Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2007

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001) mandates that all states refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, take the necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts, and deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts.

In 2004, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that it knew of not a single Saudi donor of funds to terrorist groups who has been publicly punished.

In his July 2005 testimony to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate, Stewart Levey, the Undersecretary for the Office of Terrorism and Financing Intelligence of the Department of the Treasury, reported that even today, we believe that Saudi donors may still be a significant source of terrorist financing, including for the insurgency in Iraq. He added that Saudi financiers and charities remain a key source for the promotion of ideologies used by terrorists and violent extremists.

According to a July 27, 2007 New York Times article, Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow..

According to a July 15, 2007 Los Angeles Times article, About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia … according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said. Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity..

The Center for Religious Freedom, formerly affiliated with Freedom House, in a 2006 report entitled Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance, stated that despite 2005 statements by the Saudi Foreign Minister that their educational curricula have been reformed, this is simply not the case. Contrarily, religious textbooks continue to advocate the destruction of any non-Wahhabi Muslim. Saudi Arabia has established Wahhabism, an extreme form of Islam, as the official state doctrine, and about 5,000,000 children are instructed each year in Islamic studies using Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks.

A Fall 2007 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom report stated Due to insufficient information provided by the Saudi government, the Commission could not verify that a formal mechanism exists within the Saudi government to review thoroughly and revise educational texts and other materials sent outside of Saudi Arabia. It appears that the Saudi government has made little or no progress on efforts to halt the exportation of extremist ideology outside the Kingdom..

A September 2005 Government Accountability Office report stated that Saudi Arabia’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry, although largely owned by the government, has fostered the creation of large private fortunes, enabling many wealthy Saudis to sponsor charities and educational foundations whose operations extend to many countries. United States Government and other expert reports have linked some Saudi donations to the global propagation of religious intolerance, hatred of Western values, and support of terrorist activities.

A June 2004 press release on the website of the Saudi embassy, www.saudiembassy.net, discussed the creation of the Saudi National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad, a nongovernmental body designed to take over all aspects of private overseas aid operations and assume responsibility for the distribution of private charitable donations from Saudi Arabia in order to guard against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. As of late 2007, this Commission had not been created.

In a February 2006 open Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on the World Wide Threat, former Director of National Intelligence and current Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, stated that there are private Saudi citizens who still engage in these kinds of donations [in which money is transferred back door to terrorists].

A March 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that at least 5 persons listed as beneficiaries of the Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada were suspected suicide bombers.

During November 8, 2005 testimony on Saudi Arabia before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security of the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate, Steve Emerson, terrorism expert and Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, stated that despite repeated declarations by Saudi officials that there has been substantial reform in education, progress against terrorism, and movement toward transparency, a review of other Saudi announcements shows that they have either specifically failed to follow through or cannot be proven to have followed through on their pledges. He also noted that the Saudi government established the Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada, which was proven to provide aid to Palestinian terrorist groups. During an Israeli raid on a Hamas institution, they discovered a spreadsheet from the aforementioned committee giving a detailed account about how they received $545,000 from the committee to allocate to 102 families of so-called martyrs. The spreadsheet included the names of 8 suicide bombers.

A January 2007 Congressional Research Service Report on Saudi Arabia’s terrorist-financing activities indicated that although the records portion of the Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada was deactivated in March 2005, of the 1,300 listed beneficiaries, over 60 matched or closely resembled the names of known Palestinian militants who carried out attacks against Israel between October 2000 and March 2002.

The final report of the Presidentially-appointed Iraq Study Group stated that funding for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq comes from private donors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

A January 2005 report by the Center for Religious Freedom found that Saudi Arabia was creating and distributing, through its embassy in Washington, D.C., material promoting hatred, intolerance, and violence at mosques and Islamic centers in the United States.

On December 14, 2005, R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence wrote, Over the long run, this movement [Wahhabism] is in many ways the most dangerous of the ideological enemies we face. Mr. Woolsey also explained that al Qaeda and the Wahhabis share essentially the same underlying totalitarian theocratic ideology. It is this common Salafist ideology that the Wahhabis have been spreading widely — financed by $3–4 billion/year from the Saudi government and wealthy individuals in the Middle East over the last quarter century — to the madrassas of Pakistan, the textbooks of Turkish children in Germany, and the mosques of Europe and the U.S..

According to a May 2006 report by the Center for Religious Freedom, official Saudi religious textbooks continue to teach hatred of those who do not follow Wahhabi Muslim doctrine and encourage jihad against such infidels and the Saudi public school religious curriculum continues to propagate an ideology of hate toward the unbeliever … [A] text instructs students that it is a religious obligation to do battle against infidels in order to spread the faith.

In May 2006, the Congressional Research Service reported that Saudi Arabia has discussed increasing boycott efforts against Israel, despite their WTO [World Trade Organization] obligations.

it is imperative that the Government of Saudi Arabia immediately and unconditionally—

the President, in determining whether to make the certification described in section 4, should judge whether the Government of Saudi Arabia has continued and sufficiently expanded its efforts to combat terrorism since the May 12, 2003 bombing in Riyadh.

is fully cooperating with the United States in investigating and preventing terrorist attacks;

has permanently closed all Saudi-based Wahhabbist organizations that fund Islamic extremism, internally and abroad;

has exercised maximum efforts to block all funding from private Saudi citizens, corporations, and entities, to foreign Islamic extremist and terrorist movements; and

has stopped financing and disseminating materials, and other forms of support, that encourage the spread of radical Wahhabi ideology.