[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.
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