Saudi Arabia and radicalism
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Saudi Arabia and radicalism concerns a position John Kiriakou presents as long-standing rather than newly arrived at: "I have always believed that Saudi Arabia was the primary generator and creator of radicals and radical movements around not just the region but around the world."

Not the government alone

The distinction he insists on is that the source is not a policy but a system. It is not just the government that does this and supports this extremism, he says, but the entire structure of government and society in Saudi Arabia.

His illustration is the clerical establishment. He points to a former chairman, Sheikh bin Baz, who swore until the day he died that the earth was flat and that anyone who argued the earth was round was subject to the death penalty. Of the successor he identifies only as coming from a very honourable and very old family, the name is rendered "Kakani" in the automatic transcript and is not corroborated elsewhere in the corpus, he says he has done absolutely nothing to improve human rights, political discourse or the rights of women. What this amounts to, in his summary, is a group of religious extremists who tell the government and its leaders what they should think and what they should do.

The private exemption

Kiriakou sets against this the conduct of the people the system nominally binds. Behind closed doors, he says, they think and do whatever they want: most if not all of the senior royals drink alcohol and consort with women, doing the things the average Saudi is not allowed to do, while in Saudi Arabia everybody else is expected to toe the line.

The groups abroad

Internationally he describes a government in Riyadh that supports movements the United States, and specifically the State Department, has formally identified as terrorist groups. The examples he gives are the Nusra Front, some of the jihadi groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, and a Southeast Asian movement he names after Hambali.

The position this leaves the United States in is the point of the passage: an American government fighting these groups around the world when its friends are organising and financing them, and doing so openly, since in his account the Saudis "think nothing of just flouting that to us."

See also

- The U.S.,Saudi relationship
- ISIS
- Saudi aid priorities
- The Saudi fear of an election
- Saudi princes and 9/11
