By ROGER FRANKLIN
Even among his professional rivals in the PR business, Washington spinmeister Michael Petruzzello incites mixed emotions. For those whose outfits have floundered in the wake of the dot-com bomb and September 11, it's a simple case of jealousy. While their receipts nose-dived, the president of Qorvis Communications' job as official US spokesman for the House of Saud has kept him rolling in dough.
There are the others who insist, with varying degrees of sincerity, that Qorvis is welcome to its deep-pockets client. "Ask me if I want to represent Hitler or Saudi Arabia and I'll learn to speak German,"said one of Petruzzello's competitors.
Cleaning up Saudi Arabia's image is a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Consider what Petruzzello and his team are up against: of the 19 mass murderers who claimed 3000-odd lives on September 11, all but a handful entered the US on Saudi passports. In the earlier attack on the World Trade Centre, the plotters who detonated their truck bomb in the Twin Towers parking lot were fired up with fanatic zeal at a New Jersey mosque financed by Saudi dollars.
When the FBI asks for help to investigate terrorists, the Saudis pay lip-service without giving too much away. That is why US investigators have never been able to directly interrogate the suspects who butchered dozens of Americans when they blew up the Khobar Towers in 1996. Even today, as George Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vow to root out evildoers, the Saudis restrict intelligence about the hijackers' backgrounds, associates and financial supporters.
They do not, however, cut the cash intended to buy favour in Washington. Soon after September 11, the Saudis' Washington Embassy approved a US$10 million emergency TV ad campaign in an attempt to colour public opinion - and that was just for cable channels.
As their veteran Washington Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, explained just two days after the attack, airing those ads was a matter of urgency. The news that most of the hijackers were from his homeland left him feeling as if "the Twin Towers had just fallen on my head".
The full extent of the Bush team's determination to protect Saudi Arabia became clear two weeks ago, when the State Department demanded that visa applicants from countries associated with terrorism agree to be fingerprinted. The exception: Saudi Arabia - even though it is the homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the September 11 hijackers.
For that dispensation, the House of Saud has Bandar to thank. Not only is he the longest serving Ambassador in Washington, he is owed an awful lot of favours. When Ronald Reagan's rogue colonel, Oliver North, needed an infusion of quick cash to support the Contras' sly war against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, Bandar produced an immediate $20 million. And when Libya balked at handing over the suspects accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103, Bandar quietly changed Muammar Gaddafi's mind.
Then there are the close relationships the former fighter pilot has enjoyed with every President since arriving in Washington in 1981. The Bush clan are regular guests at his Thanksgiving dinners. His relationship with Bill Clinton was so close that the President's handlers reportedly insisted the ambassador not be allowed into the White House with more than one female companion at a time, in case the pair of infamous ladies men indulged their mutual interest.
These days, Bandar's influence in the White House is more proper but no less pronounced, something that became abundantly clear when an American mother called Monica Stowers recently testified on Capitol Hill about her fruitless attempts to recover her two children, spirited away to the kingdom in 1985 by her estranged Saudi husband.
In 1990, during the reign of Bush the Elder, she managed to get her son and daughter to the US Embassy in Riyadh, where she innocently assumed they could expect sanctuary. Instead, a resident US official not only had her thrown out on the street, he also ordered a guard to drive the kids home to their father.
Another mother, Pat Roush, told how her two children were snatched from their Chicago home and flown to Saudi Arabia, where the youngest was recently forced into an arranged marriage. Like Stowers, she complained that US officials were more interested in making excuses for Saudi despotism than in arranging the return of her children. "All I ever hear from the State Department," she said, is 'Let's look at this from a Saudi's point of view."'
Roush told a radio interviewer she lays the blame at the feet of the Bush clan, which she accused of selective blindness towards a regime that supplies so much of the world's oil.
Maybe she is right, for Bush the Younger has demonstrated a distressing willingness to put expedience above principle. He is, after all, the free-trader who championed steel tariffs, who opposed farm subsidies yet did not hesitate to pump $18 billion into the pockets of agribusiness in an effort to boost his party's standing in the Midwest before the November congressional elections.
So why abandon hypocrisy when it comes to Saudi Arabia? Sure, the kingdom treats women as property, harbours kidnappers, and doesn't care too much if the religious maniacs it funds are used to advocate terrorism against the West.
But why should Bush worry - at least not while the oil is flowing and Petruzzello's glad-handers are hard at work depicting tyrants as a bunch of really swell guys?
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Spinmeisters keep the Saudi image well-oiled
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