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If you didn't read last month's Vanity Fair--you know, the one with a smirking shirtless George Clooney on the cover--go find one. Quickly, before they're all thrown out and replaced with the issue with a pensive Prince Harry on the cover. There is an article in there that will make you bring up every meal you have eaten for the past month--and which, better yet, is guaranteed to have a similarly emetic effect on any American you mail it to, assuming you can make that person read it all the way through.
No, I'm not talking about the article by Christopher Hitchens about what a wonderful thing the occupation of Iraq has been for the Iraqi people, although certainly that one is equally pukeworthy. I'm talking about the one by Craig Unger that investigates a truly flabbergasting aspect of September 11 that is only now beginning to get any real play in the papers: the Bush administration's deliberate shielding and protection of Osama Bin Laden's family.
The fact that the Bushes and the Bin Ladens go way back did not surprise us, nor will it surprise anyone who has been paying attention. But it was a shock to discover exactly what that meant. Here's the concrete example that this article is organized around: in the week following September 11, 2001, when private air traffic (including planes carrying, for instance, human organs for transplant) was still grounded all across America, a number of private planes managed to fly dozens of members of a few highly influential Saudi families (including Bin Laden's) out of America and back to Saudi Arabia. Some of the domestic flights were even provided with their own security escorts (one of the main informants is a private detective who was asked by the Tampa police to chaperone a flight from Tampa to Lexington). One of the international flights that ferried the Bin Ladens out of the country left from Boston's Logan Airport--which was at the time going crazy trying to increase security, since it had been the origin of the two flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. The Logan Airport folks didn't think it was such a hot idea to put 11 relatives of Osama Bin Laden on a private plane and let it take off from their airport before the FBI had so much as interviewed the passengers to verify that they were who they said they were. But the directive came down from on high for them to do it, and the flight took off.
What the FUCK?
OK, to put this in perspective: in the weeks and months following the WTC and Pentagon attacks, we witnessed a MASSIVE governmental crackdown on Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim people in this country. Members of Congress openly embraced racial profiling. People were kept off flights for having Arabic-sounding names, for being dark-skinned and looking "suspicious," for all kinds of crazy reasons. *Any* male belonging to a certain age group who was a citizen of one of a list of "suspect" countries was required to report to the FBI for an interview. In California, at least, many of those who reported were then detained for some time without warning and without any real basis for it. People were denied contact with lawyers, were held for months in Guantanamo, were hounded in a dozen different ways because all of a sudden, anyone from That Part Of The World was automatically assumed to be a potential terrorist. Meanwhile, members of Bin Laden's own family not only are not getting treated this way--they are being provided with special protections and special privileges which, given the post 9/11 climate, must have been authorized at the highest levels. And--and this is the most flabbergasting part of it--they were spirited out of the country without even having been interviewed by the FBI.
I'll say it again: What the FUCK?
As I said to Liza, "No wonder there are so many conspiracy nuts going crazy on 9/11." Because if you were even a little tiny bit paranoid, what could you conclude, after looking at these facts, except that the Bush administration was intentionally trying not to investigate this crime? I mean what kind of a plan is this? Throw out a huge dragnet that brings in thousands of innocent people who have no connection whatever to Al Qaeda but will keep your law enforcement agencies happily occupied for months at a time, while you quietly smuggle the people who are most likely to have some real knowledge of Bin Laden's whereabouts out of the country? Do they not want this guy brought to justice?
Well, it would explain why we haven't found Bin Laden: we were never really looking.
The article takes a different tack, explaining this incredible situation through a more prosaic but also more insidious form of evil: influence. The Bushes and the Bin Ladens have been scratching each other's backs for decades, and when something happened that was just about guaranteed to make life in America very dangerous for these people, the Saudi ambassador--and the article has a fascinating little profile on him and his own connections to the Bush family--called in all his chips, and managed to wangle their getaway flight. I find this only too credible as an explanation. I don't give the Bush administration credit for being audacious, patient, or smart enough to actually organize a real conspiracy. No, this is the same bullshit conspiracy that both Bush presidencies have always been about: the rich and powerful banding together to keep each other rich and powerful.
The details of the financial and personal ties between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens and the house of Saud are fascinating and complex, but it boils down to one basic mechanism: the Saudis pump money into the Bushes' oil and capital ventures (Arbusto, Harken, the Carlyle Group) and in return they get influence. This is not the first time the pattern has been noted; the article cites a Wall Street Journal piece that came out after the implosion of the notoriously corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International (remember the BCCI scandal?) in which the author wonders aloud whether all the favoritism that these Saudis have shown to Bush jr's various failing ventures represents "an attempt to cozy up to a presidential son." And God help us all, I guess it worked.
I said at some point, "It's like organized crime." Only the Bushes seem a lot less organized. The money-for-influence thing is a strategy that the Saudi royal family appears to have been pursuing carefully and assiduously for 30 years, with a great deal of skill and success. The Bushes, meanwhile, appear simply to be lurching from one financial fiasco to another. What is incredible about this part of the story is the fact that despite all the favors the Saudis granted to Harken, on whose board Bush jr. was serving, the thing STILL went under. I guess if Bush and his buddies were actually COMPETENT, they wouldn't be quite so dependent on special concessions and large infusions of cash provided by influence-hungry foreign investors.
Well. Here we are then. We have reached the logical result of corporate politics. Our president's hiney is owned by a group of powerful Saudi families from amongst whose ranks the mastermind of 9/11/01 has also emerged. As a result, our president and his cronies either will not or cannot go after Osama Bin Laden's actual support network, as it will undoubtedly include some of the people who own his hiney. So what's a president to do, except to start a couple wars in poor nations which either have oil or are nicely placed for a pipeline, while not only ignoring but actually abetting the ruling class of the nation that actually produced not only the mastermind but the vast majority of the hijackers?
Christ almighty.
Does it mean that Bush is deliberately protecting people who were involved in 9/11? Not necessarily. The conduct of the war in Iraq has convinced me of something I would never have believed before it started, which is that this is an administration which is dumb and deluded enough to believe its own bullshit. I'm sure that Bush really honestly believes that his nice Saudi friends could never have had anything to do with anything as nasty as the WTC attacks. After all, he knows them. They're good people. They buy million-dollar horses in Kentucky and go with him on expensive golfing trips. They're not like those Other people, the ones who are in the country on student visas or green cards and have no connections to speak of and being relatively or perhaps actually poor would of course be much more likely to be morally depraved enough to commit an action like this. But other people, people who are not as rich as the Bushes and do not have the special understanding and knowledge of human nature that comes with being part of one of the richest families in the world, they might not understand that none of Bin Laden's nice wealthy relatives could possibly know anything about where he came from, what he's like, or where he might be now, and so he had to get them all out of the country before someone decided to put them through the same humiliating, repressive, racist treatment that all those Other people were about to suffer.
The rich protecting the rich. It's the only conspiracy we need.
Do me a favor, fellow-Americans: would you get MAD about this? It's disgusting and it's shameful and it redefines "pukeworthy." Find the article--or even find the many, many earlier articles on which this one draws heavily--and send it to relatives, friends, congressional representatives, anyone you can find who may not have heard about this. And maybe that will get even people who have no problem with our invading countries and killing people in order to protect ourselves to realize that as long as this asshole is in power, we will always be invading the wrong countries and killing the wrong people.
Sigh,
The Plaid Adder
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