I have been waiting to read some news for a whole month now. Waiting very confidently, as a matter of fact. But it’s starting to look like this news isn’t going to happen. And that in itself strikes me as constituting news.

You may recall the strange and curious tale of Prince Bandar, and BAE Systems, and the British government. That story of corruption that is not corruption, of under-the-table payments that are not bribes.

It was “Britain’s biggest ever arms deal”, worth $87 billion. An arms deal of that size, of course, was negotiated only with the active participation of the British government. In fact, the “contract was between the British and Saudi governments, not between BAE and Saudi Arabia, and … BAE was only the contractor.” The Saudis demanded that $2 billion be paid surreptitiously into secret accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington, accounts said to be controlled by Prince Bandar. The British government blessed this arrangement, and BAE Systems implemented it. The payments date back to the 1980s. When the existence of these payments threatened to come to light recently, “British investigators were ordered by the attorney-general Lord Goldsmith” to conceal them from “international anti-bribery watchdogs”.

The fact that Prince Bandar is still walking around with all his limbs attached (other body parts too, presumably) tends to support his claim that the payments were not bribes to him, that the Riggs Bank accounts were controlled by the Saudi ministry of defence and aviation and audited by the Saudi ministry of finance. And I say this because the Saudi government has what can only be described as an extremely medieval concept of justice. Steal from the Saudi government or the Saudi royal family (same difference), and miscellaneous body parts will start detaching themselves from you. And this doesn’t seem to have happened to Prince Bandar.

We learned a whole month ago that the Justice Department — relentless in its prosecution of justice and its persecution of the unjust — was launching an investigation of BAE Systems:

…the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether BAE Systems, the British defense corporation accused of bribing ex-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, has violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Act is meant to prevent companies engaged in bribery from doing business in the United States. Bandar’s alleged payoffs are only one element in the inquiry, as the British government’s Serious Fraud Office has linked BAE to fraud cases in Tanzania, South Africa, Chile, the Czech Republic, Qatar and Romania.

Fair enough, I said to myself. Just as expected. Now let’s wait for the other shoe to drop.

Because Saudi Arabia doesn’t buy arms only from the British. Over the years they’ve done a tidy arms business with the U.S. too. There may not be any deals the size of the BAE contract, but there are several that ran into the billions. For example, an IHT story in November 2006 said:

Saudi Arabia said in July that it planned to spend $5.8 billion on American weapons to modernize its National Guard and will also put in more than $3 billion in orders for Black Hawk helicopters, armored land vehicles and other products.

And remember that the BAE payments date back to the 80s. That’s a lot of billions when you go back so many years.

Now Tony Snow may believe that the Saudis had surreptitious payment arrangements only with the British—and I’ll bet good money that he does believe exactly that. But George and Laura and Barney are probably the only others who believe this.

Common sense dictates if they were doing this with the British, they were doing it with the Americans too.

Common sense therefore dictates that if the Justice Department is going to launch an investigation of BAE, they should also be investigating American companies who sold arms to Saudi Arabia.

So why isn’t it happening?

By now it is well-established that laws don’t apply to Bush, or to anyone in his administration who qualifies as a loyal Bushie (or knows where the bodies are buried). Are we now in the process of learning that it doesn’t apply to anyone who’s on BFF terms with Bush either?