Christine
Visions Of Life
The Bush-Saudi Connection.
The Bush-Saudi Connection.
In 1920, under a League of Nations mandate, officials
from France and Great Britain carved up vast tracts of
warlord-dominated territories in Arabia into what they
imagined would be nation states devoid of the complex
historical, cultural, and tribal realities of the
Mideast.
Instead of establishing European-style nation states,
the strongest warlords quickly entrenched themselves
with the aid of standing armies and spy networks. In
much of the Mideast, fealty is often accorded to
tribal overlords and the Islamic sects they favor
rather than to the territory and people within the
boundaries of the nation state. Jonathan Rabin
succinctly defines the reality, past and present, of
the desert sheikdoms: "The systems of government that
have evolved in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are
paranoid family dictatorships with ancestral roots in
a single city or village." (1)
Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden make
their appeals to the nation or community of believers,
not to any particular nation state, although the rich
and powerful among the Muslims have founded
Western-style businesses and formed corporations both
inside and outside the boundaries of their native
countries. Because Osama himself is a son of a rich
Saudi family with wide-ranging business interests
throughout the world, the split Saudi personality is
most evident in him and the bin Laden clan. Osama, who
calls America "The Great Satan," has done business
with the infidel Americans whenever it suited him.
Throughout the eighties, when the United States
assisted the Saudis in a giant military buildup of
airfields, ports, and bases throughout the kingdom,
many of the contracts were awarded to the largest
construction company in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi
Binladen Group, founded by Osama bin Laden’s father.
At the same time, the United States trained and armed
troops in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The United
States and Saudi Arabia spent about $40 billion on the
war in Afghanistan, recruiting, supplying, and
training nearly 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty
Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among the
recruits were Osama bin Laden and his followers. (2)
With C.I.A. funding, Osama bin Laden imported
engineers and equipment from his father’s Saudi
construction company to build tunnels for guerrilla
training centers and hospitals, and for arms dumps
near the Pakistan border. After the Soviets withdrew
from Afghanistan, the C.I.A. and the Pakistani
intelligence agency sponsored the Taliban
organization, a government composed of the fanatic
Wahhabi Islamic sect, the same sect that is the state
religion in Saudi Arabia. Although followers of the
Wahhabi sect do not refer to themselves as Wahhabis,
the label is useful because it applies to a single
Muslim group with a set of beliefs peculiar to them
alone: Wahhabis maintain that Shi'ites and Sufis are
not Muslims, and that Muslims should not visit shrines
or celebrate Mohammed’s birthday. (3)
The Saudi sheiks have been Wahhabis since they
intermarried with the family of a puritanical Muslim
scholar, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, in 1774.
Supported first by Britain and later by the United
States, the Saudis captured the Muslim holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, easily gaining control of the entire
Arabian peninsula.
Wherever they ruled, the Wahhabis imposed their
medieval code on their hapless subjects, making public
spectacles of stoning adulterers to death and maiming
thieves, destroying decorated mosques and cemeteries,
prohibiting music, sequestering women, and promoting
war on infidels. The Saudi sheiks have lavished funds
on anti-American and anti-Israeli
terrorists-in-training while indoctrinating other
Muslims through its worldwide network of religious
schools, mosques, newspapers, and presses.
Jihad
The Wahhabi Taliban in Afghanistan had the blessings
of the Saudi royal family and of The Big Three--the
bin Laden family, the al Ahmoudi family, and the
Mahfouz family--the richest clans in that medieval
kingdom. (Khalid bin Mahfouz is bin Laden’s
brother-in-law). The desert oligarchs profited from
world-wide investments as well as sleazy banking
schemes such as the infamous Bank of Credit and
Commerce International.
Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother, has conducted all
his American affairs through James Bath, a Houston
crony of the Bush family. Bath’s former business
partner Bill White testified in court that Bath had
been a liaison for the C.I.A. In 1979 Bath invested
$50,000 in Arbusto, George W. Bush’s first business
venture. Rumor had it that Bath was acting as Salem
bin Laden’s representative. "In conflicting
statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath,
then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was
aware Bath represented Saudi interests." (4)
In addition to doing aviation business with Saudi
sheiks, Bath was part owner of a Houston bank whose
chief stockholder was Ghaith Pharaon, who represented
the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI),
a criminal global bank with branches in 73 countries.
BCCI proceeded to defraud depositors of $10 billion
during the ‘80s, while providing a money laundry
conduit for the Medellin drug cartel, Asia’s major
heroin cartel, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the
C.I.A., and Islamist terrorist organizations
worldwide. (5)
Big Three wheeler-dealer Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of
the largest stockholders in the criminal bank, was
indicted when the massive BCCI banking scandal blew
apart in the early 1990s. The Saudi royal family
placed him under house arrest after discovering that
Mahfouz had used the royal bank to channel millions of
dollars through fake charities into bin Laden’s
organizations, but Mahfouz was not so much punished as
inconvenienced. (6)
Members of the Wahhabist Saudi oligarchy are driven by
the sometimes conflicting emotions of power lust and
religious fervor. Their support of radical Islamists
follows from their ambition to dominate the Muslim
world, but their fear that radical Islamists might
overthrow the Saudi regime at home motivates them to
fund and encourage holy warriors in countries other
than their own.
As Daniel Pipes points out, jihad (holy war) is a
central tenet of Muslim belief . "According to one
calculation, Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles,
of which just one (the Battle of the Ditch) was
defensive. Within a century after the prophet's death
in 632, Muslim armies had reached as far as India in
the east and Spain in the west. " (7)
Pipes traces the bloody advance of fundamentalist
jihadists against their twentieth century
co-religionists. "Islamists, besides adhering to the
primary conception of jihad as armed warfare against
infidels, have also adopted as their own Ibn Taymiya's
call to target impious Muslims. This approach acquired
increased salience through the 20th century as
Islamist thinkers . . . promoted jihad against
putatively Muslim rulers who failed to live up to or
apply the laws of Islam. The revolutionaries who
overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the assassins
who gunned down President Anwar Sadat of Egypt two
years later overtly held to this doctrine. So does
Osama bin Laden."
In 1989, bin Laden established al Qaida (the Base) in
Afghanistan to organize extremist Wahhabis and
disperse their networks throughout the country. A year
later, he returned to Saudi Arabia and founded a
welfare agency for Arab-Afghan veterans. Bin Laden
hoped to mobilize the veterans as a kind of
religious-military army, but King Faud discouraged the
venture. When King Faud invited 540,000 American
troops to the kingdom to fight in the Gulf War, bin
Laden lambasted the royal family and urged religious
authorities to issue fatwahs (religious rulings)
condemning the American infidels.
In 1991, Osama bin Laden and a band of Afghan veterans
agitated in Sudan for a holy war against the enemies
of Islam. In 1992, he claimed responsibility for the
attack on American soldiers in Yemen, and again for
attacks in Somalia in 1993. He was mum about the
terrorist truck bombing of the World Trade Center in
1993, the explosion that killed six people and injured
more than a thousand, but investigators knew bin Laden
had donated heavily to the religious "charity" that
financed the bombing operation.
Spiked Investigations
In February 1995, when he was appointed chief of the
F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism section in Washington, John
O’Neill immediately assembled and coordinated a team
to capture Ramzi Yousef, who was en route from
Pakistan to Afghanistan. Yousef was strongly suspected
of planning and directing the World Trade Center
bombing in 1993.
In three days, the kingpin of the World Trade Center
bombing was in custody, and O’Neill went on to
accumulate damning evidence against the 1993 World
Trade bombers that led to their conviction in American
courts. For the next six years, John O’Neill
tirelessly investigated terrorist strikes against
Americans and American interests in Saudi Arabia, East
Africa, and Yemen, often encountering American
officials’ roadblocks on the way. Even in 1996, after
Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl turned himself in at the American
Embassy in Eritrea and divulged details of bin Laden’s
and al Qaeda’s organization and operations, the State
Department refused to list al Qaeda as a terrorist
organization.
In February 1998, bin Laden assembled a number of
terrorist groups, including Islamic Jihad, and issued
a fierce fatwa calling for the deaths of all
Americans. On August 7, 1998, 226 people died in the
simultaneous bombing of American embassies in Tanzania
and Kenya. Investigators blamed bin Laden for the
attacks. On August 20, 1998, President Clinton amended
Executive Order 12947 to add Osama bin Laden and his
key associates to the list of terrorists, thus
blocking their US assets--including property and bank
accounts--and prohibiting all U.S. financial
transactions with them. The United States conducted a
missile attack against bin Laden's facilities in
Afghanistan.
On October 12, 2000, two suicide bombers ignited their
boatload of explosives next to the USS Cole, an
American destroyer refueling in Aden, off the coast of
Yemen. The blast killed seventeen sailors and wounded
thirty-nine others. O’Neill and his crack
investigating team were dispatched to Yemen and hit a
stone wall. He had hoped satellite intercepts of phone
calls between an al Qaeda operative in Aden and Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan would lead him to the
mastermind of the Cole attack, but the American
ambassador and the Yemeni officials blocked the
investigation at every turn.
O’Neill resigned from the F.B.I. in July 2001 and
signed on as security chief for the World Trade Center
in September. He died in the WTC attack on September
11, 2001.
Oil Diplomacy
In Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy
and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden, two French
intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and
Guillaume Dasquie, claim that the Clinton and Bush
administrations impeded investigations of bin Laden
and his al Qaeda terrorist group in order to maintain
good relations with Saudi Arabia and to maintain the
stability of the oil market. "As the late John O’Neill
told one of the authors [Brisard] of this book, ‘All
of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to
dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found
in Saudi Arabia.'" (8)
In articles and interviews, Brisard has expanded on
this statement, pronouncing the official story about
bin Laden’s exile from his native Saudi Arabia in 1994
and his frozen assets to be a canard. Not only did
O’Neill and the F.B.I. have extensive information
concerning the finances of bin Laden and al Qaeda, but
the business connections between the bin Ladens, the
Mahfouzes, the al Ahmoudis, the Saudi royal family,
and the Bush family kept turning up in their
investigations.
Mahfouz, who owns Nimir Petroleum, has conducted joint
ventures with the al Amoudi family, which owns Delta
Oil. Delta Oil and Unocal planned to build a pipeline
through Afghanistan before the Taliban backed away.
These Saudi companies are still partnered with bigger
oil companies (such as Texaco and Unocal) in
developing Central Asian oil projects.
Although Brisard’s interpretation of events has been
disputed, the documentation of Forbidden Truth is
impeccable. Clearly, the finances and fortunes of the
Saudi oligarchs and the Bush family have been
intertwined for many years, and oil has been the
lubricant of choice, even non-existent oil.
In The Conspirators, Al Martin describes an instance
of the latter. He says that the Gulf Oil Drilling
Supply, of New York, Miami, and Bahrain, was Jeb
Bush’s favorite artifice for oil and gas frauds:
"The fraud was rather simple. Richard Secord arranged
through then Vice President George Bush Sr.’s old
friend, Ghaith Pharaon, the then retired head of Saudi
intelligence, for Gulf Oil and Drilling to purchase
from the Saudi government oil and gas leases in the
Gulf which were effectively worthless."
The leases would be embellished to appear extremely
valuable and then used as loan collateral. Great
American Bank and Trust of West Palm Beach
subsequently failed under the weight of unpaid
Iran-Contra loans.
"Also, in the case of Gulf Oil Drilling Supply, there
was some moderately large international lending to
that company. As you would suspect, it was principally
out of the old George Bush friendly banks--Credit
Lyonnais and Banque Paribas, which, combined lent $60
million dollars to Gulf Oil Drilling Supply, which, of
course, was defaulted on later." (9)
Special Saudis
Michael Springmann, formerly chief of the visa section
at the US Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, claims that
he rejected hundreds of suspicious visa applications,
but the C.I.A. officer overruled him and ordered the
visas to be issued. Springmann protested to the State
Department, the Office of Diplomatic Security, the
F.B.I., the Justice Department and congressional
committees, but in vain. (10)
Springmann observed that 15 of the 19 people who
allegedly flew airplanes into buildings in the United
States got their visas from the same CIA-dominated
consulate in Jeddah. As a special favor to residents
of Saudi Arabia (including non-Saudi citizens),
applicants for non-immigrant visas can apply at
private travel agencies and receive their visa through
the mail. During the months following the 9-11 attack,
102 applicants received their visas by mail, 2 more
were interviewed, and none were rejected.
The Saudis always got special treatment. In a November
6, 2001 BBC broadcast Greg Palast revealed just how
special that treatment was. Even after Pakistan
expelled the World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY)
and India claimed that the organization was linked to
terrorist bombings in Kashmir and the Philippines
military accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency,
the F.B.I. got orders to leave the "charitable
association" alone.
After 9/11, investigators of the Islamic
charities discovered overwhelming evidence that Saudis
at all levels worked in tandem with the terrorists.
David Kaplin reports, “At the Saudi High Commission in
Bosnia, which coordinated local aid among Saudi
charities, police found before-and-after photos of the
World Trade Center, files on pesticides and crop
dusters, and information on how to counterfeit State
Department badges. At Manila's international airport,
authorities stopped Agus Dwikarna, an al Haramain
representative based in Indonesia. In his suitcase
were C4 explosives.” The interlocking charities make
it difficult to follow the money trail. “Many share
directors, office space, and cash flow. For two years,
investigators have followed the money to offshore
trusts and obscure charities which, according to court
records, they believe are tied to Hamas, al Qaeda, and
other terrorist groups.” (US News and World Report,
December 15, 2003).
The White House official line is that the Bin Ladens
are above suspicion --apart from Osama, the black
sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's
fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal
household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could
otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has
obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of
other members of the Bin Laden family for links to
terrorist organisations before and after September
11th." (11)
In the Boston Globe, March 11, 20004, Carl Unger,
author of House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret
Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful
Dynasties, states that the 9/11 commission should ask
who authorized the evacuation of 140 Saudi nationals
on at least 8 aircraft making stops in 12 cities
immediately following the attacks. “Many of the
passengers were high-ranking members of the royal
House of Saud. About 24 of them were members of the
bin Laden family, which owned the Saudi Binladin
Group, a multibillion-dollar construction
conglomerate.” Unger obtained passenger lists for 4 of
the flights, which are posted on his website:
www.houseofbush.com and includes the name of Prince
Ahmed bin Salman.
“As reported last year by Gerald Posner in 'Why
America Slept,' Prince Ahmed not only had alleged ties
to Al Qaeda, but may also have known in advance that
there would be attacks on 9/11. According to Posner,
Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative who was part of
Osama bin Laden's inner circle and was captured in
2002, made these assertions when he was interrogated
by the CIA. The commission should ask Mueller about
Zubaydah's interrogation. They should also ask whether
the FBI interrogated Prince Ahmed before his
departure.
"But Prince Ahmed will never be able to answer
any questions because not long after the CIA
interrogation, he died of a heart attack at the age of
43. Yet we do know that he was on one of the flights.”
Unger believes that thisepisode “raises
particularly sensitive questions for the
administration. Never before in history has a
president of the United States had such a close
relationship with another foreign power as President
Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal
family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than
$1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went
from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to
companies in which the Bushes and their allies have
had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton,
and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that
President Bush himself played a role in authorizing
the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he
know and when did he know it?”
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/04/11/unasked
_questions?mode=PF
In October 2001, the Treasury Department identified
the Muwafaq Foundation, largely endowed by Khalid bin
Mahfouz, as an al Qaeda front that had funneled
millions of dollars to bin Laden. Some families of the
9/11 victims have named Mahfouz and dozens of
prominent Saudis, including members of the royal
family, in a lawsuit that accuses the Saudis of
funding the 9/11 terrorists. Bush administration
officials stated that they would seek to have the suit
dismissed or delayed. (12)
Senators Bob Graham and Richard C. Shelby, leaders of
the congressional panel ending an investigation of the
9/11 attacks, said the administration should
declassify information concerning Saudi funding of
terrorists.
"Citing ‘their people and a lot of their leaders and
probably even the royal family,’ Shelby said: ‘I
believe [the Saudis] cannot support so-called
charities that support terrorism on a big scale, and
then pretend that they're our friends or our allies.
"‘As we get into the money trail, it might be
embarrassing, but the American people need to know;
the victims and their families need to know,’ he
added. Shelby and Graham said avoiding embarrassment
and maintaining good relations with Saudi Arabia are
not legitimate reasons to withhold information from
the public.
"‘The question is,’ Graham said after the news
conference, ‘will we get [the information
declassified] in 30 years when the archives are open,
or will we get it in time, before the next attack?’"
(13)
Doubtless one of the connections the senators referred
to was the Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar,
Saudi ambassador to the United States for the last
twenty years, the longest serving ambassador in
Washington. Princess Haifa had been making monthly
transfers, $130,000 in all, from her Washington bank
account to a needy woman who relayed some of the
checks to her husband and another man who assisted and
funded the two hijackers who were based in San Diego.
(14)
"The money moved into the family’s bank account
beginning in early 2000, just a few months after
hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in
Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within
days of the terrorists’ arrival in the United States,
Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually
hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming
party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an
apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid
$1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al
Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is
possible that the hijackers later repaid the money."
(15)
Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa professed their
ignorance of the whole affair.
Mark Stein speculates about the recent visit Prince
Bandar and Princess Haifa paid to George and Laura at
the Crawford ranch, where they were received with the
accolades usually reserved for heads of state. Bush
must have known about the money transfers and Bandar
must have known Bush knew, but apparently a good time
was had by all.
"Meanwhile, Majeda Ibrahin, the woman the princess was
sending all that money to, turns out to be married to
Osama Basnan, another buddy of the al-Qa’eda duo, and
one who subsequently celebrated 11 September as a
‘wonderful, glorious day’. But here’s an odd little
thing: Mr Basnan is known to have been in Texas in
April when Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage
flew in to the state to see Bush at the ranch. Just
another coincidence? Well, sorta: he’s supposed to
have had a meeting in Houston with some big-time Saudi
prince who deals with ‘intelligence matters.’ This
seems an unusual degree of access for some schlub from
San Diego who’s in the US illegally, as it transpires.
He is variously described as a Saudi government agent
and al-Qa’eda sympathiser, as if these positions are
mutually exclusive. The Saudi embassy say they’ve only
received queries about this matter from the media, not
from the FBI. Odd that. The federal government claims
it needs vast new powers to track every single
credit-card transaction and every single email of
every single American, yet a prima facie link between
the terrorists and Prince Bandar’s wife isn’t worth
going over to the embassy to have a little chat
about." (16)
Apparently it is not only the Saudis’ oil riches that
insulates them from criticism, but also their
calculated distribution of largesse. The Saudis have
contributed to every presidential library in recent
decades. Not surprisingly, former ambassadors to Saudi
Arabia from the United States end up being apologists
for the corrupt, despotic Saudi regime. The Saudis
have arranged that American ambassadors to their
country not speak Arabic. The American embassy in
Saudi Arabia gets all its information about the
reactionary regime from the rulers.
Some of the Washington politicians who found the Saudi
connection lucrative include Spiro Agnew, Frank
Carlucci, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John Connally,
James Baker, George H. W. Bush, William Simon and
Caspar Weinberger. (17)
Profits before Patriotism
The Bush dynasty has always been comfortable putting
profits before patriotism. Prescott Bush, Bush
Senior’s father, extended credit to Adolph Hitler and
supplied him with raw materials during Word War II.
The U. S. seized his assets under the Trading with the
Enemy Act, but grandfather Bush found other ways to
replenish the family coffers.
Bush Senior struck it rich in oil and in the defense
industry. Mahfouz (yes, that Mahfouz), Prince Bandar
and Prince Sultan (Bandar’s father) were also heavily
invested in the defense industry through their
holdings in the Carlyle Group, where Bush Senior
served on the board of directors. Founded in 1987 as a
private investment group with strong connections to
the Republican Party establishment, Carlyle increased
its original investment of $130 million to $900
million when it went public in 2001.
"In recent years, Carlyle has been successful both at
raising and making money. It has raised $14 billion in
the last five years or so, and its annual rate of
return has been 36 percent. Its 550 investors consist
of institutions and wealthy individuals from around
the world including, until shortly after September
2001, members of the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
The family — which has publicly disavowed links with
Osama bin Laden — had been an investor since 1995."
(18)
"As the eleventh largest US defence contractor,
Carlyle is involved in nearly every aspect of military
production, including making the big guns used on US
naval destroyers, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle used by
US forces during the Gulf War and parts used in most
commercial and military aircraft. United Defense has
joint ventures in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two of the
United States’ closest military allies in the Middle
East." (19)
It’s passing strange that even as the hijacked planes
smashed into the World Trade Center, the Carlyle Group
was holding its annual investor conference. Shafig Bin
Laden, brother of Osama Bin Laden, attended.
Bush Junior once served as an executive with Caterair,
one of hundreds of companies Carlyle has bought and
sold over the past 15 years, but he removed the record
of this period from his resume.
In 1986, Bush Junior, to date a flop as a businessman,
joined Harken Energy Corporation as a director and was
awarded 212,000 shares of stock and other plums.
In 1987, Khalid bin Mahfouz arranged for BCCI investor
Abdullah Bakhsh to purchase 17% of Harken. A Harken
official acknowledged that Bush’s White House
connections had everything to do with the appointment.
Somehow, the inexperienced, obscure firm was awarded a
prime drilling contract by Bahrain, and Harken’s stock
price soared.
In June 1990, Bush Junior sold his Harken stock for a
juicy $848,000, enabling him to pay off the loan he
had assumed on buying shares in the Texas Rangers.
Never mind that the Harken stock promptly tanked when
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, for Abdullah Bakhsh, a
major Harken shareholder and an investor in BCCI, who
had purchased 17% of Harken Energy in 1987, got his
money’s worth. By 1990, Bakhsh’s representative on
Harken’s board, Talet Othman, began attending Middle
East policy discussions with President Bush Senior.
Now that Bush Junior occupies the White House, Bush
Senior receives frequent CIA briefings (his
prerogative as a former president). "In July 2001,
Bush personally contacted Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah
to ‘clarify’ his son's Middle East policies. Also
during the summer of 2001, Bush forwarded his son a
North Korea policy plan penned by ‘Asia expert’ and
former ambassador to Korea, Donald Gregg. Gregg is a
31-year CIA veteran and the elder Bush's former
national security adviser whose expertise involved
participation in the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program
(death squads), Air America heroin smuggling,
‘pacification’ efforts in El Salvador and Guatemala,
the ‘October Surprise,’ and the Iran-Contra operation
(for which Gregg received a Bush pardon in 1992)."
(20)
Bush Junior has received more than advice from his
father. He has taken on the team of hustlers and
criminals that worked with George Herbert Walker Bush
when he was Vice President and President of the United
States of America.
Just as his father did, he invokes executive privilege
to hide all evidence of collusion with the petroleum
pashas who have enriched the Bushes and intimidated
the rest of us.
Sandy Tolan, an I.F. Stone Fellow at the Graduate
School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, asserts that what
the Bush administration really wants in Iraq is a
remapping of the Mideast. "The plan is, in its way, as
ambitious as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between
the empires of Britain and France, which carved up the
region at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The
neo-imperial vision, which can be ascertained from the
writings of key administration figures and their
co-visionaries in influential conservative think
tanks, includes not only regime change in Iraq but
control of Iraqi oil, a possible end to the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and
newly compliant governments in Syria and Iran --
either by force or internal rebellion."
The Bushes are carriers of the
deny-destroy-and-be-damned virus. Prescott Bush never
apologized for trading with the Nazis. George Bush
Senior professed to know nothing of the drug and arms
dealing that funded the bloody, illegal Iran-Contra
operations, although it was common knowledge that he
directed them. He and his sons enriched themselves
through shady real estate deals and financial
manipulations that brought down entire banking and
savings and loan institutions. They are all consummate
inside traders, looting and leaving ruin in their
wake.
President-Select George Bush is no exception. He has
no scruples about exploiting his office for personal
and family gain. The Texas governor who could joke
about frying prisoners in the electric chair will not,
as president, agonize over the decision to send young
men and women into battle--or over denying them
medical care when they are injured.
There is irrefutable evidence that highly-placed
Saudis aided and supported the terrorists who murdered
over 3000 American citizens on September 11, 2001. Yet
George Bush persists in protecting and colluding with
those who sponsor terrorists. Is this not an an act of
treason?
George Bush should be impeached.
Notes:
(1) Jonathan Raban, "Western conceit of
nation-building ignores culture and history of
Arabia," Seattle Times, November 24, 2002
(2) Michael Parenti, 9-11 Terrorism Trap: September 11
and Beyond (2000) City Lights Books, San Francisco
(3) Laura Secor, "Which Islam?," Boston Daily Globe,
December 15, 2002
(4) Wayne Madsen, "Questionable Ties: Tracking bin
Laden's money flow leads back to Midland, Texas,"
(5) "The Press on the BCCI-bin Mahfouz-bin Laden
Intelligence Nexus, " Boston Herald , December 11,
2001
(6) Jonathan Beaty & S. C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A
Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI, (1993) Random
House, New York
(7) Daniel Pipes, "Jihad: How Academics Have
Camouflaged Its Real Meaning," December 2, 2002
(8) Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie,
Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and
the Failed Hunt for bin Laden (2002) Thunder's Mouth
Press/Nation Books, New York
(9) Al Martin, The Conspirators: Secrets of an
Iran-Contra Insider (2002) National Liberty Press, LLC
(10) Center for Cooperative Research, "Hijackers who
were under surveillance before 9/11"
(11) Greg Palast and David Pallister, "FBI and US Spy
Agents Say Bush Spiked Bin Laden Probes Before 11
September," The Guardian, November 7, 2001
(12) Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller, "Saudis Called Slow
to Help Stem Terror Finances," New York Times,
November 28, 2002
(13) Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt, "9/11 Panel
Criticizes Secrecy on Saudi Links," Washington Post,
December 12 2002
(14) Greg Miller, Greg Krikorian and H.G. Reza, "FBI
Looks at Saudi's Links to 9/11," Los Angeles Times,
November 23, 2002
(15) Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, November 22, 2002
(16) Mark Steyn, "Bush and the Saudi Princess"
(17) Daniel Golden, James Bandler and Marcus Walker,
Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001 Posted at
globalresearch.ca 5 October 2001
(18) James Hatfield, "Why would Osama bin Laden want
to kill Dubya, his former business partner?" Online
Journal, July 13, 2001
(19) Steve Lohr, "Gerstner to Be Chairman of Carlyle
Group," New York Times, November 22, 2002
(20) Tim Shorrock uncovers the Bush connection to US
defence giant the Carlyle Group, New Internationalist
347, July 2002
Updates
From the Progressive Populist, February 1, 2003 --
Bush’s uncle, Jonathan Bush, is an executive at Riggs
Bank, where Saudi Princess Faisal had the checking
account through which she made her donations to
charities.
Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to Al Qaida
over the past decade, according to a report prepared
for the United Nations
New Chairman of 9/11 Commission had business ties with
Osama's Brother in Law
Documentation that Bush Junior and James Bath both
served together in the National Guard at Ellington Air
Force Base and were suspended for failure “to
accomplish annual medical inspection”
An investigation of Saudi banks
Confirmation that the U.S. has a long-standing
agreement with Saudi Arabia to train pilots at U.S.
bases