Author:
Publication: The Observer, UK
Date: November 24, 2002
URL: http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,846600,00.html
The rulers of Saudi Arabia are gorging
themselves on the country's oil wealth. But, reports John Sweeney in Riyadh,
one British man has tasted the cruelty that is maintaining this precarious
regime against a rising tide of extremism
The hoovers came first, sucking
up the desert sand that had drifted across the red carpets. Then the flunkeys,
wage-slaves from Pakistan, bearing platters of lamb and sheaves of flowers,
then the sniffer dog for explosives, then the Royal Guard, scimitars glinting
in the sun, their white robes gleaming as if in a Daz ad. And, finally,
His Excellency's Bus.
The man who runs the House of Saud
moves around Arabia like a Saga holidaymaker. Crown Prince Abdullah - podgy,
with a goatee beard and moist eyes - is the boss, because his brother,
King Fahd, has had a stroke and thinks it's still 1992. 'Has Schwarzkopf
left yet?' is a question the sick, confused king is said to ask. Prince
Abdullah, and some of his family's 7,000 princes, had rocked up in an enormous
sandpit to celebrate the opening of a new gasworks. Watch the House of
Saud eat and the received wisdom about these austere guardians of Wahabism
goes out the window. Hands scooped up great swaths of lamb and jaws munched
in contentment. It was a party Saudi-style: no women, no alcohol, no balloons.
But more remarkable than the greed
and joylessness was the waste. After they had got up, a huge mountain of
food still lay piled high on the banqueting tables, enough to feed a Palestinian
refugee camp for a week. Time was when the House of Saud could stuff itself
stupid, and waste billions, and it would not matter. And the princes have
squandered the bonanza, chiefly on themselves.
In 1980, the average income in Saudi
Arabia was $20,000. Now it's $7,000, making Saudi a contender to be the
world's fastest shrinking economy. True, the ruling princes - all in their
seventies - still squat on three-quarters of the world's oil reserves.
But today they are under grave and present danger - and their response
to the biggest threat to their grip on power reveals them as a gang of
old men who don't know what to do.
The threat comes from the stark,
alluring nihilism of Osama bin Laden and his supporters, and the House
of Saud takes refuge in denial, and cruelty. There is no better evidence
of the feebleness of its grip on power than its denial of twenty-first
century evidence that the seven Western men it has locked up for planting
bombs that killed other Westerners are innocent. His Highness Prince Saud
Al Faisal, the Foreign Minister, had never been presented with a courtroom
artist's drawing of one of his own government's torturers before. He pulled
a face at the pencil sketch of Lt Col Abdul Aziz, a state-licensed sadist
who tortures for the House of Saud. The drawing comes with a warning: never
torture an accountant. They never forget the small print, and make great
witnesses.
Scottish tax accountant Ron Jones
was blown up by a bomb in Riyadh in March last year, rushed to hospital
suffering blast burns and then taken away by the Saudi secret police still
wearing his hospital gown. He was shackled hand and foot, and then the
man who called himself Lt Col Aziz began his work. Jones says he was beaten
on the soles of the feet - falanga - day and night: 'the pain was absolutely
excruciating.' He was hung from a bracket for so long he screamed in agony.
At one time, the torturer 'started
to sing and I have this thing in my head that he was singing Ring-A-Ring
of Roses'. 'The blows got fiercer and actually knocked my blindfold off
slightly, and I could see him out of the corner of my eye and he was smiling.
And I remember saying "I'll tell you anything you want. Just don't hit
me again".'
The Saudi system of justice is that
the moment you are a suspect you are deemed to be guilty, and so you are
tortured until you make a confession in front of the khavi, the investigating
judge. If you don't, you get tortured some more. It's a closed loop with
no way out.
The bomb that injured Jones exploded
on 15 March 2001. He drew us a map of the prison where he was tortured.
Being an accountant, he remembered well. We found and filmed (with a zoom
lens) the Mabaheth Interrogation Centre, heavily guarded behind metal gates,
on Abdul Aziz Ibn Fahd Al Mu'ammar street - and fixed its location with
a satellite positioning system at North 24 ' 38.698" , East 46' 40.903".
It's a confession factory. Jones
told us: 'I would hear the screams of people upstairs being tortured. That
was awful because you knew what they were going through. And you knew that
it was your turn next.'
Some of those screams may have come
from the other Westerners, some from Saudi wretches who had upset the House
of Saud. The accountant was eventually released, after pressure from the
British. Back in England, a courtroom artist worked with Ron on a sketch
of Aziz the torturer - which so upset the Foreign Minister when I presented
it to him in Riyadh. The prince gathered his robes and leant towards me
with a not entirely friendly expression on his face: 'Well, I could hold
a piece of paper in your face.'
Nor did His Highness savour the
judgment of experts, in Britain and Denmark, who used ultrasound technology
to prove Jones's claim that he was tortured. After Jones was released,
he was examined in Britain by Dr Nathaniel Cary, a leading forensic pathologist
at Guy's Hospital, London, and radiologist Professor Adrian Dixon of Cambridge
University. Cary concluded: 'The findings therefore both independently
and objectively corroborate Mr Jones's allegations of having had his palms
and soles repeatedly beaten.'
These results were backed up by
ultrasound tests carried out by the Parker Institute in Copenhagen - the
world leader in the diagnosis and treatment of torture. The technology,
which allows a mum-to-be to see her unborn child in the womb, enables the
doctors to see massive scarring under the skin of Ron's feet.
The prince scoffed: 'I don't care
what the so-called experts say. The experts are not just wrong, they are
absolutely wrong.'
The difficulty for the old men of
the House of Saud is that, although they have now arrested, found guilty
and sentenced seven Westerners (before they met their defence lawyers)
for bombing other Westerners, the bombs have kept on exploding.
While seven allegedly guilty men
were locked in Saudi's maximum security prison - Al Haier, east of Riyadh
- another bomb killed British banker Simon Veness this June and yet another
- the eleventh - killed German businessman Maximillian Graf in September.
Perhaps the Saudi seven jumped over the wall, planted the bomb, and then
jumped back over the wall again. Twice. Or perhaps, someone else is planting
the bombs - for example, those loyal to Saudi-born renegade Osama bin Laden.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers of 11 September were from Saudi Arabia; 125
inmates at Camp X-ray, which holds the al- Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo
Bay, are from Saudi Arabia.
Putting forward the possibility
that Islamic extremists are the real bombers irritated the Foreign Minister
and the suggestion was rejected by defence lawyer Dr Ahmed Altuwaijri,
who co- represents six of the seven Westerners in jail and who believes
bin Laden was framed for 11 September - and that the true culprits are
the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
The proof that Jones was tortured
blasts a hole in the safety of the convictions of the other seven Westerners.
Unless they win an appeal, two of them - Scot Sandy Mitchell and Canadian
Bill Sampson - face an appointment with the executioner at a public beheading
in Riyadh's infamous Chop-chop Square.
The first of 11 bombs, solely targeted
at Westerners, exploded two years ago on 17 November 2000, killing Briton
Christopher Rodway. No one was arrested. A second car bomb a few days later
injured four nurses, from Britain and Ireland. Belgian paramedic Raf Schyvens
was travelling in a second car and gave first aid to his injured friends.
The secret police arrested Schyvens,
whose only evidential link with the bomb was that he treated its victims,
then his friends Mitchell and Sampson. All three were members of the same
drinking club in Saudi - illegal, but not murderous.
Three men were inside, but the bombs
continued, and four more men, all British and all illegal drinkers, were
arrested for the next batch of bombs. They are James Lee, James Cottle,
Les Walker and Pete Brandon.
Then the seven men confessed on
Saudi TV - and Interior Minister Prince Naif announced that no Saudis were
involved.
Now an eighth Westerner - British
businessman Glen Pallard - has been arrested and is being held. There is
every possibility that he, too, is being tortured. Pallard's detention
is evidence, were in it needed, that the Foreign Office's policy of handling
the cases with minimum fuss, lest it cause offence, is not working.
One relative of the Saudi eight
said: 'We are being blackmailed by the Foreign Office not to discuss this
for fear it would jeopardise the men, but then Whitehall does nothing,
so they rot in jail.'
The Al Yamamah arms deal between
Britain and Saudi Arabia is worth $500,000 a day to Britain - gold enough,
some might say, to stuff the mouth of Her Majesty's Government.
The bigger picture is no less bleak.
Why are the Americans so keen to control Iraq, which sits on the world's
second biggest oil field? Because, it seems, they fear they will lose the
biggest.
(John Sweeney's report on 'Saudi
Arabia: State of Denial', part of the tbe Correspondent series, can be
seen on BBC2 at 7.15pm tonight. The programme is produced by Guy Smith.)
