Eideard

Oil is thicker than water

In August last year, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak was not happy with Saudi Arabia. He complained that the Saudis appeared to be funding an opposition candidate, Anwar Ibrahim, in upcoming elections.

What’s more, the Malaysian authorities suspected two senior Saudi princes of involvement. The Saudis launched an investigation, and uncovered something very different — and more alarming.

A secret report seen by CNN concludes: “There is no evidence any Saudi official ever supported Anwar Ibrahim” and “claims of support from the Saudi royals named in the initial report [names redacted] were found to be without basis.” But the investigation found that hundreds of millions of dollars of Saudi money had been funneled to leading Islamist politicians and political activists overseas. It also found that al Qaeda and the Taliban were still able to use Saudi Arabia for fund-raising, despite numerous measures to choke off those sources of cash.

According to a Saudi source who is not authorized to speak publically, “People close to the senior leadership of the Taliban live in Saudi Arabia and send money back” [to the Taliban].

Today he estimates the money reaching al Qaeda is “in the region of tens of thousands of dollars possibly hundreds of thousands…”

The problem facing Saudi authorities is huge, the source told CNN. “Eighty-six percent of all Islamic charities are based in Saudi Arabia” making “monitoring all their activities difficult.” The problem was compounded by several other factors, he said. Saudi Arabia “has the world’s fourth largest migrant workforce, 7 million legal workers, 3 million illegal.”

Many of them use unregulated Islamic Hawala money transfer banks where a deposit in one country can immediately be picked up in another with no paper trail to trace it. The Hawala networks were identified by the U.S. Treasury Department last year as a significant channel for funding the Taliban and other insurgent groups…

With friends like this, etc.. The Saudi royal family are vendors. We are customers for their oil. Not even clients.

So, please, don’t pay too much attention to high-sounding declarations of comradeship in the War on Terror. Or whatever it’s called this week.