U.S. Tracks Saudi Bank Favored by Extremists

Confidential reports ...detail for the first time how Al Rajhi Bank has maintained accounts and accepted donations for Saudi charities

In addition, Mr. Al Rajhi and family members have been major donors to Islamic charities that are suspected by Western intelligence agencies of funding terrorism.....a year after Sept. 11, Mr. Al Rajhi ordered Al Rajhi Bank's board "to explore financial instruments that would allow the bank's charitable contributions to avoid official Saudi scrutiny."

.... Mr. Al Rajhi "transferred $1.1 billion to offshore accounts -- "Al Rajhi Bank: Conduit for Extremist Finance."

Today, Mr. Al Rajhi is a reclusive octogenarian whose fortune is estimated at $12 billion.

In 2002, the bank sued The Wall Street Journal Europe Also in 2005, a U.S. judge dismissed Al Rajhi Bank from a lawsuit filed by relatives of Sept. 11 victims. .

For the ruling Saud family, any confrontation with the Al Rajhis could be politically treacherous. To stay in power, the Sauds rely on the tolerance of clerical and business elites, many of whom view the royal family as corrupt. The wealthy Al Rajhis are a clan long at odds with the royal family. And U.S. intelligence files show the Al Rajhis also have close ties to another group critical of the royals: Saudi Arabia's conservative clerics.

Ultimately, the Bush administration again chose merely to continue privately exerting pressure on the Saudis to stiffen their oversight.

We need to insist that Saudis shape up their policies

(http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/490408,CST-EDT-HUNT31.article)

July 31, 2007

STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.com

President Bush wants to shower billions of dollars in sophisticated military goodies on Saudi Arabia. Can anyone explain why this is a good idea?

The stated purpose of the $20 billion worth of fighter aircraft upgrades, precision missile technology and new warships is to bolster the military capability of Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni Arab nations to confront the hegemonic ambitions of Shiite Iran. And as far as that goes, the Bush plan seems to make sense.

The trouble is that Saudi Arabia has failed time and again when asked to play a constructive role in the crisis-prone Middle East.

Only last week the New York Times, quoting various sources, reported a laundry list of Saudi meddling in Iraq: offering financial support for Sunni tribes, trying to get other Persian Gulf states to do the same, passing forged documents falsely portraying Iraqi Shiite leaders as tools of Iran, and doing nothing to stop Saudis from traveling to Iraq to join the bloodletting. Nearly half of foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudis and they make up the majority of the suicide bombers.

All that takes place under the radar screen, but the royal family in Riyadh hasn’t been shy about publicly pouring gas on the tinderbox emotions in the Arab street. In April, King Abdullah denounced the U.S. intervention in Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.”

And let’s not forget that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Since then, Riyadh has cracked down on some of the worse jihadists within its borders, meaning those who joined al-Qaida in attacking targets in Saudi Arabia. Saudi petro dollars continue to fund madrassas around the world, religious schools that often spew vitriolic hatred and rage against the West. And Wahhabism, an intolerant brand of Islamic fundamentalism that has been a wellspring of radicalism, is the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

Nor have the Saudis been agents for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They like to parade the “Saudi initiative” on the world stage, but it has turned out to be little more than a desert mirage in the five years since King Abdullah, in an interview with a journalist, allowed that he had tucked away in his desk a solution to the conflict. His so-called solution claims a “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war and their descendants, a poison pill that would mean the demographic death of the Jewish state.

The Arab League supposedly has embraced this Saudi initiative and the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab states with diplomatic relations with Israel, traveled to Jerusalem last week to discuss that. Yet the League itself went out of its way to emphasize that the two officials were not actually representatives of the group.

All this history should be on the minds of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates as they meet with Arab leaders in the Middle East this week. The Saudis’ influential sway in oil pricing for years has had the United States tip-toeing around the misbehavior of Riyadh. That has to end.

It can be argued that the threat from Tehran means we don’t have much choice but to bolster Iran’s adversaries in every way. Maybe so. But for a change, we’ve got to get something in return for our military largess. The Saudis must be told it’s time for them to exert leadership and be a responsible citizen in the region. That means ceasing their troublemaking in Iraq and embracing in full President Bush’s call for the Arab world to end the fiction that Israel doesn’t exist.

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