US House votes to deny all aid to Saudi Arabia
Afp, Washington
The US House of Representatives has voted to deny all aid to Saudi Arabia, despite repeated assurances by the administration the desert kingdom was cooperating with the United States in the war on terror. The ban is contained in a little-publicised amendment quietly slipped by a bipartisan group of lawmakers into a 34.2-billion-dollar bill financing US foreign operations in fiscal 2008. The massive bill, featuring a wide range of humanitarian programmes, was approved by lawmakers in the middle of the night on Friday. Similar measures on aid to Saudi Arabia have been passed by the House before. But the current one goes a step further by closing a legislative loophole that in the past had allowed the administration of President George W. Bush to waive these bans by invoking requirements of the war on terror. While oil-rich Saudi Arabia has never been a large recipient of US aid, the Bush administration channelled a total of more than 2.5 million dollars to the kingdom in fiscal 2005 and 2006.
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