When is the Saudi monarchy going to wake up and get with the program (see article below)? Their regime is in danger and looking the other way will not remove the danger. It wouldn't be surprising if terrorists used anthrax, bombs or other weapons in the royal palace.
BTW, The anthrax being used is in a very fine powder form so that it is easier to be inhaled. Perhaps its wishful thinking, but since the terrorists sending the anthrax through the mail most probably do not have the outfits we see on TV for handling this stuff, isn't it likely that sooner or later they will be found dead of anthrax?
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Probe Unraveling Saudis' Role
Southwestern Region Seen as a Center of Al Qaeda Activity
By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 17, 2001; Page A16
ABHA, Saudi Arabia -- After tracing the backgrounds and travel patterns of as many as nine Saudis suspected in the Sept. 11 airliner hijackings, U.S. investigators have concluded that some of the recruiting and planning for the attacks took place in Saudi Arabia, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.
Investigators have found evidence of an active branch of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network operating mainly in southwestern areas of the kingdom, where people have also been linked to the October 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole in a Yemeni port.
The bin Laden operatives are thought to have assembled a core of young men who in most cases acted not as pilots but as "muscle" to seize control of the airplanes, according the official, who declined to elaborate.
Beginning in the spring of 2000 and continuing through December, the men departed the kingdom in a trickle, never more than a pair at a time. Some first transited through Germany and Russia's breakaway province of Chechnya, and some traveled directly to the United States. They left behind only vague travel plans with their families.
The first to depart from Saudi Arabia was apparently Hamza Alghamdi, who local papers reported had left his home of Baljurshi a year and a half ago, saying he was bound for Chechnya, where foreign volunteers help Muslim rebels battle Russian forces.
Three of the suspected hijackers were last seen by their families as they departed for a trip to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, with talk of hoping to participate in unspecified Islamic relief work abroad, according to local press accounts.
Ahmed Alnami, a mosque prayer leader in Abha and former student at the King Khaled University Islamic law school, was reported in the local al-Watan newspaper to have left home in the summer of 2000. Brothers Wail M. and Waleed M. Alshehri left on a similar route in December from the nearby village of Khamis Mushayt, according to local press accounts.
That is the same month that another Saudi hijacker, Hani Hanjour, arrived in the United States, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
It is not certain, U.S. officials say, whether the recruits knew the exact nature of the operation being planned. It is likely they left knowing only that they were to take part in a terrorist operation "in a certain time, at a certain place."
Only one, Hanjour, is suspected of piloting a plane, with the others providing the physical support needed to subdue or kill crew members and gain control.
Like they have in Germany, investigators are discovering that Saudi Arabia -- the world's largest oil producer and a close diplomatic, financial and military partner of the United States -- was a center of gravity in the planning for the operation.
U.S. investigators suggest there was a more active bin Laden network here than previously thought. It was able to recruit young men and provide enough coordination and support to get them, undetected, into the United States with money and contacts to support them over several months as the final details of the assault were arranged.
Coming from mostly middle-class families with no obvious connections to radical or dissident groups, the men would have blended easily into the stream of thousands of Saudi visa applicants who pass through the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh or the Jiddah consulate each year.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities identified as many as nine Saudis among the 19 suspected hijackers. But Saudi officials publicly questioned whether their citizens were involved, while complaining that the United States had been slow in providing investigative leads. "There were 400 people aboard the four planes and we find it strange that the focus is on Arabs, and Saudis in particular," the interior minister, Prince Nayef, told the Saudi Press Agency on Sunday.
Early confusion over names and identifications added to public and official doubts about the depth of Saudi involvement: Hundreds of Saudis in a provincial city such as Abha might share the same first and last names, and local papers made a sport in the early days of finding suspected hijackers alive and well at their homes.
Another leading Saudi military official this week played down the significance of the hijackers' Saudi roots, arguing that because none of them came from the central Najd region, the base of the Saudi monarchy, they were simply "derailed" individuals outside the "fabric" of the kingdom.
However, top Saudi officials acknowledge that Saudi citizens were in all probability on the plane.
Foreign diplomats here say that the government is also concerned that the presence of a large bin Laden network within the kingdom's borders represents a serious internal security issue.
One of bin Laden's chief goals is toppling the Saudi monarchy, which he regards as corrupt and un-Islamic because it is allied militarily with the United States and has allowed U.S. troops to remain here since the Persian Gulf War a decade ago.
Though it is impossible to gauge the depth of support for bin Laden's views, even Western-oriented Saudis say his rhetoric strikes a chord in Saudi society.
In recent fatwas, or religious edicts, some prominent religious figures have come close to saying that King Fahd and other Saudi rulers are infidels for not joining a holy war against the United States. Such statements challenged the monarchy's legitimacy as leaders of a state based on Islamic law and home of the faith's holy sites in Mecca and Medina.
"Whoever supports the infidel against Muslims is considered an infidel," Sheik Hamoud Oqla Shuaibi said in an opinion issued after the Sept. 11 attacks. "It is a duty to wage jihad on anyone who attacks Afghanistan."
In this environment, Saudi investigators "are well on the road to developing leads" from the areas where the suspects grew up and were drawn into al Qaeda, a U.S. official said. "On the official level they recognize that they have a serious problem -- that Osama bin Laden is able to operate" in Saudi Arabia, even though the country has officially ostracized him, stripped him of citizenship and tried to suppress the voices of those who share his views.
The sensitivity of the issue is evident in Abha, capital of a region suspected to have produced four of the hijackers.
The Saudis have been trying to promote the town and the province for tourism, opening a five-star hotel and a hospitality college, in hopes of persuading Saudis to spend their summers in the cool mountain forests of Asir province instead of in Beirut, Cairo or the West.
But one local military officer, stationed here for more than a decade, spoke of the province as a tribal and suspicious place. One longtime resident said the entire southwest of Saudi Arabia has become more religiously conservative in the last 20 years.
Signs of that are clear: Abha is home to a college of Sharia, or Islamic law, attended by one of the suspected hijackers. At a local hotel, the owner recently pulled the plug on his satellite television connection because he was disturbed by the content; he would allow only the two local Saudi channels.
And the province is sensitive about the implications of its role in the hijackings. Foreign journalists arriving here have been refused permission to conduct interviews and have been told to leave.
While Abha appears outwardly like almost any other Saudi town, the province was the last to be brought under the rule of the Saud family, about 70 years ago. Like other southwestern provinces, it still maintains a sense of distance from Riyadh. Until a year ago, there was not even agreement on the border between that area of Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen, where an ultra-conservative Islamic university is located and tribal leaders have given bin Laden an open offer of sanctuary.
Investigators probing the Cole bombing found direct links to people in the Saudi southwest. The boat that carried explosives and suicide bombers across Aden harbor to the destroyer, for example, was purchased in Jizan, just north of the Yemen border, a U.S. official said. In addition, investigative leads followed by those examining the Cole bombing "disappeared" into southwestern Saudi Arabia, said a U.S. official familiar with the investigation.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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