NYT: Saudi royal family lavishes $$$ on terrorist groups

Looks like the lawyers for the families of Sept 11 got tired of trying to get the justice system to hear them, so they took it to the press. They gave the New York Times a stack of damning evidence linking the House of Saud to Al Qaeda, Taliban, and others.  From the article:

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

If this is true, this is a Big Deal.  I don't fully understand why the Saudis would want to support these organizations.  Maybe somebody more versed in the ways of the Middle East can explain it to me.