Category: House of Saud

Yes, Not Like Iraq at All………

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This just in, we have a news report that, the rebels were behind the gas attack in Ghouta.

Full disclosure, I know nothing of the news organization, MintPress News, though I am familiar with the work of one of the authors, Dale Gavlak, she’s done stuff for public radio, the AP, and Salon.

The assertion is that the Jabhat al-Nusra, received the weapons with the aid of Prince Bandar, the head of intelligence for the Saudi Arabia.

The connection between the House of Saud and Jabhat al-Nusra is well known, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could have happen.

Needless to say, I don’t think that this will delay the attack on Syria at all, because Obama is too concerned about his dick swinging over his “red line” comments, and so wants to maintain his “credibility.”

My guess is that it was Syrian government forces who did this, but I’ve yet to see anything that would justify us dropping missiles on them at this point.

The 4 page declassified report from the White House, which has basically no useful information in it at all, is after the break.

Oh, Crap

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Have you heard about MERS?

I don’t mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers — so far — are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means “to visit a populated place,” and it’s the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent — a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.

Why Are We Supplying Arms to Bahrain?

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If anything, the crackdown on dissent in Bahrain is worse than in Syria, because of the overtones of ethnic cleansing against the Shia (At least the Syrians oppress everyone equally), and we are arming them:

Despite Bahrain’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation.

Defense Department documents released to ProPublica give the fullest picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes ammunition, combat vehicle parts, communications equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an unidentified missile system. (Read the documents.)

The documents, which were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and cover a yearlong period ending in February 2012, still leave many questions unanswered. It’s not clear whether in each case the arms listed have been delivered. And some entries that only cite the names of weapons may in fact refer to maintenance or spare parts.

For all the evil that the rulers in Syria have done, they have not arrested doctors for treating protestors that came into their emergency rooms, and they haven’t demolished mosques of other sects, as the the Al Khalifa monarchy has done in Bahrain.

Both regimes should be replaced by something that better serves the needs of their citizens, but we are letting the House of Saud dictate our priorities, and surprisingly, they oppose a secular regime run largely by non-Sunnis, and they support a Sunni monarchy like themselves.

The real problem here is that the Arab monarchies will eventually fall, either violently in the manner of the Romanoffs of Russia, or peacefully, in the manner of the House of Windsor in the UK, and the more that we prop them up, the bigger the backlash when they fall.

Iran’s transition from US ally to foe, which derived directly from our unqualified support of a despot, would not suit our interests, nor the interests of the people in that part of the world.

My rule of thumb here is that if the House of Saud is for it, I’m against it.

The House of Saud Tried to Buy Our Elections

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This is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision:

The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.

New disclosures retrieved today, showing some of API’s spending over the course of last year, reveal that API used its membership dues (from the world’s largest oil companies like Chevron and Aramco) to finance several dark money groups airing attack ads in the most recent election cycle.

Last year, API gave nearly half a million to the following dark money groups running political ads against Democrats and in support of Republicans:

• $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) group, which ran ads against President Obama and congressional Democrats.

• $412,969 to Coalition for American Jobs’ 501(c)(6) group, a front set up by API lobbyists to air ads for industry-friendly politicians, including soon to be former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).

• $25,000 to the Sixty Plus Association’s 501(c)(4), which ran ads against congressional Democrats.

Jack Gerard, the president of API, was a close ally to the Mitt Romney campaign. Like the US Chamber of Commerce, API is one of several large trade associations that has spent heavily in support of Republican candidates.

Seriously, I’d rather have Greece’s Fascist Golden Dawn party involved in our politics than the House of Saud.

Yep, It Happened in Libya Too

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When you allow the House of Saud and the rest of the Medieval Gulf Despots determine which Arab regimes to overthrow, they go after the secular regimes, and the armies that they fund engage in ethnic and religious persecution and bigotry:

Syria’s 2.3 million Christians, constituting about 10 percent of the country’s population, have generally known a more privileged existence under the Assad dynasty than even the Shiite Alawi sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs. Yet their allegiance to Assad was never absolute. Some Christians openly clamored for political change in the early months of the anti-government uprising. But as the rebellion became suffused with Sunni militants sympathetic to or affiliated with Al Qaeda, Christians recoiled.
A churchgoing Syrian told me that he used to see himself primarily as “Syrian” and that religious identity, in political terms, was an idea that never occurred to him — until an opposition gang attacked his family earlier this year in Homs. “It’s a label they pinned on us,” he said. “If their revolution is for everyone, as they keep insisting it is, why are Christians being targeted? It is because what they are waging is not a struggle for freedom, and it’s certainly not for everyone.”
As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who’ve been “cleansed” from their homes in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home.
The rebels’ conduct has prompted at least some Sunnis who had supported the rebels and once-wavering Syrians to pledge renewed loyalty to Assad. Many who once regarded the regime as a kleptocracy now view it as the best guarantor of Syria’s endangered pluralism.
A Sunni shopkeeper in the impoverished suburb of Set Zaynab, which was partly destroyed in the clashes last week, no longer supports the rebellion. “I wanted Assad to go because he is corrupt,” he said. “But what happened here, what they did, it scared me. It made me angry. I cannot support the murder of my neighbors in the name of change. You cannot bring democracy by killing innocent people or by burning the shrines of Shiites. Syrians don’t do that. This is the work of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia,” he added, referring to the ultra conservative Sunni sect.
Repeated attempts by Free Syrian Army fighters to destroy a shrine to Sayyida Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shiites, have not yet caused the area’s Sunni minority to flee — many Shiites here have refused to blame their Sunni neighbors for the rebels’ crimes.
Over the past week, more than a dozen Syrians — chiefly Alawi and Christian, but also a handful of Sunnis — affirmed to me their determination to pick up arms to defend Assad.
The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria’s religious minorities — and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad — is breeding a bitter anti-Americanism among many secular Syrians who see the United States aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world’s most resolutely secular state.
Fresh from abetting the suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Syria is part of its effort to attenuate Iran’s influence and cripple what it fears is a growing Shiite corridor of power in the Middle East.

Most Syrians, regardless of their faith, want the power to change their government. But the armed groups that have seized control of the rebellion, now contaminated with Al Qaeda fighters and corrupted by Saudi money, have repelled many people.

This is no surprise.

The Libyan transitional government, also funded by the Saudis and the various Emirates is doing the same thing, engaging in ethnic cleansing of Black African Libyans.

The Assad Regime sucks, but for the United States to allow its own interests in a modern, generally secular governance in the Arab world to be subverted to the needs of the ineluctably corrupt House of Saud, is simply nuts.

A majority of the 911 hijackers were Saudi for a reason.

The House of Saud bankrolls much of the infrastructure of terrorism in the world, exporting a harsh and reactionary ideology, and it is not in the best interest of the United States.

H/t Washington’s Blog.

no surprise. The Lybians are doing the same with Black African Lybians.

House of Saud Takes Steps to Ensure Sunni Hegemony in Syria

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There are reports that the house of Saud is arming the rebels in Syria:

Saudi Arabia is delivering military equipment to Syrian rebels in an effort to stop bloodshed by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a top Arab diplomat said on March 17.

“Saudi military equipment is on its way to Jordan to arm the Free Syrian Army,” the diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“This is a Saudi initiative to stop the massacres in Syria,” he added, saying that further “details will follow at a later time.”

The announcement came two days after the conservative Sunni-ruled kingdom said it had shut down its embassy in Syria and withdrawn all its staff.

It also followed a brief meeting on the Syrian crisis last week between Jordan’s King Abdullah II and the Saudi monarch King Abdullah in Riyadh.

There was no official reaction to the statement from the Saudi capital, but Jordan flatly rejected the report.

“Jordan categorically denies the report,” government spokesman and information minister Rakan Majali told AFP.

What we need to understand is that the actions of the Arab league are being driven by the House of Saud, and their goal is to take down the more secular regimes, and to ensure Sunni control of societies wherever possible.

They see this as an essential action for preserving their (completely corrupt and dysfunctional) regime.

They need to play up sectarian conflict, and they need to take down regimes like Qaddafi’s and Assad’s, because they have largely pushed religion out of the public sphere in order to distract their population. 

That’s why they are continuing to support (occupy, really) Bahrain, even though the crack-down there is so bad that the US is delaying weapons sales.

While our relationship with the House of Saud is good for the defense industry they are allies much in the same sense as the Pakistanis are.

Yet Another Dissection of the bin Laden Killing

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First, it comes out now that bin Laden was not armed and did not use his wife as a human shield, which implies to me that perhaps the reason for his burial at sea was to obscure the powder burns caused when a muzzle of a weapon is pressed against the head.

Second is the question of, “Why Now?,” and I think that this analysis is the one closest accurate: that the House of Saud determined that with unrest through the Arab world, he had become redundant:

Normally I do not speculate on operational matters; to solicit information on secret matters even from very good sources is like telling Pinocchio, “Lie to me.” Some considerations here are obvious, though, even without the usual disinformation. It is hard to conclude otherwise that Bin Laden died this week because people who knew his whereabouts chose this particular moment to inform the US authorities. What has changed? The simple answer is: everything has changed. Instability in the Muslim world has reached a level that makes Bin Laden redundant.

The overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the near-overthrow of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh, along with the eruption of instability across the whole of the Arab world, changed al-Qaeda’s position. From Riyadh’s vantage point, Bin Laden was a loose cannon and an annoyance, but no threat to the strategic position of Saudi Arabia.

The royal family preferred to allow some of its more radically-inclined members to provide support to Bin Laden on a covert basis in return for al-Qaeda’s de facto agreement to leave the Arabian Peninsula in peace. As a WikiLeaks cable revealed, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a secret December 2009 memo, “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Toiba] and other terrorist groups.”

With the destabilization of Yemen, that sort of modus vivendi became obsolete. As the terse diplomatic announcements of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ April 6 conversation with King Abdullah made clear, the Saudis were deeply concerned about the destabilization of Yemen by al-Qaeda along with Iran.

I think that he’s wrong about one thing: al Qaeda wasn’t done in by some sort of Iranian alliance, these folks are Salafists, and consider Shia to be heretics, but rather they are terrified at the idea that Jihadism is fading as an outlet for desires for reform and democracy in the dominion of the House of Saud, and they are casting about for some other way to maintain their kleptocracy.

The Ongoing Libyan Clusterf%$#

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First, it appears that since the US has dropped its lead position, NATO does not have enough attack aircraft, and now the British are talking about sending in trainers and advisers to help the rebels:

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.

The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.

So, we are talking about a major escalation of involvement, one, by the way, which is not called for in the UN Security Council resolution, including the use of mercenaries.

This is not going to end well.

Suspected Israeli Spy Released By Saudi Government

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The suspect spy was a vulture.

Really, I mean that literally.

It appears that an Israeli academic tagged some vultures with tracking tags, and the Saudis were worried about their potential threat to state security:

A Saudi Arabian prince has announced that a tagged Israeli vulture captured last week and accused of being a Mossad agent will be released, according to ABC News.

The bird was reportedly captured last week by Saudi officials and accused by local media of being part of a “Zionist plot” after it was discovered wearing a GPS tracker labeled Tel Aviv University.

Prince Bandar bin Saud Al Saud dismissed the accusations on Sunday: “These systems are fitted to birds and animals, including marine animals. Most countries use these system, including Saudi Arabia. We have taken delivery of this bird, but we will set it free again after we [have] verified its systems.”

When a member of the House of Saud is the voice of sanity, you are doing something very wrong.

Elections Have Consequences: Not Pandering to the House of Saud

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In response to the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253, the TSA will engage in aggressive screening of travelers from 14 countries.

I think that, once again, we are seeing something that is more security theater than real security, but there is a refreshing change in this little charade:

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

………………

Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said.

(emphasis mine)

This is significant break from the way that Bush and His Evil Minions™ dealt with the House of Saud, which basically involved putting their tongues so far up the anus of Prince Bandar that they tasted tonsils.

A Clarification and an Apology

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In my earlier post on the Taliban severing ties to al Qaeda, I said the following:

Al Qaeda was never particularly popular in Afghanistan, where the people are, after all not Arabs, and they have about as much love for rich Arabs as we in the United States do.

Bin Laden was there because the Taliban wanted his money, not him.

When they were in control of Afghanistan, not only were they not fierce protectors of him, but they were trying to find a way for help the US make him dead in a way that gave them some plausible deniability.

As Sortition notes (In the comments of the previous post. BTW, read his blog, Pro Bono Statistics), this could be construed as an endorsement of bigotry against Arabs. This is not my intent.

To the degree that some people in Afghanistan or the West dislike “Arabs”, it is an indictment of those people, who are exhibiting bigotry toward Arabs.

Arabs are people like everyone else, and they love their families, just like everyone else, and while there are shortcomings in the governance of most Arab states, these are issues of complaints against the ruling elites.

So, a criticism of the House of Saud (or Mubarak in Egypt, or Qaddafi in Libya, or the Al-Sabah’s of Kuwait, or the Zayed’s of the UAE, the Assads of Syria, al Bashir in Sudan, King Mohammed of Morocco, etc.), or its policies is no more a criticism of the Arab people than criticism of the rulers of America, Goldman Sachs, would be a criticism of the American people.

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me

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So, it appears that the House of Saud, whose two businesses are shaking the world down for oil, and shaking down observant Muslims on Haj to Mecca are now saying that they want compensation if the world starts burning less oil.

They are claiming that, “assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification,” is basic fairness.

Ummm….You are getting plenty of money now. Put your royal family on a more reasonable allowance, stop bankrolling a Neanderthal view of Islam around the world, and spend that money in diversifying your damn economy.

You have at least a decade before anything changes to do this. If you choose not to, you can go Cheney yourselves.

BAE Bribery Investigation Back On

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It appears that elections make a difference, so a desperate Gordon Brown is allow investigations to proceed regarding potential bribery in, “Tanzania, South Africa, Romania and the Czech Republic,” but nothing involving Saudi Prince Bandar and the House of Saud, whose bribery levels are probably 10 times higher than the other 4 nations combined.

It would be nice if the west stopped coddling the House of Saud, which is a cesspool of corruption, greed, and terrorism.

House of Saud Looking at Silent Eagle

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So, it looks like al Queida’s best friends are looking at buying an additional 72 F-15 Eagles, and the word is that they are very interested in the modified reduced signature (stealth is way to strong a word here) F-15 SE.

If they do, it will likely be instead of purchasing the F-35 Lightning II, and a quick perusal of the Wiki shows that nothing is moving there yet.

What the F-15 SE brings to the table for the Saudis is greater speed and payload at the expense of having a larger radar cross section.

On Receiving the Largess of the House of Saud

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I have followed the entire “rent-a-crowd” hysteria regarding Charles Freeman’s appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council, but I really haven’t had anything to add, but in commenting on this Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Magazine asks the following:

So why is the Middle East Policy Council any more intellectually corrupt than AEI or WINEP? And why is employment at the former a bar to government employment, but a job at the last two is not?

The answer here is not is not that the MEPC is in any way more corrupt, either legally or intellectually than the AEI or WINEP.

Rather, it is that Saudi money is perceived as dirty, while the money going to the AEI and WINEP is largely domestic wingnut, which is perceived as “cleaner”.

As corrupt as domestic wingnuts are, and they are very corrupt, their history of selling opinions to big bucks backers has long been document, but the House of Saud is a poster child for bad governance, bad policy, and bad governmental structures, being one of the few remaining absolute monarchies in the world, and even by that standard it is remarkably venal and corrupt.

I think that the hit on Freeman was wrong and stupid, but the idea that Saudi money should be viewed as both corrupt and corrupting is very close to the truth of the matter.

If an organization wants to be taken seriously, it should steer clear of Saudi money.

Economics Update

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Scary Picture of the Day:
Industrial Output Cliff Diving

The U.S. trade deficit fell by 28.7% in November, not because we are exporting more, but because consumption is falling so quickly. This is why you don’t see decoupling in the world economies (see chart pr0n)

While we are on the topic of international capital flows, it appears that Standard and Poor’s is threatening to downgrade the debt of Spain and Portugal because of increasing deficits.

Of course, and I am not a deficit hawk right not, it does beg the question about what to do with the US government shortfall, as it was $485.2 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2009 (October 1, 2008 – December 31, 2008), which is more than the deficit for all of FY 2008.

When is S&P going to warn us, and when is S&P going to be prosecuted for its recent fraud on the public? After the meltdown of various instruments that S&P saw fit to declare AAA, one wonders why. I would not employ any of the major ratings agencies as pastry chefs.

We have some good news though, the TED spread fell to 98 basis points (0.98%), dropping below 1% for the first time since August 15.

The TED spread is the difference between 3 month treasuries and 3 month interbank loans, and the spread goes up as uncertainty about getting your money back goes up.

BTW, homes won’t be turning around any time soon, Beazer Homes is reporting a 53.2% drop in home sales Q4 2007 to Q4 2008.

So with all of this uncertainty, people are pulling money out of palces like Spain and Portugal and putting it in the US, which drove the dollar up today.

Oilrose too, largely on promises of large production cuts by the House of Saud.

Just How Dirty Was Tony Blair?

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Because we already know that Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saudr, known as “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush Crime Family, is unbelievably dirty. He took around £1 billion in commissions to “facilitate” the military sales in question.

Tony Blair shut down the investigations into bribes around the Al-Yamamah arms sales to the house of Saud in response to threats from that nation, and now the OECD has released a blistering critique of the behavior of the British government at that time for Blair’s shutting down that investigation.

Maybe Bush and Blair can share a cell.

Peak Oil Closer Than You Think

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Brian O’Keefe, and editor at Fortune Magazine wonders why OPEC isn’t opening the spigots to prevent a world wide recession with the possible result of a collapse in oil demand which would drive prices down.

There are two answers, they want the money now, or the spigot is already full open.

Well, Steve LeVine at competitor Business Week has received a copy of a document which, if true, settles the dispute, because it says that the House of Saud is incapable of pumping oil at the volumes that they promise:

But the detailed document, obtained from a person with access to Saudi oil officials, suggests that Saudi Aramco will be limited to sustained production of just 12 million barrels a day in 2010, and will be able to maintain that volume only for short, temporary periods such as emergencies. Then it will scale back to a sustainable production level of about 10.4 million barrels a day, according to the data. Business Week obtained a field-by-field breakdown of estimated Saudi oil production from 2009 through 2013. It was provided by an oil industry executive who said he had confirmed it with a ranking Saudi energy official who has access to the field data. The executive, who has proven reliable over several years of reporting interaction, provided the data on condition of anonymity to protect his access to the kingdom and the identity of the inside contact who confirmed the information.

The fact that the House of Saud is notoriously closed mouth about its assessments of its oil reserves lend additional credence to this document.

It means that oil is high because we are pumping, and burning, as much as can be pumped out of the ground, and so minor disruptions create spikes, and a long term minor spike could create actual physical shortages.

US May Prevent Shipments Eurofighter Typhoons to House of Saud

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It appears that the issue here is not technology transfer, but the corruption allegations swirling around the deal that have put the transfer at risk.

The Department of Justice has problems with the roughly $1 billion in “consultancy fees” to Prince Bandar, aka “Bandar Bush”. See here, here, here, here, and here for my earlier thoughts on this.

I don’t see anything happening to Prince Bandar until after January 2009, because of his remarkably close ties to the Bush clan, and truth be told, I don’t see anything beyond embarrassment happening to him until the violent revolution that seems inevitable in the lands of the House of Saud.

House of Saud Threatened UK With Terrorist Attacks If Bribery Was Investigated

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The Guardian is reporting that the House of Saud threatened to help terrorists if the British government continued to investigate the bribes paid to Saudi Prince Bandar.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced “another 7/7” and the loss of “British lives on British streets” if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

It should be noted that one of Bandar’s nicknames is “Bandar Bush”, because he is considered a sort of virtual member of the Bush clan by the family.

One of the future goals of any future US administration should be the removal from power of the House of Saud, and the imprisonment of those who held the reigns of power.