[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 176 (Wednesday, November 14, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2403-E2405]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  SAUDI ARABIA IS HUB OF WORLD TERROR

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. PETER HOEKSTRA

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 13, 2007

  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Madam Speaker, I believe that Congress should continue 
to encourage an open and robust debate about the threat from radical 
jihadists. I found the following report in the Sunday Times of 
particular interest. I would like to share it with my colleagues.

[[Page E2404]]

                 [From the Sunday Times, Nov. 4, 2007]

 Saudi Arabia Is Hub of World Terror: The Desert Kingdom Supplies the 
                          Cash and the Killers

                  (By Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter)

       It was an occasion for tears and celebration as the Knights 
     of Martyrdom proclaimed on video: ``Our brother Turki fell 
     during the rays of dawn, covered in blood after he was hit by 
     the bullets of the infidels, following in the path of his 
     brother.'' The flowery language could not disguise the brutal 
     truth that a Saudi family had lost two sons fighting for Al-
     Qaeda in Iraq.
       The elder brother, Khaled, had been a deputy commander of a 
     crack jihadist ``special forces'' unit. After his 
     ``glorious'' death, Turki took his place.
       ``He was deeply affected by the martyrdom of his brother,'' 
     the Knights said. ``He became more ambitious and more 
     passionate about defending the land of Islam and dying as a 
     martyr, like his brother.''
       Turki's fervent wish was granted earlier this year, but 
     another Saudi national who travelled to Iraq had second 
     thoughts. He was a graduate from a respectable family of 
     teachers and professors who was recruited in a Saudi Arabian 
     mosque and sent to Iraq with $1,000 in travel expenses and 
     the telephone number of a smuggler who could get him across 
     the Syrian border.
       In Iraq he was ordered to blow himself up in a tanker on a 
     bridge in Ramadi, but he panicked before he could press the 
     detonator. He was arrested by Iraqi police. In a second 
     lorry, another foreign fighter followed orders and died.
       King Abdullah was surprised during his two-day state visit 
     to Britain last week by the barrage of criticism directed at 
     the Saudi kingdom. Officials were in ``considerable shock'', 
     one former British diplomat said.
       Back home the king is regarded as a modest reformer who has 
     cracked down on home- grown terrorism and loosened a few 
     relatively minor restrictions on his subjects' personal 
     freedom.
       With oil prices surging, Saudi Arabia is growing in 
     prosperity and embracing some modern trappings. Bibles and 
     crucifixes are still banned, but internet access is spreading 
     and there are plans for ``Mile High Tower'', the world's 
     tallest skyscraper, in Jeddah. As a key ally of the West, the 
     king had every reason to expect a warm welcome.
       Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide 
     terror networks. ``If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut 
     off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,'' 
     said Stuart Levey. the U.S. Treasury official in charge of 
     tracking tenor financing.
       Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of 
     the world's nastiest trouble spots.
       An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 
     55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most 
     uncompromising and militant.
       Half the foreign fighters held by the U.S. at Camp Cropper 
     near Baghdad are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in 
     a separate, windowless compound after they attempted to 
     impose sharia on the other detainees and preached an extreme 
     form of Wahhabist Islam.
       In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused 
     consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for 
     the destruction of the great Shi'ite shrines in Najaf and 
     Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And 
     while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty 
     regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading 
     figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are 
     tolerated.
       Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees 
     terrorist trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, 
     encouraging young men to fight in Iraq. ``Entering Iraq has 
     become risky now,'' he cautioned. ``It requires avoiding 
     those evil satellites and those drone aircraft, which own 
     every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone knows that he 
     is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and 
     if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is 
     free to do so.''
       The Bush administration is split over how to deal with the 
     Saudi threat, with the State Department warning against 
     pressure that might lead the royal family to fall and be 
     replaced by more dangerous extremists.
       ``The urban legend is that George Bush and Dick Cheney are 
     close to the Saudis because of oil and their past ties with 
     them, but they're pretty disillusioned with them,'' said 
     Stephen Schwartz, of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism in 
     Washington. ``The problem is that the Saudis have been part 
     of American policy for so long that it's not easy to work out 
     a solution.''
       According to Levey, not one person identified by America or 
     the United Nations as a terrorist financier has been 
     prosecuted by Saudi authorities. A fortnight ago exasperated 
     U.S. Treasury officials named three Saudi citizens as 
     terrorist financiers. ``In order to deter other would-be 
     donors, it is important to hold these terrorists publicly 
     accountable.'' Levey said.
       All three had worked in the Philippines, where they are 
     alleged to have helped to finance the Abu Sayyaf group, an 
     Al-Qaeda affiliate. One, Muham-mad Sughayr, was said to be 
     the main link between Abu Sayyaf and wealthy Gulf donors.
       Sughayr was arrested in the Philippines in 2005 and swiftly 
     deported to Saudi Arabia after pressure from the Saudi 
     embassy in Manila. There is no evidence that he was 
     prosecuted on his return home.
       This year the Saudis arrested 10 people thought to be 
     terrorist financiers, but the excitement faded when their 
     defense lawyers claimed that they were political dissidents 
     and human rights groups took up their cause.
       Matthew Levitt, a former intelligence analyst at the US 
     Treasury and counter-terrorism expert at the Washington 
     Institute for Near East Policy, believes the Saudis could do 
     more. He said: ``It is important for the Saudis to hold 
     people publicly accountable. Key financiers have built up 
     considerable personal wealth and are loath to put that at 
     risk. There is some evidence that individuals who have been 
     outed have curtailed their financial activities.''
       In the past the Saudis openly supported Islamic militants. 
     Osama Bin Laden was originally treated as a favourite son of 
     the regime and feted as a hero for fighting the Soviets in 
     Afghanistan. Huge charitable organisations such as the 
     International Islamic Relief Organisation and the al-Haramain 
     Foundation--accused in American court documents of having 
     links to extremist groups--flourished, sometimes with 
     patronage from senior Saudi royals.
       The 1991 Gulf war was a wake-up call for the Saudis. Bin 
     Laden began making vitriolic attacks on the Saudi royal 
     family for cooperating with the U.S. and demanded the 
     expulsion of foreign troops from Arabia. His citizenship was 
     revoked in 1994. The 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in 
     Dhahran, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen and one Saudi, was a 
     warning that he could strike within the kingdom.
       As long as foreigners were the principal targets, the 
     Saudis turned a blind eye to terror. Even the September 11 
     attacks of 2001, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, 
     could not shake their complacency. Despite promises to crack 
     down on radical imams, Saudi mosques continued to preach 
     hatred of America.
       The mood began to change in 2003 and 2004, when Al-Qaeda 
     mounted a series of terrorist attacks within the kingdom that 
     threatened to become an insurgency. ``They finally 
     acknowledged at the highest levels that they had a problem 
     and it was coming for them,'' said Rachel Bronson, the author 
     of Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with 
     Saudi Arabia.
       Assassination attempts against security officials caused 
     some of the royals to fear for their own safety. In May 2004 
     Islamic terrorists struck two oil industry installations and 
     a foreigners' housing compound in Khobar, taking 50 hostages 
     and killing 22 of them.
       The Saudi authorities began to cooperate more with the FBI, 
     clamp down on extremist charities. monitor mosques and keep a 
     watchful eye on fighters returning from Iraq.
       Only last month Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, 
     the kingdom's leading cleric, criticised gullible Saudis for 
     becoming ``convenient knights for whoever wants to exploit 
     their zeal, even to the point of turning them into walking 
     bombs''.
       And last week in London, King Abdullah warned young British 
     Muslims not to become involved with extremists.
       Yet the Saudis' ambivalence towards terrorism has not gone 
     away. Money for foreign fighters and terror groups still 
     pours out of the kingdom, but it now tends to be carried in 
     cash by couriers rather than sent through the wires, where it 
     can be stopped and identified more easily.
       A National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad, a 
     nongovernmental organisation that was intended to regulate 
     private aid abroad to guard against terrorist financing, has 
     still not been created three years after it was trumpeted by 
     the Saudi embassy in Washington.
       Hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested but many 
     have been released after undergoing reeducation programmes 
     led by Muslim clerics.
       According to the daily Alwa-tan, the interior ministry has 
     given 115m riyals (14.7m) to detainees and their 
     families to help them to repay debts, to assist families with 
     health care and housing, to pay for weddings and to buy a car 
     on their release. The most needy prisoners' families receive 
     2,000-3,000 riyals (286 to 384) a 
     month.
       Ali Sa'd AI-Mussa, a lecturer at King Khaled University in 
     Abha, protested: ``I'm afraid that holding [extremist] views 
     leads to earning a prize or, worse, a steady income.''
       Former detainees from the U.S. military prison at 
     Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are also benefiting. To celebrate the 
     Muslim holiday of Eid, 55 prisoners were temporarily released 
     last month and given the equivalent of 1,300 each 
     to spend with their families.
       School textbooks still teach the Protocols of the Elders of 
     Zion. A notorious antiSemitic forgery, and preach hatred 
     towards Christians, Jews and other religions, including 
     Shi'ite Muslims, who are considered heretics.
       Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Institute 
     for Gulf Affairs, said: ``The Saudi education system has over 
     5m children using these books. If only one in 1,000 take 
     these teachings to heart and seek to act on them violently, 
     there will be 5,000 terrorists.''
       In frustration, Arlen Specter. the Republican senator for 
     Pennsylvania, introduced the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act 
     10 days ago, calling for strong encouragement of the Saudi 
     government to ``end its support for institutions that fund, 
     train, incite, encourage or in any other way aid and abet 
     terrorism''.

[[Page E2405]]

       The act, however, is expected to die when it reaches the 
     Senate foreign relations committee: the Bush administration 
     is counting on Saudi Arabia to help stabilise Iraq, curtail 
     Iran's nuclear and regional ambitions and give a push to the 
     Israeli and Palestinian peace process at a conference due to 
     be held this month in Annapolis, Maryland.
       ``Do we really want to take on the Saudis at the moment?'' 
     asks Bronson. ``We've got enough problems as it is.''

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