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By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
November 19, 2006
This article is based on Robert Baer's book Sleeping With The Devil (2003). Baer was a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997. His overseas assignments included stints in Iraq and Beirut. Baer, who is fluent in Arabic, handled agents that infiltrated Hezbollah, Fatah, and al-Qaeda.
Sleeping With The Devil is a partly (CIA) censored account of how the United States, or rather Washington, D.C., has been cohabiting with Saudi Arabia for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Let's understand why.
Saudi Arabia sits on 25 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. Although the Saudi Kingdom has more than eighty active oil and gas fields, half of its proven reserves -- 12.5 percent of all the known oil in the world -- is contained in eight fields.
According to Baer, "if terrorists were to simultaneously hit only five of the many sensitive points in Saudi Arabia's downstream oil system, they could put the Saudis out of the oil-producing business for about two years. A commando boat attack could do the job."
To appreciate the importance of Saudi oil, on September 12, 2001, less than 24 hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Saudis put on the market an extra nine million barrels of oil, going mostly to the United States. It should be emphasized, however, that Saudi Arabia transferred half a billion dollars to al-Qaeda in the ten years beginning 1992.
No less significant: The Saudis have financed the construction of thousands of mosques, many in the U.S. which preach a hatred of the West that is "as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the ayatollahs." Baer notes that Saudi mosque schools and universities have become hothouses of militant Islam, the breeding grounds of Sunni global terrorism. Bali, Kenya, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Lower Manhattan all point back to these schools, to Saudi Arabia.
Even while the Saudis spew hatred of America, Washington nurtures this Islamic virus. Why? Not because the Saudi government spends more per capita than any other country in the world on arms, but because much of those arms come from U.S. arms dealers. According to Baer, two-way trade between Saudi Arabia and the United States in 2000 was almost $20 billion.
Thus, while the U.S. arms the Saudis, the Saudis call for "a world without America" -- as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has put it.
Now let's go back to 9/11. It's well known that 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi nationals. According to the law, those 15 Saudis should not have been issued visas. By issuing visas to these (unemployed) Saudis, the State Department broke the law.
The Saudis, says Baer, fed the ATM machines for the 9/11 hijackers. Moreover, "When NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, they found before-and-after photos of the destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of the World Trade Center (when it still stood), and of the U.S.S. Cole, as well as...materials for forging official U.S. identity cards."
Baer notes that every Washington think tank has taken Saudi money, as have numerous lobbyists, PR firms, lawyers, and every presidential library of the last thirty years. Nor is this all.
Despite CIA censorship, Sleeping With The Devil reveals that there is hardly a living former CIA director, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, White House staffer, or member of Congress who hasn't ended up on the Saudi payroll in one way of another. "At the corporate level, almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has served on the board of at least one company that did a deal with Saudi Arabia."
Baer's conclusion: While Saudi Arabia buys U.S. arms, we buy Saudi oil, refine it, and put it in our automobiles, and a certain small percentage of what we pay for ends up funding terrorist acts against America and American institutions at home and abroad.
Now Israelis can better understand why Washington endorsed the Road Map to a Palestinian state initiated by Saudi Arabia. But wait!
Surely Baer's revelations are known to Israel's ruling elites. If so, why doesn't Israel's government -- with plausible deniability -- expose Washington?s cohabitation with Saudi Arabia? Instead of the milk-and-toast hasbara that is supposed to endear Americans to Israel, why doesn't the government leak information about this conspiracy? Is this reticence of Israel's ruling elites a matter of timidity or of complicity?
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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