Posted on 01/18/2002 11:39:31 AM PST by classygreeneyedblonde
Paid $10 million to Iran for arms destined for Palestinian intifada
The financing of the Karine-A arms-smuggling ship destined for the Gaza Strip came from Saudi Arabia – a shocking discovery made, according to intelligence sources, by all three teams investigating the affair: American, Israeli and Palestinian.
They established that Saudi sources put up the $10 million paid over to Iran for the weapons cargo, the $400,000 purchasing price for the vessel and another $1 million to cover miscellaneous expenses, such as hiring the crew, fuel, repairs and port charges.
The discovery rocked the U.S. and Israeli governments back on their heels. But, together with the Palestinians, each decided for its own reasons to treat the information as sensitive and keep it under wraps. For, more than any previous indication, this new fact is disturbing evidence of the uncertain internal situation in Saudi Arabia, demonstrating for the first time the willingness of influential figures in the royal house and Saudi intelligence to go out on a limb and back the Palestinian-Hezbollah-Iran connection.
Until now, Saudi Arabia was known to have refused financial aid to Yasser Arafat’s intifada, funding only the fundamentalist Hamas at its bases in Palestinian-controlled areas, Jordan and Syria.
Technically, the funds for the arms-smuggling operation were advanced by Muslim charitable societies in Jeddah, but investigators say no sums of any such scale could have been secreted out of the oil kingdom without the knowledge and consent of Saudi intelligence and government authorities – especially if they went through Abu Dhabi and Beirut.
Intelligence sources close to the investigation say that the Karine-A funding is nothing compared to the burgeoning transactions in train between Saudi Arabians and factions of the Iranian government and military intelligence. Saudi Arabians are now believed to have underwritten some of the costs entailed in transferring al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan via Iran to safe havens in the Gulf.
They are also a Western nation of non-islamists.
4 to 5 Daisy Cutters ought to do the job without the Un-PC "fallout" that a nuke would engender. Let's go conventional!
I was thinking more along the lines of implanting mind-control chips into the brains of some of captured Al-Aqeda in Cuba and then turn them loose.
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