Yes.

Has been all along, with the caveat that SA is not internally monolithic. The two royal brother rivals (and their crews) have achieved a balance of power based on different but mutually dependent power centers. Most of us do not see the brother of the domestic constituency but only the public foreign policy face of SA as represented...I could go on with this bullshit, but I know nothing.

In some conspiracy theories, the domestic faction was displeased with the FP faction for allowing the American bases, thus 9/11 to wake Bandar Bush to his limitations.

The domestic Wahhabist faction is more paranoid of Iran & the Shia, or plays to that paranoia for domestic political purposes. So this article is one sense the FP faction telling Britain they can't control the domestic faction and its al Qaeda division.

SA is so powerful we may not speak its name. Delete this comment.

Now back to Wilson on Yeats' The Vision

Figures.

Y'know, if Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait, the Bush regime would still be making nice to him as well - we'd be hearing none of that "but he gassed his own people!"

And the UK government is just as happy to kneel down with its mouth wide open and suck in the big oil pipeline as the US government is. "Allies", hell. They've got oil. We want it. The Saudi rulers have one of three nation-states in the world that could cause a massive religious uproar just by threatening to bomb it. The Saudis are free to oppress and enslave their own people, to torture Brits without significant protest from the Foreign Office - and, evidently, to shut down criminal investigations just like that.

Now I'm even more interested to know how the Saudis indicated to the Bush administration that they didn't want any investigation into al-Qaeda that might impinge on Saudi Arabia. I wonder if they needed to make any direct threats or if they just smiled and pointed at their big oil pipeline and said "Suck it".

Of course, al-Qaeda accomplished their primary mission in 2003: the Bush administration did what the terrorists had demanded and withdrew the US military from Saudi Arabia. What did they get in return, if anything? A promise not to attack the US? Or just to keep releasing videos any time Bush needed an electoral boost?

Now I'm even more interested to know how the Saudis indicated to the Bush administration that they didn't want any investigation into al-Qaeda that might impinge on Saudi Arabia.

There was some investigation of the money trail, for one example, which can be considered (see 1) FP SA allowing some humiliation of Domestic SA. These two aspects of SA are often contained in the same people: the bin Laden family must go to Washington parties (to enable foreign investment) and simultaneously donate to al Qaeda (to maintain internal legitimacy). Who knows where their true allegiances are? They may not know themselves. I can't even call them hypocrites.

Note:checked Yglesias and Clemons. Np post on this article. Yglesias & Klein are all over AIPAC etc yet rarely mention Saudi Arabia. Perhaps that is for the best. Clemons does play with SA, but is careful and opaque to the unitiated (like myself).

I don't want to add Eric Martin back to my blogroll. Way too much to read now.

Can't we make an exception from this whole pacifism thing and invade Saudi Arabia? Just this once?

One of the reasons I'm so nuts is that I've thought pretty much from the beginning that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States were (initially at least) overwhelmingly al Qaeda's main supporters.

It was individual support rather than state support in the strict sense, but the Saudi's bizarre feudal/tribal political structure makes it hard to distinguish state and private. The oil rents are divided up into various slush funds controlled by various different royal and connected individuals, and much of it is relayed to religious-charity slush funds, and up to some point a lot of it went to al Qaeda. Whether any still does I don't know.

For a long time the Saudis had a tolerance policy, funding fundamentalist paramilitaries outside SA on condition that they didn't conduct operations within SA. Several attacks on the US (Lebanon, Cole) were organized and funded from SA, and the Saudis were absolutely uncooperative about allowing an investigation. Low level terrorists may have been punished, but not necessarily the royals.

I could go on with this bullshit, but I know nothing.

That hasn't held you back in the past.

I did a lot of research on the Bushes, the bin Ladens, Bandar, and the Saudis before the 2004 election. The media and the Democrats didn't touch it.

Republicans can wave the bloody shirt and smear anyone they want, even with lies, but Democrats can't. Any bullshit the Republicans throw out will have traction, and nothing the Democrats throw out will.

The only people willing to really attack Bush are the Ron Paul Republicans, some of the Huckabee Republicans, and a few Congressional representatives -- mostly black and often women.

the mainstream Democrats are as meek as church mice.

And sorry if my La Pasionara shit bothers anyone.

Really. Terribly sorry.

6: Or any of us for that matter.

You were right to continue on with #3 Bob, the foundational elements blog commenting should not be trifled with.

Perhaps a reverse Kyl-Lieberman is in order, a resolution declaring that the US will regard al Qaeda as Saudi Arabia's Revolutionary Guard.

At some level I am OK with a degree of straightforward realpolitik in dealing with regimes like the Saudis, but it is just so fucked up when at the same time there is the BS of the use of international terrorism to define Iraq and Iran policy and to quell the crowds at home and siphon dollars to the pockets of a variey of war- and terror-profiteering criminals, cronies and sycophants.

Too bad that this thread got so few comments compared to the thread about the blog that insulted the unfoggetariat whities.

as a white person, I am really into hating motherfucking saudi arabia.

Is it me, or does this read like a wild journalistic overstatement? As far as I can tell, make it easier for terrorists to attack London is not actually explained in the article. The closest they get is referring to threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists.

I read "making it easier" as a proactive step of some kind. The SA government would have to be giving terrorists money, smoothing their paths for visas, allowing them to travel under diplomatic cover, refusing to comply with British requests to block specific people from traveling or otherwise surveil suspects....I dunno. Are they accused of doing anything like that?

Because otherwise, this article makes no sense to me. It's a headline-grabbing claim with absolutely no back-up.

I agree that the claim is overstated. Nonetheless, it's pretty ugly behavior.

Which SA can always totally get away with, not only because of the three powerful little words -- oil, Iraq, Iran -- but also because of the genuine fear that things can only get worse there, and that pretty much any pressure we put on will badly backfire.

One of the reasons I'm so nuts is that I've thought pretty much from the beginning that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States were (initially at least) overwhelmingly al Qaeda's main supporters.

What am I missing here? Saudi Arabia's relationship to al Qaeda has been well documented, and lots of people were pointing out not long after 9/11 how many of the hijackers were Saudi. This doesn't seem particularly controversial or crazy-making.

Except that all of American policy has been based on the contrary assumption, which justified attacks on the Saudis' enemies. And except that we've taken Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (involved with the Taliban) as our anti-terrorism partners. And except that no more than perhaps 10% of the voting public has any idea what actually happened, which allows Bush to play fast and loose.

The fiction is that only a few bad Saudis were involved and that they've been quietly punished, but I don't believe that. Anti-American terrorism wasn't an official Saudi government policy, but it was tolerated and there was high-level involvement by prominent individuals, and there was no Saudi cooperation in the US's investigations.

Bandar Bush and Turki al-Faisal not only have not been called to account -- they seem to be increasing their influence.

I guess I don't understand the reason for your calmness. Not to leap to conclusions, but what you said sounds like the insider "we all know that, and we're not upset, so you're being silly" kind of thing.

They specifically threatened "another 7/7". Of course this was caveated with the thing about "...because we wouldn't pass on important intelligence", but it sure looks like a threat. (PS, you really need to read all the other David Leigh/Rob Evans stories about this affair. It's a cathedral of journalism.)

What strikes me about it is that a) even Goldsmith, Blair's dodgy brief, refused to play ball. Even the worm turns. b) Blair dunnit. Personally. Directly. c) I'd bet quids that BAE ran off straight to Bandar after Goldsmith told them to fuck off and begged him to put the hard word on Blair.

JE, you think the complicity of many in the SA giverning elite isn't understood in policy circles in the US? I think it is, but no one really wants to look jump into that abyss.

The US complicity with the Saudi elite (notably Bush's), combined with the Saudi elite's complicity in terrorism, combined with the takeover of the media, the intimidation of Congress and the complicity of the courts, and a fraudulent war as part of a grandiose strategy of world conquest -- all small things, of course, but they add up. (Unless you're Christian and a patriot.)

What are the odds that Dubya will make a couple of million-dollar speeches in Riyadh in 2009?

I guess I don't understand the reason for your calmness. Not to leap to conclusions, but what you said sounds like the insider "we all know that, and we're not upset, so you're being silly" kind of thing.

Who said I was calm? Your comment made it sound like you thought this wasn't common knowledge; I think it is. I also think that, as Napi says, no one really wants to deal with it. Probably because they don't know *how* to deal with it.

And if I'm calm, it's only because I don't think there's anything to be done about it until Bush is out of office.

10: White people don't like discussing Saudi Arabia.

18: Point taken, but can you imagine that guy being paid a million bucks to speak?

I found an effective anti-Iraq arguing technique in barrooms, etc., is to argue that we should have attacked Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq. There is enough awareness of the Saudi role in events that for the average pro-war person this argument is unanswerable.

You asked what was crazy-making about it. I concluded that it didn't make you crazy like it does me.

I don't think that the degree of elite Saudi involvement is common knowledge. People only know about the individual Saudi hijackers. That might be a good arguing point, but popular support for the fraudulent Iraq war only gradually drifted downward when the war seemed to be failing. Either a lot of people were fanatically supporting the war even though they knew at some deep level that it was fraudulent, or else most people didn't know. The bulk of the discourse has been about almost everything else but that.

Bush's Saudi ties (including Bin Laden ties) should have been usable against him, but they weren't. No one tried except me, and I found that crazy-making. I spent a month documenting that stuff. Later on I spent two weeks reading the 9/11 report, which documented Bush's failures (though interpretation was required because the conclusions had been excised, or at least I suspect so.) Even liberal Democrats were not interested in that.

So it's all been a charade since 2002 or so, and nobody with a voice has been willing to say so. And so I'm crazy.

23: I have always wondered how 2004 would have gone if Kerry and the Dems had come right out with a full-frontal attack on 9/11—the incompetence beforehand, the ignored warnings, the Saudis, the reluctance to investigate, yes even The Pet Goat video. Attack the perceived strength, Rove would certainly have done it if the situation had been reversed. The Beltway Pundits would have howled but just have Kerry jam it right up Bush's ass. There certainly would have been some collateral damage, but I think it would have been a messy but winning strategy.

JP, I really put in a lot of time trying to make that happen. I still have all the research stored, though not posted.

The Kerry campaign was adamantly opposed to that kind of thing and they gave a complete cold shoulder to the blogosphere (Kos and Hesiod testified to that effect -- poor Peter Daou was caught in the middle). I've been informed that ir was Mary Beth Cahill who screwed everything up; Joh Edwards seems to think so.