House of Saud: a house of sand: as internal dissension festers in the kingdom of Arabia, the Saudi royal family straddles the fence between Osama bin Laden/al-Qaeda and the U.S. war on terror

Insight on the News, Dec 24, 2001 by Tony Hays

Saudi Arabia is a powder keg, say Middle East experts, and multimillionaire Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was intended as the match to blow the United States out of the region and radicalize the whole of Islam. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Saudi royal family all have been working hard to shore up the appearance of a congenial U.S.-Saudi alliance, but there are serious problems.

INSIGHT has learned the cycle of corruption has been such that U.S. munitions sold to the Saudis have been funneled to bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations -- allegedly with the knowledge of the U.S. government and the approval of the Clinton administration.

Even though Saudi Arabia has the largest proved oil reserves in the world and dominates the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, some Americans are beginning to ask why the United States has insisted on defending the Saudi regime. Bill Darnell, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who was assigned to the region, puts it bluntly. "You can't believe a word they say," Darnell tells INSIGHT. "Here we are fighting a battle against human-rights violations every day and we look the other way when it comes to the Saudis."

According to Amnesty International, between 1980 and 1993 the United States authorized the sale to the Saudis of handcuffs, shackles, leg irons, etc. -- all standard equipment in U.S. police and correctional facilities. But a salesman for British Aerospace says his company arranged the transfer of 8,000 electroshock batons. Saudi Arabia and the British government have denied this widely reported transfer, but Amnesty International says electroshock batons are in common use in Saudi police operations. A 1995 Arab Times report, for which a journalist hid in the minaret of a mosque and photographed a ritual beheading, records official use of such electric cattle prods to get the condemned to jerk up and stretch their necks so the swordsman might be efficient at his work.

And Saudi treatment of women often is little better than that accorded by the Taliban. As a rule, old Saudi hands tell INSIGHT, women are required to go completely covered. If the religious police, the mutawa, spy undraped skin they are authorized to beat the female offender with a whip. A former senior U.S. diplomat, a woman, called a visit to Saudi Arabia "the most uncomfortable five days I've ever spent anywhere."

Jack Allen, a retired English teacher who served several years in Saudi Arabia, reports witnessing mutawa beatings. "You learn right away not to get involved or they'll turn that whip on you," he says. Shopkeepers caught trading at prayer times are beaten by the mutawa, who also ruthlessly censor newspapers and films. And yet we count Saudi Arabia as a major ally in the Persian Gulf even as we condemn less-brutal violators of human rights in other areas of the world.

Feuding, backbiting and double-dealing have been staples of Arabian politics for decades, say those who have lived there. Since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, when the remarkable Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, felt the sting of both British and Arabian duplicity, inter-regional squabbles have marked the whole of Arab politics. All the countries of the peninsula have felt the strife of familial ambition -- branches of the Sabah family of Kuwait, for instance, used to track each other down in London and kill one another.

With the discovery of oil in the 1930s the stakes went up, and Western leaders had to learn to deal with a philosophy of negotiations and a perspective on alliances that they still don't understand. Bribery, a concept well understood in the West, is called "sharing" or "helping your brother" in the Arabian world. Telling people what they want to hear without regard to the truth is part of the culture, as is the fact that a handshake on a deal or alliance is only the beginning of negotiations. Little wonder, say U.S. intelligence analysts, that Saudi Arabia is emerging as the worst violator of U.S. trust in the Persian Gulf.

Ailing King Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud virtually has ceded power to his two chief aides, Crown Prince Abdullah (whose anti-American rhetoric has been ignored by the liberal U.S. media until recently) and Deputy Prime Minister Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul-Aziz, who is pro-American but has been forced by Saudi internal dissension to take a moderate stance. The Saudi royal family prudently fears an internal uprising related to al-Qaeda/bin Laden, bringing together the princes in rare familial harmony and explaining the government's rhetoric of support for the United States while denying airfields for strikes against either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Intelligence insiders tell INSIGHT this alliance has nothing to do with the 4,000 casualties in New York City and Washington, nor with seeking a more-stable Middle East. It has to do with preserving the House of Saud, and public agreement by Sultan and Abdullah on anything is the strongest possible evidence that the rulers of this massive Islamic kingdom are worried about the head that wears the crown.