[Congressional Bills 108th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 3137 Introduced in House (IH)]






108th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                H. R. 3137

  To prohibit assistance or reparations to Cuba, Libya, North Korea, 
                     Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                           September 17, 2003

  Mr. Weiner introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
Committee on International Relations, and in addition to the Committee 
 on Financial Services, for a period to be subsequently determined by 
the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall 
           within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
  To prohibit assistance or reparations to Cuba, Libya, North Korea, 
                     Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. FINDINGS.

    Congress makes the following findings:
            (1) Saudi Arabia is the center of Wahabbism, the ultra-
        purist, jihadist form of Islam followed by members of Al Qaeda.
            (2) More than 50 percent of the funding of Hamas, a 
        Palestinian terrorist organization, comes from Saudi Arabia, 
        and support for Hamas by Saudi Arabia is increasing despite 
        President Bush's request to the Government of Saudi Arabia to 
        discontinue the provision of assistance to Palestinian 
        terrorist groups.
            (3) Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, the Saudi Interior 
        Minister and a brother of King Fahd, oversees the Saudi 
        Committee for the Support of Al Quds Intifada, which provides 
        assistance to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers 
        through specially designated bank accounts. According to Arab 
        News, a Saudi daily, a single telethon early last year raised 
        approximately $112,000,000 for Al Quds.
            (4) The Government of Saudi Arabia provided cash payments 
        of $5,333 to each family of ``martyrs'' killed while trying to 
        murder Israelis.
            (5) In June 2003, a senior Saudi official, Dr. Abdul Wahid 
        Al-Humaid, published the following quote in a series of Saudi 
        periodicals: ``The Jews . . . have succeeded in [winning] world 
        sympathy by playing on the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities. The 
        result has been a world that gradually shifted from disliking 
        Jews to sympathizing with them. The Jews are masters at 
        manipulating the media, money, world organizations and pressure 
        groups.''.
            (6) In the spring of 2002, United States Armed Forces in 
        Sarajevo discovered in the office of the Saudi High Commission 
        for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina documents that proved that 
        Saudi Arabia provided funding to Hamas to enable it to produce 
        a short-range missile called the ``Qassam''.
            (7) During the summer of 2000 in San Diego, a known Saudi 
        intelligence agent, Omar al-Bayoumi, hosted Khalid Almihdhar 
        and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the individuals who subsequently 
        hijacked commercial aircraft on September 11, 2001, and crashed 
        the aircraft into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 
        New York City and into the Pentagon. Al-Bayoumi met Almihdhar 
        and Alhazmi in Los Angeles, directed them to a Muslim community 
        in San Diego, and even wrote a check for their apartment 
        deposit.
            (8) The wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, 
        Princess Haifa al-Faisal, transferred $15,000 in 1998, and then 
        $2,000 a month thereafter, to a Saudi resident of San Diego, 
        Osama Bassnan. During the same period, Bassnan and another man 
        who apparently also received Saudi financial support helped two 
        other individuals who subsequently committed the terrorist 
        attacks on September 11, 2001.
            (9) For more than a month after the terrorist attacks that 
        occurred on September 11, 2001, the Government of Saudi Arabia 
        refused to freeze the financial assets of Osama bin Laden, the 
        individual who masterminded the terrorist attacks.
            (10) Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of 
        Investigation Robert M. Bryant stated that the Government of 
        Saudi Arabia has prevented FBI investigators from interviewing 
        any civilians who witnessed or may have been involved in the 
        bombing in 1996 of Khobar Towers, a United States military 
        housing installation in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 United States 
        servicemen were killed.
            (11) In April 1995, the Government of Saudi Arabia 
        prevented the United States Government from apprehending Imad 
        Mighniyah, the head of the Palestinian terrorist organization 
        Hezbollah, and who had planned the bombing in 1983 of the 
        United States Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in which 241 
        Marines were killed. The Government of Saudi Arabia ignored the 
        request of United States National Security Advisor Anthony Lake 
        to allow the aircraft that was carrying Mighniyah to land in a 
        location where Mighniyah could be apprehended.
            (12) During the first Gulf War, Saudi officials would not 
        allow United States troops to hold formal Christmas services on 
        Saudi territory, even as the United States was protecting Saudi 
        Arabia from Iraqi invasion.

SEC. 2. PROHIBITION AGAINST DIRECT FUNDING FOR CERTAIN COUNTRIES.

    No funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to an 
Act making appropriations for foreign operations, export financing, and 
related programs may be obligated or expended to finance directly any 
assistance or reparations to Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Saudi 
Arabia, or Syria. For purposes of the preceding sentence, the 
prohibition on obligations or expenditures shall include direct loans, 
credits, insurance, and guarantees of the Export-Import Bank of the 
United States or its agents.
                                 <all>