[url]http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/134470476_prince08.html[/url]
[red]Excerpted relevant paragraphs:[/red]
Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a member of the royal family that rules Saudi Arabia, is chairman of one of his nation's largest media empires, [b]whose newspapers have angered some Saudis by denouncing Islamic militancy and Osama bin Laden.[/b]
Salman's father, governor of the capital of Riyadh, is fourth or fifth in line to the throne, said Youssef Ibrahim, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and former Mideast correspondent for The New York Times.
"His father is an extremely important personality and also one of the most enlightened," Ibrahim said.
The media company Salman operates publishes a number of important newspapers, including Asharq Al-Awsat, which raised eyebrows in Riyadh when [b]it began running columns by The New York Times' Thomas Friedman. In a break with Arab media orthodoxy, it uses the term "suicide attackers" rather than "martyrs" when referring to Israel bombings in news reports.[/b]
Although hardly independent of the Saudi government, the paper is published in London and circulated widely in Saudi Arabia, an arrangement that frees it of the most severe censorship.
Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Center, said Salman's papers are among the most liberal in the Arab media but are not free of offensive content. The Salman-published, English-language Arab News, for example, recently carried a dispatch by former Klansman and American white-power advocate David Duke that claimed Israel "aided and abetted" the Sept. 11 attacks.
Salman was buying horses at an auction in Lexington, Ky., on Sept. 11, when planes hijacked by 19 men — 15 of them Saudi citizens — slammed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
[b]Salman was quoted in the next day's Lexington Herald-Leader saying, "It's just a catastrophe. It's like it happened to Arabia. This is my second home. What happens to America happens to Arabia."[/b]
[b]His prescription: "We gotta get them and get them big. And do like we do in Arabia: an eye for an eye."[/b]
[b]Salman's friend Collier was with the prince that day and described him as "shocked and horrified."[/b]