Author: Arnaud de Borchgrave
Publication: United Press International
Date: June 19, 2004
URL: http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040618-050738-5162r.htm
Osama bin Laden running for high
office in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia? And winning a free election hands
down? A preposterous scenario, but one that was suggested by one of the
most important Saudi businessmen, speaking privately in a European capital
this week.
"We are reaping what we have sown
over the last 25 years," said the billionaire who is on good terms with
the highest ranking members of the Saudi royal family.
The terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia
over the past year have not weakened popular support for bin Laden, the
Saudi said. The execution of an American technician, he speculated Friday,
is precisely what fundamentalists seek. They want all the Westerners who
keep the economy and the military humming to leave. The economy would then
grind to a halt and the House of Saud, they hope, would collapse like a
sand castle at high tide.
Until al-Qaida terrorists attacked
the U.S. Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia was see-hear-speak
no evil about the royal family. CIA officers based in the kingdom were
discouraged from reporting on the excesses of the royals and the activities
of the Wahhabi clergy. Saudi intelligence, also in denial, failed to monitor
what their nationals were up to in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya
and the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union.
Even though 15 of the 19 suicide
bombers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals, the Saudi royals still failed to
recognize they had become vulnerable on the home front.
Some 100,000 young men in the Arab
and Muslim worlds, including about 20,000 Saudis, underwent guerrilla training
in Pakistan in the years that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
When Saudi veterans returned home after the Soviets decamped in Feb. 1989,
veteran Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal (now the ambassador
in London) did not see them as a threat to the House of Saud.
When the Taliban regime fought its
way to power in Afghanistan in 1996, and Osama bin Laden moved his headquarters
from Khartoum, Sudan, to Kabul, drawing some 25,000 Saudis for indoctrination
in his Islamist training camps, the royals remained oblivious to any internal
threat -- until May 2003, that is, when terrorist attacks got underway
on Saudi soil.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Saudi
organizations and individuals transferred hundreds of billions of dollars
of privately held money to their accounts in foreign banks. Surveillance
of all this traffic was impossible for Saudi intelligence agencies. And
for the less fortunate, the hawala (trust) system was virtually impenetrable.
Known hawala clients transferred smaller amounts up to $50,000 without
so much as a rudimentary paper trail.
It was these transfer channels that
enabled the Wahhabi clergy to move some $300 million a year to Pakistan
to maintain more than 10,000 madrassas that taught some five million young
boys during the past to learn Arabic and recite the Koran by heart. Interspersed
in the one-dimensional curriculum were messages of hate about the United
States, Israel and India.
1979 was a critical turning point
on several fronts: 1) the Soviets occupied Afghanistan; 2) Iran's religious
extremists -- Shiite variety - - overthrew the pro-western monarchy; 3)
Saudi religious extremists -- Sunni variety -- occupied the Grand Mosque
in Mecca.
It took the royals -- with technical
assistance from French security -- three weeks to subdue the religious
revolt, but the compromise negotiated with the Wahhabi clergy left the
royal establishment hoist on its own petard. In return for muzzling their
Wahhabi critics, the royals left the clergy to its own devices outside
of Saudi Arabia. Funded with the zakat -- the 2.5 percent of yearly incomes
that are semi-mandatory donations to clergy-controlled charities -- the
Wahhabis spread their strictest form of Islam from Mindanao in the Philippines
to Morocco.
Such charities also financed extremist
fronts, including the Palestinian organizations that most Saudis see as
legitimate national liberation fronts. Thus, massive subsidies flowed to
extremist and terrorist organizations under the guise of charity.
It was not until recently that Saudi
intelligence discovered, belatedly, that some 15,000 young Saudis were
involved in homegrown Islamist extremist groups. This was hardly a small
number given the tiny size of a terrorist cell. In Northern Ireland, at
the height of the IRA's terrorist campaign against British rule, there
were never more than 300 Irish terrorists in the field. But they kept half
the British army pinned down for a quarter of a century.
The Saudi kingdom's head-in-the-sand
surveillance also failed to detect a spreading Wahhabi missionary network
in Europe and North America.
Alarmed by the spread of Islamist
extremism in Europe, France's new Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin,
who was the former Foreign Minister, asked the "Renseignments Generaux,"
the French equivalent of the FBI's counter-intelligence branch, for a report
on what goes on in the country's mosques.
Eighty percent of the imams in the
1,000 mosques surveyed by RG are foreigners; 20 percent French nationals,
but only 2 percent born in France. Most of the imams said they are unpaid
volunteers dependent on collection plates. In 40 percent of the mosques,
imams admitted they were "self- proclaimed" or "improvised" with no theological
credentials. Only the Turks could prove they had undergone religious training.
A little over one tenth of the imams
surveyed said they were "self-taught" and were getting their religious
training on the Internet. Asked to show what web sites they were consulting,
they were all pro-al-Qaida. France's domestic intelligence agency also
reported a steady increase in inflammatory sermons from Brest to Marseilles.
Their attacks on French discrimination against Muslims -- female scarves
banned from state schools -- paled next to anti-U.S. diatribes.
The Saudi royals detained over 1,000
imams after last year's bombings in May and November. They were warned
they would go straight to jail if they so much as mentioned the word jihad
(holy war) in their Friday prayers. The Saudi billionaire, speaking not
for attribution, said there are 40,000 mosques in Saudi Arabia, and the
warnings go largely unheeded.
