January 01, 2005

Larry Flynt's Blog Mentions "50 Reasons..."

The Bush Family's Kinship with the Saudi Monarchy

Interview by Bruce David and Dan Kapelovitz

In his book House of Bush, House of Saud, investigative reporter Craig Unger explains the clandestine bond between the Bush clan and Saudi Arabia’s royal family. Acclaimed for his Bush exposés in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair, the current-affairs expert is also featured in Michael Moore’s hard-hitting film Fahrenheit 9/11.

HUSTLER: How did you first become involved in investigating the Bush-Saudi connection?

CRAIG UNGER: For almost all Americans, 9/11 seemed to come out of the blue, but actually it didn’t. There was a history. I decided to look at the relationship between the two most powerful families in the world: the Bushes and the royal House of Saud, which is the richest family in history (with a quarter of the planet’s oil resources). In many ways the story begins in 1974. At the time, Salem bin Laden—one of Osama’s older brothers—was head of the Saudi Binladin Group, which is an enormous construction company worth several billion dollars. Another billionaire was Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was to become the most powerful and richest banker in Saudi Arabia. He was effectively the banker for the royal House of Saud. The Saudis began to invest enormous sums of money in the United States, more than $800 billion over the next 20 years.

How did bin Laden and bin Mahfouz get tied to the Bushes?

When Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz came to Houston, their point man was a guy named James R. Bath. Bath is a very interesting and, in some ways, mysterious guy, who is said to have had CIA links. He was in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush. He became friendly with Bush and his father, who had been head of the CIA. He became friendly with James Baker, and with John Connally, who was a Texas governor and later became Secretary of the Treasury.

Bath was very politically wired. He got a call from Saudi Arabia; it was Salem bin Laden, and that’s how the relations started. Salem bin Laden and bin Mahfouz came over to Houston, bought property and started setting up small companies. Some were in the Cayman Islands; some seemed a bit mysterious. Bath maintained his relationship with George W. Bush and Bush Sr. as well.

In 1980 and ’81 bin Mahfouz developed a 75-story skyscraper in Houston for the Texas Commerce Bank, which was started by James Baker’s family. At the time, this was the beginning of the Reagan-Bush era. Bush was becoming Vice President, and Baker was chief of staff to President Reagan and had been Bush’s campaign manager; so the Saudis had access by then. By the start of the Reagan-Bush era, and immediately after that, this huge amount of weapons began to be sold from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, $200 billion worth.

Was bin Mahfouz involved in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal?

Yes, the BCCI was the most corrupt financial institution of all time. Banks used to give away toaster ovens to attract customers; BCCI used hookers. There was drug money involved. The CIA would fund their covert operations through BCCI. Gangsters would use it. It was funding operations for Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen in the Afghanistan war [against the Soviets]; so you had all these elements tied together. In the ’80s bin Mahfouz became its largest shareholder. In the meantime young George W. Bush was involved with yet another failing oil company [after Arbusto] called Harken Energy. Harken was drilling one dry well after another; it was loaded with debt; yet, suddenly, a series of wonderful things began to happen to it.

The Saudis bailed Bush out?

Yes, and each bailout was linked to BCCI and bin Mahfouz in one way or another. You have to ask yourself, “Why would Saudis, with all the oil in the world, travel halfway around the globe to invest in a failing oil company?” Now it could just be a coincidence that all these investments took place. On the other hand, the one thing that Harken had going for it was that George W. Bush was on the board of directors, and his father was President of the United States. So it’s reasonable to speculate that they were looking for political influence, and this was the way they began to curry favor with power.

How did this work?

The relationship with the Saudis went something like this: We’ll get all this oil from Saudi Arabia, and they will buy enormous amounts of weapons, but we won’t look into what’s really going on in their internal affairs. What was going on is this: Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocracy, and the state religion is Wahhabi Islam. It’s an extremely puritanical form of Islam; and in its most militant form you end up with Osama bin Laden.

So there were undercurrents working against U.S. interests?

Right. Initially they were working for us because bin Laden and al Qaeda were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, but all of that changed [in 1991] during the Gulf War. The real turning point was when Iraq and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the Bush Administration went to Saudi Arabia and said, “We want to station American troops here.” Bush and Prince Bandar [Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States] got the King to agree. At the same time, Osama bin Laden went to the royal House of Saud and said, “You cannot allow infidel American troops on our sacred soil. Let me and my guys go fight Saddam Hussein.” The royal family just laughed at him. American troops came in and stayed there. That was considered a real sacrilege. At that moment, Osama began to formulate his jihad against the U.S. and against the royal House of Saud as well.

How much money have the Bushes received from the Saudis?

When you add it all together, what you end up with is $1.4 billion, which went from the House of Saud (in contracts and investments) to companies in which the Bushes, their families and their allies have had a major role.

Are the Bushes willing to sell out America for the sake of their own personal profit?

I think they see themselves as people who are helping manage a global economy. Essentially you have an administration that largely consists of oilmen. [George W.] Bush is an oil executive. His father was an oil executive. [Vice President Dick] Cheney too. Condi Rice is on the board of Chevron and had a tanker named after her. James Baker is still a main partner in the most powerful oil-energy law firm in the world [Baker Botts]. It’s not like they just do contracts for oil companies. They help map out huge strategic initiatives.

There are profits to be made by those who don’t have our interests at heart?

Not only that, but there’s also a big piece of logic that’s been missing in the American conversation, and that’s this: Without the Saudis you don’t have 9/11. If you look at the funding of the terrorists, of al Qaeda and of the infrastructure, the Saudis play a huge role. Osama bin Laden is Saudi. Fifteen out of 19 hijackers were Saudi. Many of the [al Qaeda] charities are Saudi-funded. The great Saudi merchant elite and members of the royal House of Saud have made contributions to these charities for many years. The Saudis have been terribly uncooperative when Washington has tried to figure out how all the charities are funded. That’s one piece of logic.

Number two, the Bushes have effectively been in bed with the Saudis for more than 20 years. That $1.4 billion is a lot of money. I’m not alleging any conspiracy. It’s business, and one rule of business is that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. What I’m saying is, the Bushes have not been asking the tough questions of the Saudis in terms of that country’s role in enabling the rise of terrorism.

The bottom line is, the Bushes don’t want to harm this profitable relationship.

They’ve always turned a blind eye. They’ve viewed the Saudis as friends, colleagues, business associates, clients—and when you’re doing business like that, you have to ask, “What have the Saudis gotten out of it?” For that, I look at the days immediately after 9/11. Two days after 9/11, American skies were locked down. No one could fly. I found a man in Seattle who was desperately awaiting a heart transplant. The organ was to be flown in, but the plane transporting it was forced down by American military aircraft.

Bill Clinton couldn’t fly. Al Gore couldn’t fly. FBI counterterrorism agents couldn’t fly. But some people could fly, namely Saudis. I found a flight that left Tampa, Florida, for Lexington [Kentucky] early in the afternoon of September 13. This was at a time when all private aircraft were still grounded. I talked to two people on the record who had been onboard that flight, whose passengers included a number of Saudis. It was the first of eight airplanes I was able to find that stopped in 12 American cities, picking up about 140 people—most of them Saudis, many of them members of the Saudi royal family. About 24 of the evacuees were members of the bin Laden family.

Wouldn’t the order allowing the Saudis to fly have to have come from the White House?

It absolutely needed White House approval. There’s no question of that. Someone did confirm that conversations on authorizing these flights had taken place: [former terrorism advisor and now Bush critic] Richard Clarke, whom I interviewed. That was the first time there was any corroboration that the White House had authorized these flights. When I asked the White House for comment, it insisted that these flights had not taken place. I not only talked to people on the record who were on the flights, I got photos of the interior of the planes, and I talked to FBI agents who identified the passengers, though they did not interrogate them.

Recently [Secretary of State] Colin Powell was asked about it on Meet the Press. He said, “We may have orchestrated something. I don’t know the details.” Dick Cheney said he didn’t know anything about it. Bush has never commented on it, and I don’t know that he’s ever been asked directly.

Tell us about Prince Ahmed bin Salman.

I was able to obtain passenger lists for four of these flights. Probably the most interesting name I found was Prince Ahmed bin Salman. Another Saudi billionaire, he was best known in this country in horse-racing circles and was the owner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem. Prince Ahmed allegedly had ties to al Qaeda and allegedly had advance knowledge of 9/11.

All this came to light in March 2002 when Abu Zubaydah, a fairly high-level al Qaeda operative, was captured in Pakistan. He was later interrogated by CIA agents and said that the royal family of Saudi Arabia was in fairly close contact with al Qaeda and that one way to check it out was to talk to Prince Ahmed. Zubaydah reeled off Prince Ahmed’s phone numbers by memory.

When the CIA obtained this information after interrogating Zubaydah, it went to Saudi intelligence to get corroboration and to see what the Saudis would say about it. The Saudis denied that this could possibly be true. Not long afterward Prince Ahmed returned to Saudi Arabia and died mysteriously of a heart attack at age 43. His wasn’t the only baffling death, by the way. Zubaydah had named three other people, and they all ended up dead under rather mysterious circumstances.

You’ve mentioned that those allowed to fly soon after 9/11 included close relatives of Osama bin Laden.

Right. It’s been widely reported of the bin Laden family that “Oh, Osama was a black sheep; the rest of them are wonderful people.” It’s much more complicated than that. There have been other members of the bin Laden family who have had close ties to militant Islam. A fellow named Mahrous bin Laden, an older brother of Osama, was an important figure in what was known as the Mecca Affair in 1979, when Muslim Brotherhood members attacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Hundreds of people were killed, and more than 60 people charged with the takeover were later beheaded.

In addition, I have FBI documents that show Abdullah bin Laden and Omar bin Laden, who are affiliated with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, have been investigated by the FBI because the group allegedly had ties to terrorism. Carmen bin Laden, a former sister-in-law, has said that she thinks the family has been helping Osama at various times. It’s not as if we can just write that off without investigating it.

Tell us about Visa Express.

When the Bush Administration took over, one new policy it introduced in Saudi Arabia was called Visa Express. It almost sounds like a marketing program for a credit card. In the past, if Saudi subjects wanted to travel to the United States, they had to get a visa from an American consulate.

With Visa Express they no longer had to go in person. That meant, if they wanted to get a visa, they could just send a third party down to pick it up. In fact, three of the 9/11 hijackers took advantage of this convenience and used this new program to get visas to the United States and went on to carry out their mission.

Visa Express has since been terminated, but, astoundingly, it was not terminated immediately after 9/11. The procedure was in effect for at least a month or so afterward. You would have thought there would have been this enormous crackdown. Right after 9/11 there was an extraordinary PR barrage, and Prince Bandar went on TV again and again saying the Saudis had nothing to do with it. He said that Osama was not a Saudi because his citizenship had been revoked. The White House would always say that the Saudis had been cooperative, but former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill says that, immediately after 9/11, the Saudis were not helpful at all in tracing funds that may have gone to finance operations like 9/11.

Why haven’t the Democrats made an uproar about your allegations?

Immediately coming out of 9/11, there was this whole sense that you had to stand behind the President. But now things are turning dramatically. With the Richard Clarke testimony, you see for the first time that a different story can be told. I think it’s extraordinary how this has been ignored by the mainstream press, and I’m somewhat hopeful that Clarke’s testimony and other stories like it may allow what I call a counternarrative to emerge.

THE CARLYLE GROUP & THE BUSH FAMILY

The following is an excerpt from Robert Sterling’s incendiary anthology 50 Reasons Not to Vote for Bush (Feral House Publications, FeralHouse.com).

After leaving office, Poppy Bush became a consultant for the Carlyle Group, one of the largest defense contractors. Carlyle represents the worst of crony capitalism [and is] tied to political insiders from around the world. (Among others, Jim Baker is a Carlyle partner, and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci is chairman.) Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, says, “Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration as they can possibly be. George Bush [Senior] is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is President. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration’s decisions, through his father’s investments. The average American doesn’t know that and, to me, that’s a jaw-dropper.”

Something else the average American may not know is that a multimillion-dollar investor in Carlyle was the bin Laden family. Also unknown by Joe and Jane Sixpack: Before becoming Texas governor in 1994, Shrub [the younger George Bush] headed CaterAir, a Carlyle asset.

The 2001 annual meeting of Carlyle took place in the D.C. Ritz-Carlton on the morning of September 11. On one of the darkest days in U.S. history, the gathered were in the strange position of profiting handsomely from the tragedy. Unfortunately for the bin Ladens, political pressure forced them to (at least officially) cash out of the Carlyle Group. The possibility that the two biggest beneficiaries of the 9/11 tragedy could be the Bush and bin Laden families was unseemly.

For one, Larry Klayman (head of Judicial Watch) was publicly outraged. (Though Judicial Watch is an unapologetically conservative group, specializing during the late ’90s in lawsuits against the Clinton Administration, they have been admirably critical of Bush and Cheney in their many sleazy dealings.) Klayman declared, “This conflict of interest has now turned into a scandal. The idea of the President’s father, an ex-President himself, doing business with a company under investigation by the FBI in the terror attacks of September 11 is horrible.”

Isn’t this a little unfair to the bin Ladens? After all, haven’t they supposedly broken contact with the black sheep, Osama? That’s a little hard to believe, after a video was uncovered showing Osama’s mother, a sister and two brothers with Osama at his son’s wedding, just six and a half months before 9/11. Even without that, as Michael Moore put it in a public letter to Dubya, “If, after the terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, it had been revealed that President Bill Clinton and his family had financial dealings with Timothy McVeigh’s family, what do you think your Republican Party and the media would have done with that one?”

Don’t feel too bad for the bin Ladens: After all, the family is a major business partner of the Bechtel Group in Saudi Arabia. Thanks to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bechtel was awarded a secret, closed-bid, open-ended Iraq contract that could ultimately be worth billions, a good portion of which will likely find its way into the bin Ladens’ bank account soon. It’s all in the family.

Robert Sterling is the editor in chief of Konformist.com and a regular contributor to Disinfo.com, and numerous underground Web sites and publications.

January 01, 2005

Larry Flynt's Blog Mentions "50 Reasons..."

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