JICI's investigation focused on Saudi millionaire Abdulaziz al-Hiji and his wife Anoud, whose upscale home was owned by al-Hiji's father, an advisor to Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the nephew of King Fahd.

Several of the future 9/11 hijackers visited the al-Hiji home. And the al-Hiji family abruptly left the U.S. in the weeks before 9/11.

That is not all. Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent last Sunday that donors in Saudi Arabia have played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years.

The U.S. 9/11 Commission concluded in 2002 that "al-Qaeda appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia."

Seven years later, in December 2009, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton in a telegram on "terrorist finance" to U.S. embassies, which was released by WikiLeaks the following year, said: "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups."

Why then did the U.S. and Britain showed such restraint and refrained from pressuring the Saudis? The obvious answer was that they did not want to offend their close ally. The Saudi royal family had used its money to buy into the international ruling class.

Perhaps a more important consideration is that the present-day Sunni jihadists, unlike Osama bin Laden, do not see the United States as their arch enemy. Instead, they are fighting the Shiites, particularly Iran and Syria. That suits Washington and London just fine.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.h5a3.com/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm

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