, as I do, that our problems should be less dependence on oil, foreign oil, then the one president in our lifetime who really attacked this problem head on was Jimmy Carter with his Project Independence. And that project, which was designed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil over a 10-year or 20-year period, was abandoned the minute his successors took power in 1981. I think that was a great tragedy.
Nobody seems to have a solution, but that is partially because nobody seems interested in hearing that there might be a problem.
UPDATE: Info from the original diarist, bernardpliers, about our good ally:
Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.
Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.
Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.
He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
No wonder he got along so well with George Bush.