Free Republic

As al-Qaeda training camps are found in the Saudi desert, the royal family's days of comfortable self-delusion are over The Saudi royal family's once limitless capacity for self-delusion is now running on empty. The most abrupt wake-up call came in recent weeks with the discovery of al Qaeda training camps in the desert near several major Saudi cities. Camouflaged as seminaries, the pseudo-clerics doubled in brass as instructors for training in both weapons and insurgency attacks. Some 600 suspected terrorists and large quantities of guns and explosives have been captured, including hundreds of RPGs, 2,000 sticks of dynamite, and a...

IYADH, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 18 — The last few American combat troops pulled out of the Prince Sultan Air Base here earlier this month, officially closing the Persian Gulf headquarters used by the Air Force during both Iraq wars and concluding a nearly 13-year run of extensive United States military operations in Saudi Arabia. The withdrawal signaled the end of a long strategic arrangement, mutually beneficial until it fell victim to tensions resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, in which 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Since then, the countries' fragile diplomatic relations have...

A pregnant teenager was tortured and kept captive in a luxury apartment by the son of a former top Saudi official, a court has heard. English language student Sammy Shadukhi, 22, who has been jailed for five years, imprisoned the 17-year-old girl in his riverside home, whipped her regularly and subjected her to a string of so-called "punishments" over one month. She told the two-week trial that her ordeal began almost from the moment he invited her into his waterfront apartment in Rotherhithe, south London, in January last year. She recalled that sometimes he bound her hand and foot, dumped...

JAMMU, Aug 11: Six army soldiers and five militants including a ‘commander’ of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) outfit were killed while four jawans were injured and a militant of Hizbul Mujahideen was captured in separate incidents across the region overnight. Four army jawans and a militant were killed in a fierce encounter at village Daneka in Kalsian area in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district this afternoon, official sources said. They said the operation took place when an army team was ambushed by a big group of militants. Other militants escaped during an hour long exchange of gun fighting. Enforcement of troops has...

KUWAIT CITY (Agencies): Scores of Kuwaitis, including an Islamic culture instructor at the Saad Al-Abdullah Academy for Security Sciences, were recently rounded up by Saudi authorities in the wake of the Riyadh blasts on May 12, a newspaper reported Sunday. Al-Watan quoted Kuwaiti security sources as saying the Saudi authorities are questioning a number of Kuwaitis on their alleged involvement with al-Qaeda organisation. They said tens of Kuwaitis being interrogated include a Kuwaiti instructor, identified only as M.S., who went missing late last month, and entered Saudi Arabia without an exit record at any Kuwaiti border post. Saudi authorities suspecting...

The United States consul general in Jeddah recently said in this newspaper that now was the time to apply for a US visa for new or renewing Saudi students as it “may take a couple of months.” She made it look like a matter of simple routine, and as though Saudi students were welcome in the US and it was only a matter of time before they received their visa. She must be joking. What Saudi in his right mind would think about studying in the United States these days? The obstacles start with the application process. The wait is...

When American intelligence broke the Soviet wartime code, we learned that the Soviets had infiltrated the American government. The American intelligence community’s penchant for secrecy and its refusal to admit that it had been infiltrated was so great that it failed to disclose this to President Harry S. Truman. This is how Daniel Patrick Moynihan described it: "The Soviets knew we knew they knew we knew. The only one who didn’t know was the President of the United States. Our politics was injured for 30 years by this."—Quoted in the New York Times, March 30, 2002 here is a good...

Even if it is not immediately apparent, the May 12 car-bomb attacks in Riyadh are no ordinary episode in the jihad currently menacing the world. Though foreigners were the physical victims of the well-planned horror, its political targets were the ruling house of Saud. It must have shaken the asinine equanimity of the Saudi royals to realise that the policy of financing fundamentalism abroad while buying peace with fundamentalists at home has failed. They would have grasped that the kind of rough justice meted out during the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca will no longer suffice to...

RIYADH, 2 April 2003 - Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal has urged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to make a war-ending "sacrifice" for his people. "Since Saddam has asked his people to sacrifice for the country... he should be the first to sacrifice for his country," the prince said in an interview with ABC News, aired late Monday. Prince Saud made the comments to correspondent Barbara Walters who asked him whether the Iraqi leader had to be removed from power. The Saudi minister later clarified that he did not call on the Iraqi president to step down, but only advised...

<p>February 10, 2003 -- For a government that claims it is providing "full cooperation" with America's war on terrorism, Saudi Arabia is providing a considerable number of diplomatic landmines in the path of U.S. efforts to bring terrorists to justice. Examples abound. Here's just one: The Saudi wife of a man with suspected links to al Qaeda was quietly whisked out of the United States soon after her husband's arrest - and at a time when she herself was under subpoena to testify before a New York grand jury.</p>

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- To address the root causes of anti-U.S. terrorism, to improve America's hostile image in the Middle East, and to promote democracy and increase economic opportunities, Secretary of State Colin Powell unveiled a bold new initiative, presumably crafted by Tom Thumb. The United States, said Powell, was prepared to spend $29 million for the first year of this Elzevir Edition of the post-World War II Marshall Plan. For a superpower that spends more than $1 billion a day on defense, $20 billion-plus on wiping out Taliban and planting the seeds of democracy in Afghanistan, and is...

OTTAWA - There's growing frustration among supporters of William Sampson, the man who is facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, over the way Canada is handling his case. William Sampson Sampson was arrested nearly two years ago in Riyadh and accused of being involved in a bootlegging operation that mounted a series of attacks against Westerners. He confessed on Saudi television. He was sentenced to beheading. But there have been allegations Saudi officials tortured Sampson into that confession. Sampson's father says the Canadian government hasn't been any help. "He's completely innocent," said James Sampson speaking from his home in...

A group of Americans, from among the hundreds of thousands who lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, have joined to launch an information service where they can discuss the challenges to the Saudi-US relationship and work to dispel the distortions and misperceptions about the Kingdom rampant since “Sept. 11.” The effort, launched last month by a group of concerned “old-hands” — mostly retired expatriates now living in the United States, resulted in creation of the “Saudi-American Forum” consisting of a website and e-mail newsletter service. The purpose of the forum, stated on the website, is to serve as “a resource...

BURAIDA, Saudi Arabia — In the Saudi Arabia of Saleh al-Rashodi's Islamist dreams, there would be no music besides the muezzin's melancholy call to prayer, no photographs of people except those required for identification and no non-Muslims except those needed temporarily for specific jobs. If that sounds like Afghanistan under the Taliban, Mr. Rashodi would not disagree. The Taliban, he said, came close to establishing an Islamic utopia in the modern world. "The Taliban were pure Muslims," he added, as he lounged on the ochre carpet of his office here in the Islamic equivalent of America's Bible Belt. While Saudi...

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- In a truly free election in Saudi Arabia with the royal family on the sidelines bereft of the divine right of kings, and Osama Bin Laden as a candidate for prime minister, the world's most wanted terrorist would win hands down. So spoke, albeit privately, one of the most important non-royals who manages a big chunk of the royal family's portfolio of financial assets. Bin Laden, a member of a powerful and rich as Croesus non-royal family, is seen by countless millions of fundamentalist Muslims as the successor of several famous Islamic theologians going back all the...

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has acknowledged that Saudi Arabia has acquired intermediate-range missile capability. But U.S. officials said the Defense Department does not regard the Saudi missile capability as a threat to American interests in the Gulf region. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was believed to have been the first U.S. senior official to publicly address the Saudi intermediate-range missile capability. In an address to a Washington audience on Oct. 24. Wolfowitz said Riyad acquired the missiles from China in a development that stunned Washington. "I believe in the 1980s when Saudi Arabia acquired long-range ballistic missiles from...

Islamists belong to many different sects and groups. They subscribe to different schools of thought. And as such are often observed competing with each other in a race for winning as many adherents as possible for their particular causes. But on one issue they are united - the destruction of democratic values as represented by the United States of America, The agreement on a common enemy has given Al-Qaeda the much dreaded strength and penetrating ability. All the feuding factions of Islamists are united under the umbrella of Al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabian Wahabbis under Osama bin Laden, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood under...

The rulers of Saudi Arabia are gorging themselves on the country's oil wealth. But, reports John Sweeney in Riyadh, one British man has tasted the cruelty that is maintaining this precarious regime against a rising tide of extremism The hoovers came first, sucking up the desert sand that had drifted across the red carpets. Then the flunkeys, wage-slaves from Pakistan, bearing platters of lamb and sheaves of flowers, then the sniffer dog for explosives, then the Royal Guard, scimitars glinting in the sun, their white robes gleaming as if in a Daz ad. And, finally, His Excellency's Bus. The man...

RAMAH, Saudi Arabia -- Prince Alwaleed bin Talal sat on the floor of a cavernous fiberglass tent pitched in the desert some 40 miles north of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Next to him were three telephones. Before him a procession of some two dozen poets declaimed verses composed of florid praise and pointed requests. They wanted help to pay off debts, buy a new car or secure a job on the royal payroll. "Your generosity is so enormous, it is bigger than a mountain that shields us from the burning sun," intoned one supplicant. Another compared the prince's benevolence to...

RIYADH, 29 September — The father of Saud Al-Rasheed, a Saudi youth wanted by the American FBI agency for alleged links with Al-Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks, denied media reports that Saudi authorities had released his son. "My son is still with Saudi security agencies," Abdul Aziz Al-Rasheed said. However, he expected that the authorities would soon set him free."Saud has no connection with any (terrorist) organization.The only evidence the US has against my son is the presence of his photo in a floppy disc which they found in Pakistan," Abdul Aziz said.Interior Minister Prince Naif had said that...