Military

DATE=08/23/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=FRANK GAFFNEY, U-S ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

NUMBER=3-311

BYLINE=REBECCA WARD

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

/// Editors: This interview is available in Dalet under SOD/English News Now Interviews in the folder for today or yesterday ///

HOST: A senior member of the Saudi royal family is denying a report that Saudi investors recently withdrew 200-billion dollars from U-S markets -- fearing that their assets could be frozen. Prince al-Waleed bin Talal says there may have been some withdrawals, but not on the scale reported by the Financial Times Wednesday. U-S-Saudi ties have been strained because the September 11th terror attacks involved at least 15 Saudi nationals. News Now's Rebecca Ward asked former U-S Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney about alleged links between Saudi nationals and terrorism.

MR. GAFFNEY: There have been Saudi families associated with organizations, charitable organizations, in the United States, specifically, I believe the SAAR Trust and Safa Trust, or Safa Foundation, something like that, that have been placed under investigation or even raided in Federal investigations of entities that are suspected of having financial ties to terrorist organizations, including those of al-Qaida. Now, I don't know that that link has been proven, but it is certainly one that has been sufficiently seriously considered as to precipitate that kind of step. And I have the feeling that between members of the Saudi royal family, other Saudi government affiliated entities, and private and corporate entities in the Kingdom that are known to be sympathetic to or have certainly expressed sympathy for al-Qaida and various Palestinian factions, and, for that matter, Wahhabist proselytizing operations that espouse an Islamist theology and political agenda indistinguishable, for all intents and purposes, from that of Osama bin Laden, suggest that there are indeed far-reaching links between these Saudi entities and enterprises and individuals and the terrorists with whom we are now concerned.

MS. WARD: It seems to me, though, that since Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is really opposed to the monarchy, it seems to me those links would or should be weak.

MR. GAFFNEY: Well, the Faustian deal that the Saudi royal family, which is of course a huge amalgamation of individuals with wildly divergent views on domestic policy as well as international affairs, but as a group, they have struck a bargain with Osama bin Laden and, as I say, the Wahhabist theocrats, that basically they can run the religious life of the Kingdom and they can have, in the case of bin Laden particularly, after the Afghanistan war, they can have the run of the rest of the world as long as they don't try to do anything to jeopardize the Kingdom's government and royal family itself. Now, whether that is anything that bin Laden has been trying to do or not I think is a matter of some debate. His family continues to operate at the highest levels of Saudi society, with billions of dollars being made and exchanged by it. It is hard to imagine that if a member of that family were really viewed as serious a threat as your question would suggest by the royal family that that would be allowed to continue in a very authoritarian regime like that of Saudi Arabia.

But, more to the point, I think that bin Laden and his followers have in the past not so much disagreed with what the royal family was doing, with the notable exception of allowing the Kingdom to be sullied by the presence of American forces, and of course I'm sure to some extent their corruption, but the general thrust of particularly Saudi support for Wahhabism I think would not be objected to by bin~Laden. And therefore there seems to me to be less to this notion that these two groups were at each other's throats than we are sometimes told.

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