U.S. NEWS IS SPOTLIGHTING THE SAUDI TERROR CONNECTION:

For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda’s cash. The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden’s money–his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan–were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was “a constant fundraising machine.” And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia. . . .

Examining the Saudi role in terrorism, a senior intelligence analyst says, was “virtually taboo.” Even after the embassy bombings in Africa, moves by counterterrorism officials to act against the Saudis were repeatedly rebuffed by senior staff at the State Department and elsewhere who felt that other foreign policy interests outweighed fighting terrorism.

Personally, I’d take a close look at those senior staffers:

Saudi largess encouraged U.S. officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say. Billions of dollars in contracts, grants, and salaries have gone to a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis: ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even cabinet secretaries.

Hmm. A real close look.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

There are more than a few (somewhat veiled) references to this sort of thing during the British colonial era. A suspiciously large number of British colonial officials retired on substantial pensions paid for by various Sultans and Emirs. I’m most familiar with this from the Sudan, but have seen references to it in the Middle East, too. My point is that the above quote doesn’t represent anything new in the tradition of (dare I say it) Anglosphere political interaction in the Dar al-Islam.

Audit these guys. It’s interesting to me that Democrats and journalists don’t make more of the Bush connection to the Saudis, and how easy the Administration has been on them (though that does seem to be changing a bit now). But I fear that the reason is that a lot of Democrats and journalists have been at the Saudi trough as well.