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Washington — Last month, when Saudi Foreign Minister Saud appeared on the south driveway of the White House after President Bush "turned down" his nation's request to declassify 28 pages of the congressional inquiry into 9-11, the Crown Prince appeared appropriately outraged. This was as close to Kabuki theatre as it gets in Washington.

Prince Saud arrived on a private jet from his homeland in a last-ditch attempt to save what remained of the illusion that Saudi Arabia was a friend of the American people. Bush's family and friends and the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, had already blotted Bandar's copybook for arranging to evacuate the bin Laden clan from Afghanistan after 9-11. The stain got bigger after his wife's money ended up in the bank account of one of the hijackers. Bandar made sure she was moved out of the country.

An unholy alliance between the United States and the Saudi monarchy goes on despite 3,000 dead Americans, who died at the hands of 15 (of 19) Saudi terrorists. The president and the Saudis remain engaged in an effort to protect the Royal family and the reputation of our president's father. The Saudis have steadfastly not cooperated in a series of investigations into terrorist attacks on Americans. The fact that the 9-11 report found direct connections between two hijackers and Saudis with ties to both Saudi intelligence and the Royal family was shocking enough. To watch President Bush conceal this information from the American public and the families of the victims in the name of national security was painful to the survivors of the attacks.

So far, the media has been very kind to the Bush family regarding its long-standing personal and financial connections to the House of Saud. It is time to start talking about what Saudi Arabia and the United States have been doing together that the president believes is worth keeping secret from the survivors of the dead. As we dissect the relationship, it will become apparent that what the White House is protecting is a melding of Saudi and U.S. intelligence activities that began in the 1970s during the time the president's father ran the CIA.

The late Sheik Kamal Adham convinced the United States to engage in secret operations to fund the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels (which later turned into the U.S.-hating Taliban) and to secretly back Saddam Hussein in his insane war against Iran, which destroyed more than a million lives. While the Sheik and his protégé, Prince Turki, were conspiring with the United States to start proxy wars, they were deeply involved in setting up the funding mechanism that created the first Arab nuclear state, Pakistan. Sadly, George H. W. Bush looked the other way as the Saudis poured billions into Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The United States did this because we believed the Saudis' help was invaluable in supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan. What we failed to notice was that the most extreme elements in Islam were being funded and recruited by Prince Turki's minions in order to placate home-grown Islamic extremism.

By 1989 the Soviets had been routed and we abandoned the mujahideen in Afghanistan. In the process, the banking entity the CIA and Saudis had used for their undercover operations had gone bust, and both the CIA and Saudis needed new means for moving money for operations. The always-accommodating Royal family and their 20,000 cousins came through. Wealthy family members and their business associates pitched in. They even set-up a network of charities that would be perfect for moving intelligence funds around the world. Some of those charities began operations in the United States. The people running the charities were never told exactly how all the money they were moving would be used. The Saudis would help the United States with operations and fund some of their own intelligence operatives. But the Saudis decided to keep servicing Osama bin Laden's operations through the charities as well as allow a few money-moving favors for the CIA.

There was another problem: Two of the hijackers—part of the team that flew a plane into the Pentagon—had very visible connections to Saudi intelligence and the CIA. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were well known to the CIA and FBI. The claim that an FBI informant in San Diego who knew the men and assisted them but never mentioned any of this to his FBI handlers has another, darker explanation. A former CIA officer who worked in Saudi Arabia described what he says happened: "We had been unable to penetrate al-Qaeda. The Saudi's claimed that they had done it successfully. Both al-Hazimi and al-Mihdhar were Saudi agents. We thought they had been screened. It turned out the man responsible for recruiting them had been loyal to Osama bin Laden. The truth is bin Laden himself was a Saudi agent at one time. He successfully penetrated Saudi intelligence and created his own operation inside. The CIA relied on the Saudis vetting their own agents. It was a huge mistake. The reason the FBI was not given any information about either man is because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States."

It is clear that the hijackers who hit the Pentagon had more than casual connections to Saudi government officials and cash prior to the attacks. Two Saudis, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, who both had extensive connections to the Saudi government's aviation ministry and Royal family, helped welcome the hijackers to the San Diego Arab community. Both, according to the New York Times, "operated in a complex web of financial relationships with officials of the Saudi government." Perhaps the most tantalizing question is a meeting that took place in Houston shortly after the attacks. While Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah met with President Bush and Bush Sr., Osama Bassnan flew to Houston and met with a member of the Crown Prince's official delegation.