Author: Stephen Schwartz
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: December 9, 2002
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5008
Last week's federal raid of a Massachusetts
software firm raises many questions about U.S. security - not least about
our "allies" in Saudi Arabia.
The firm, Ptech Inc., is said to
have held millions of dollars in contracts with clients including the White
House, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force, and the Internal Revenue Service. Yet
investigators believe top investor Yasin al-Qadi was a major financial
backer of al Qaeda.
Earlier in the week, Saudi spin
sheikh Adel al-Jubeir, who dislikes revealing the names of Saudi terrorists,
let slip that Al-Qadi's assets are under scrutiny by his government. In
November, a long Wall Street Journal article described Al-Qadi's involvement
in moving money around various U.S. sites and his ties to fund- raising
for Hamas, another Saudi-backed terror group.
But there are significant holes
in recent media coverage of Al-Qadi.
To begin with, Yasin al-Qadi is
not a new figure in the investigation of Saudi- backed terrorism. His name
surfaced only weeks after Sept. 11. As described in my new book "The Two
Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror," Al-Qadi gave
a long interview to a Saudi newspaper in which he admitted his acquaintance
with Osama bin Laden, but had another, much more interesting name to drop:
that of Vice President Dick Cheney.
On Oct. 14, 2001, Al-Qadi told the
newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, "I spoke to [Cheney] at length and we even
became friends. I also got to know former U.S. President Jimmy Carter."
The interview bore the headline "Yes, I Know Bin Laden and U.S. Vice President
is My Friend."
At that time, Al-Qadi had already
been identified by U.S. officials as a terror financier. The fact that
this criminal sleazebag would attempt to besmirch the vice president's
name does not reflect on Cheney, but it does demonstrate that terrorist
backers are much more highly placed in Saudi society than many U.S. officials
are willing to admit.
There is another lesson to the al-Qadi
story as well. Most Western journalists have left out of their accounts
the fact that the government of poor, struggling, majority-Muslim Albania
came down hard on al-Qadi right after 9/11.
The Albanians seized Al-Qadi's properties
in their country, including an elaborate construction project called "the
Albanian twin towers." They acted swiftly and thoroughly to expose his
machinations in the Balkans - where, like other Saudis, he attempted to
exploit the suffering of local Muslims for the benefit of Wahhabism, the
death cult that is the Saudi state religion.
The American public needs more light,
not less, shone on the Saudi connection to 9/11. We need for the Saudis
to carry out a full, complete, and public investigation of their subjects'
involvement in that atrocity, with arrest, trial and punishment of all
those responsible, no matter how highly they are placed in Saudi society.
We need this for our own moral health.
The trail of Saudi slime has already led to the fancy home of Prince Bandar
bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps.
Al-Qadi's claims of intimacy with members of our executive branch show
how far the slime can splatter.
Perhaps the new commission headed
by Henry Kissinger will cleanse our nation of the tracks of this evil.
But action is needed now, by the Saudis.
There are two areas of the world
where Muslims owe America an especially big debt. One of them is Saudi
Arabia, which we have fed and coddled for 70 years. The other is the Balkans,
where our actions halted the Serbian massacre of the Bosnians and Albanians.
We made Saudi Arabia what it is,
and we saved the Balkan Muslims. How have these Muslim friends reacted
in the wake of 9/11?
Albania exposed Yasin al-Qadi and
seized his property, and tough Kosovo Albanians warned the Saudi terrorists
to get out of town, or else. Bosnia- Herzegovina, just as poor and wounded
as Kosovo, raided the terror charities and handed over Algerian terrorists
for shipment to Guantanamo.
Both the Albanians and the Bosnians
turned over every scrap of paper to Attorney General John Ashcroft. The
documents included a master list of Saudi terror financiers, found in Sarajevo,
which has yet to be disclosed to the public.
What did the Saudis do? They issued
a memo, adopted some accounting standards and held a press conference.
There were 15 Saudis among the 19
monsters of 9/11. Half of the hard-core al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay hold Saudi citizenship. There were no Bosnians or Albanians involved
in 9/11, and there are no Bosnians or Albanians in Gitmo.
It's time we recognized and supported
our real Muslim friends. It's also time for that master list found in Sarajevo
to be made public. For our moral health.
(Stephen Schwartz, an author and
journalist, is author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from
Tradition to Terror. A vociferous critic of Wahhabism, Schwartz is a frequent
contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.)