Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia

With all the debate about the 9/11 Commission’s finding regarding Iraq’s dormant relationship with Al Qaeda, anothe finding has been ignored — the relationship (or lack thereof) between Al Qaeda and the House of Saud. I discuss this in my latest Tech Central Station essay, “About That Commission Report…” Go check it out. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds kindly links to my essay but has the following cavil:

Of course, the force of this point depends to some degree on how much faith one has in the Commission, and I have very little. In addition, the finding that “we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al Qaeda,” strikes me as rather carefully worded.

On the second point — it’s tough to prove a negative statement. If I had been writing the report, that’s exactly how I’d have phrased that finding. It’s true that some evidence could surface that elements of the Saudi government bankrolled Al Qaeda — just like some evidence could emerge linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. On the first point, a lot of the criticism directed at the 9/11 commission staff report was that it was, well, a staff report, but had the imprantur of the 9/11 Commission. William Safire wrote last week (link via Jeff Jarvis):

The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission’s runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow.

I haven’t paid too much attention to the “runaway staff” allegation, so I can’t comment on it one way or the other. I can say that claims that the interim report was a partisan hit job would have to explain the fact that Philip Zelikow was a co-author of Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft with current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — a book that remains the definitive account of how Germany was reunified, by the way. Zelikow might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s a meticulous scholar, and I do trust his rendition of the facts.