Even when our politicians use complete candor they are nothing but infuriating:
LONDON, June 7 — Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family and the kingdom’s former ambassador to the United States, pocketed about $2 billion in secret payments as part of a $80 billion arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia first signed in 1985, British media reported Thursday.
The reports revived questions about the British government’s decision in December to drop a fraud investigation into the deal, which has been plagued by allegations of bribes and secret slush funds for almost two decades.
In remarks Thursday, Prime Minister Tony Blair did not comment directly on the reports made on the BBC and in the Guardian newspaper. But he repeated his often-made defense of the decision to drop the investigation on national security grounds.
“This investigation, if it had it gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family,” Blair said at a meeting of the Group of Eight nations in Germany.
He added, “My job is to give advice as to whether that is a sensible thing in circumstances where I don’t believe the investigation incidentally would have led anywhere except to the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship for our country. . . . Quite apart from the fact that we would have lost thousands, thousands of British jobs.”
This is Britain’s problem, not ours, but it’s no different than the system we have here. Prince Bandar pockets $2 billion in an arms deal? The Saudi people don’t see that money, the British people never get that money back. It should not be forgotten that Prince Bandar’s wife wired money, indirectly, to the San Diego hijackers. I always thought it was pretty clever to set her up like that. I’m sure if she had intended to fund 9/11 she would have found a more discreet way of doing it. Nonetheless, there’s a reason the Saudi people hate their royal family and take it out on us. This is one of those reasons.