The wife of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas report in the magazine’s December 2 issue. Mr. al-Bayoumi greeted two of the Sept. 11 hijackers upon their arrival in America, guaranteed the lease on their apartment, helped them open a bank account, and helped them arrange flying lessons, the magazine reports. Mr. Basnan, who had also befriended the two hijackers, was known as a vocal sympathizer of Al Qaeda, Newsweek says. After September 11, he “celebrated the heroes of September 11” and talked about “what a wonderful, glorious day it had been,” a law-enforcement official told the magazine.

Newsweek is careful to note that the money trail between the Saudi ambassador’s wife and these two men “could be perfectly innocent.”The Saudis claim they routinely give out money to subjects in distress who ask the embassy. Still, this is the context in which the Saudi kingdom has engaged the heavyweight Washington firm of Patton Boggs, whose partners include former Clinton White House scandal spokesman Lanny Davis. The New York Sun’s Adam Daifallah reported Friday that Patton Boggs and two other firms are refusing to cooperate with a congressional subpoena of their billing records, claiming what might be called a “lobbyists privilege.”

The Saudi public relations effort so far seems to have been a stunning success at the New York Times. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof and deputy editorial page editor Philip Taubman all visited Saudi Arabia recently. Mr. Taubman wrote for the Times on November 15 that “Crown Prince Abdullah is by all accounts a thoughtful, uncorrupted ruler.” Mr. Kristof wrote on October 22, “There’s plenty to criticize about Saudi Arabia, but this vision of it as a dangerous enemy is way over the top. … It’s absurd to imagine the Saudi government intentionally promoting people like Osama bin Laden when Osama’s first target was the Saudi royal family itself.” He went on from Riyadh: “To my ear the harsh denunciations of Saudi Arabia as a terrorist state sound as unbalanced as the conspiratorial ravings of Saudi fundamentalists themselves.”

Another aspect of the Saudi public relations campaign, our Mr. Daifallah reported last week, is a $500,000 donation by a Saudi Prince to the Council on American Islamic Relations. That will pay for books in American public libraries, like one by a former United States congressman, Paul Findley, who claims that the September 11 attack “had its principal origin 35 years ago when Israel’s U.S. lobby began its unbroken success.” The Findley book claims that the reason Hamas and Hezbollah are on the American list of terrorist groups is the “pro-Israel bias of government leaders.”

Yet another aspect of the Saudi campaign upon which our Mr. Daifallah has reported is the creation, with some $17 million in funding, of the Arab Thought Foundation. Earlier this month in Washington, it hosted a conference with Fortune magazine at which the editor of a quasi-official Saudi newspaper, Arab News, referred to the Zionist lobby as “subhuman.” That’s the same editor, Khaled Al-Maeena, who Mr. Taubman said reminded him of the daring Russian newspaper editors testing the limits of glasnost in the waning days of the Soviet Union.

Meantime, the Saudis could save themselves the money on library books and foundations and the $200,000 a month they are reportedly paying Patton, Boggs and company if the kingdom simply stopped funding terrorists and started adjusting to the spread of freedom and democracy that has taken hold elsewhere in the world. The kingdom could free the kidnapped Americans trapped within its realm. It could comply with the congressional subpoenas. It could stop propagating anti-Semitism. Until it takes these steps and others like them, no amount of public relations spending will bamboozle the American people, who are perfectly capable of telling the difference between our friends and enemies.