That was fast

I mentioned that I thought the story about some of the guns found in an al-Qaeda safehouse being tracked back to the Saudi national guard would be down played, but I wasn't quite expecting to see it this soon.

Whenever I open my browser, I've got Google News set as my home page, so I can see if anything new is going on. I just opened my browser after being off line for a few hours, and the story is nowhere on their main page. Granted, stories do get rotated through there, and it may show up again later, but usually, really big stories stay on the front page for a day or two - if not in the very top section, then in one of the lower sections on that first page. It isn't even listed in the "In The News" section that gives 2 or 3 word "headers" with links to stories on those subjects.

Hopefully, this is just a momentary anomoly, but I don't have a lot of confidence in that. This is exactly the kind of story that the Bush administration would want to keep quiet, simply because it could be rather embarassing to him. I mean, we just fought a war and toppled a government that Bush claimed had WMD, which it might give to al-Qaeda, and had other ties to al-Qaeda as well. Of course, so far, nothing reliable has turned up to give credence to either of these claims (and yes, I am aware that there were papers "found" by a reporter, in a building the US had been guarding, indicating a link, but I don't consider that to be "reliable"), yet here we have one of our allies, a country that has produced many terrorists - including most of the terrorists who took part in the 9/11 bombings - that we find out has military officers selling weapons to al-Qaeda - and we're not doing much, if anything, about it.

I can't even begin to imagine what would have happened if, during the lead-up to the war, word had gotten out that officers from Saddam's Republican Guards had sold guns to al-Qaeda. At the very least, it would have been proclaimed as evidence that Iraq was cooperating al-Qaeda and used as further justification for attacking them. I have no doubt that the leaders of Saudi Arabia will claim that they "didn't know" what these officers were doing, yet there's also evidence that, for quite some time, weapon inventories had indicated that weapons were missing, and they hadn't taken steps to find out what was happening or where the weapons were going. Even if the government officials didn't know specifically where the weapons were going, they had to know it was a possiblity that terrorist groups would want to buy them - and probably were.

As I said in my earlier post, I'm not advocating attacking Saudi Arabia or overthrowing their government - that would be an extremely serious over-reaction. I do think, however, that we need to take a very close look at them, and why we consider them allies.