The US House of Representatives has voted to deny all aid to Saudi Arabia, despite repeated assurances by the Bush administration that the desert kingdom is cooperating in its "war on terror."
As many as 61 percent of all suicide bombers in Iraq are of Saudi Arabian descent, it is claimed. The lawmakers also argued that Saudi clerics continued to preach hate towards the United States, Israel and their allies.
The ban is contained in a little-publicized amendment quietly slipped by a bipartisan group of lawmakers into a 34.2-billion-dollar bill that finances US foreign operations in the 2008 fiscal year. Similar measures on aid to Saudi Arabia have been passed before by the House. But the current one goes a step further by closing a legislative loophole that in the past had allowed the administration of President George W. Bush to waive these bans by invoking requirements of its war on terror.
While oil-rich Saudi Arabia has never been a large recipient of US aid, the Bush administration channeled a total of more than 2.5 million dollars to the kingdom in fiscal 2005 and 2006 as part of their partnership in the war on terror, congressional officials said.
Mohammed al-Zulfa of Saudi Arabia's consultative Shura Council said the US action "represents one method out of several that the US Congress has used to pressure the Saudi government into carrying out reforms, whether in the fields of human rights or religious freedom."
The ban is contained in a little-publicized amendment quietly slipped by a bipartisan group of lawmakers into a 34.2-billion-dollar bill that finances US foreign operations in the 2008 fiscal year. Similar measures on aid to Saudi Arabia have been passed before by the House. But the current one goes a step further by closing a legislative loophole that in the past had allowed the administration of President George W. Bush to waive these bans by invoking requirements of its war on terror.While oil-rich Saudi Arabia has never been a large recipient of US aid, the Bush administration channeled a total of more than 2.5 million dollars to the kingdom in fiscal 2005 and 2006 as part of their partnership in the war on terror, congressional officials said.
Mohammed al-Zulfa of Saudi Arabia's consultative Shura Council said the US action "represents one method out of several that the US Congress has used to pressure the Saudi government into carrying out reforms, whether in the fields of human rights or religious freedom."
[AFP]
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