It finally occurred to me what the right analogy for the connection between Bush minions and 9-11 is. We had a gruesome video in our safety meeting awhile back, featuring a modest chemist with a serious acid spill down the front of his pants. He ran to the lab shower, but was too embarrassed to strip out of his pants quickly and sustained burns far more serious than necessary. The moral of the story-don't let modesty override avoiding serious injury.
3000 people a two years ago essentially died of embarrassment-not theirs, but that of Bush and cronies, who blocked critical investigations before and after because they wanted to hide their financial dealings with Saudis linked to terrorist networks. Just as the excessively modest chemist chose more severe burns, Bush chose 9-11.
My archive of links--
http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/911-graham-admits.htmSEN. BOB GRAHAM: Yes, going back to your question about what was the greatest surprise. I agree with what Senator Shelby said the degree to which agencies were not communicating was certainly a surprise but also I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. That would motivate the government to take action.
GWEN IFILL: Are you suggesting that you are convinced that there was a state sponsor behind 9/11?
SEN. BOB GRAHAM: I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down, make the further case, or find the evidence that would indicate that that is not true and we can look for other reasons why the terrorists were able to function so effectively in the United States.
GWEN IFILL: Do you think that will ever become public, which countries you're talking about?
SEN. BOB GRAHAM: It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now. And, we need to have this information now because it's relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing today.
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7310I still didn't have an answer to all my questions. We knew that Clinton and the Bushes were reluctant to discomfort the Saudis by unearthing their connections to terrorists -- but what made this new president take particular care to protect the Saudis, even to the point of stymying his own intelligence agencies?
The answers kept coming back: "Carlyle" and "Arbusto."
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2002-11-30&id=2544
Clearly, the House of Saud has come to an arrangement with al-Qa'eda, and this arrangement involves, among other things, money. More interesting is why the administration insists on pretending otherwise. On 20 September, George W. Bush said, 'You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.'
A couple of weeks later, a small number of us began pointing out the obvious: the Saudis are with the terrorists. But the US-Saudi relationship is now so unmoored from reality that it's all but impossible to foresee how it could be tethered to anything as humdrum as the facts.
Seven of the nine biggest backers of al-Qa'eda are Saudi, and Riyadh has no intention of doing a thing about it; but the White House insists, as it did on Monday, that the Kingdom remains - all together now - 'a good partner in the war on terrorism'. Fifteen out of the 19 terrorists were Saudi, but
the state department's 'visa express' programme for young Saudi males remained in place for almost a year after 11 September and, if it weren't for public outrage, Colin Powell would reintroduce it tomorrow. The overwhelming majority - by some accounts, 80 per cent - of the detainees at Guantanamo are Saudi, but the new rules requiring fingerprinting of Arab male visitors to the US apply to Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Algerians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, but not Saudis.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/838867.asp#BODY)
"(...)sources describe the financial records as 'explosive' and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed-especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq. 'This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States,' said another administration official, who cited the need to prevent a rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship."
"The leaders of a joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees investigation have vigorously pushed for the release of a classified report that lays out the evidence of the Saudi money flow. But Bush administration officials, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have adamantly refused to declassify the evidence upon which the report is based."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14897The administration treads gingerly in targeting institutions that could lead to the Saudi royals and influentials. In December, Sens. Bob Graham (D-Florida) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Alabama) accused the Bush administration of refusing to declassify information that showed possible Saudi Arabian financial links to terrorists because it didn't want to embarrass the Saudis and endanger its political ties. Shelby, sworn not to reveal classified material, said the information could involve "a lot of their leaders and probably even the royal family."
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd01312003.htmlBut now it seems that Kean might possess some unique insights of his own. Fortune Magazine reports this week that both Kean and Bush share an unusually well-placed business partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz -- perhaps better known as "Osama bin Laden's bagman" or even "Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law."
Kean, like so many worthies, followed the revolving door out of public service into lucrative sweetheart deals and well-wadded sinecures on corporate boards. One of these, of course, is an oil company--pretty much a requirement for White House work these days. (Or as the sign says on the Oval Office door: "If your rigs ain't rockin', don't come a-knockin'!") Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan.
(The partnership is incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax haven," natch. You can't expect a worthy like Kean to pay taxes like some grubby wage slave.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1023.htmlAnd now the Saudis have another protector in the White House, the presidential dauphin, George W. Even though evidence continues to pile up about Saudi funding of madrassas, mosques, charities, and guest houses linked to Al Qaeda through a diffuse network of banks, companies, hawalahs, and front operations, the Bush II administration refuses to support an independent commission to look into the sordid nature of past and current funding of Al Qaeda and its allies.
That is because this trail ultimately leads directly to the palaces,
mosques, and office suites of Riyadh, Jeddah, Medina, and Mecca. But the trail does not stop there. When one considers the alleged involvement of wealthy Saudi billionaires like Khalid bin Mahfouz with some of G. W. Bush's past ventures like Arbusto and Harken Energy and the more recent involvement of Bin Mahfouz and Mohammed Hussein al Amoudi with Delta Oil/Nimir, a partner of UNOCAL in the trans-Afghan natural gas pipeline, the true nature of Bush's double game with the Saudis becomes very apparent.
These banking records reveal that the Saudis have directly contributed money to groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad for the purpose of strapping bombs on to young people and have them blow themselves up on busses, restaurants, and marketplaces throughout Israel. Another group that enjoyed the largesse of the Saudis was an Al Qaeda cell found to be operating in the West Bank. What is more galling is the fact that some of the Saudi checks to the terrorists were routed through the Saudi American Bank and one of its corporate parents, Citigroup. Incidentally, Saudi American Bank is the bank of choice for Bush's Texas ranch guest, Saudi Prince Bandar. But as with Enron cover up, it is doubtful that the Bush administration will conduct any meaningful investigation of the role of U.S. banks in financing criminal activity.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stmMICHAEL SPRINGMAN:
In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence.
What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.
The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3482399.htmlGerman authorities investigating a Moroccan man on trial on charges that he was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States say there is evidence that he had contact with a Saudi diplomat as well as the leaders of an extremist group in Saudi Arabia.But despite their requests for help following up on these leads, German officials said, responses had not been forthcoming from U.S. or Saudi authorities.
In Washington, a Justice Department spokesman named called questions about the German authorities' requests "too sensitive" for comment.
After the arrest of Mounir el-Motassadeq in Hamburg last year, police found the business card of an official in the Saudi Embassy in Berlin in his apartment. Prosecutors say they also found records of numerous calls to Saudi Arabia, which have since been traced to members of an extremist group in Riyadh called Dar al-Assima al-Nahr. Cell phone numbers of the group's leaders were found on Motassadeq's computer.
Prosecutors say that the first of these calls was made in December 2000, around the same time that the Sept. 11 suicide pilots began their flight training in the United States.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00085.htmAmid reports in the days after the September 11 attacks that two of the hijackers, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi received flight training at Florida's Pensacola Naval Air Station, a new dot has been connected which may shed more light on past revelations that 9/11 terrorists learned to fly at secure United States military bases.
Royal Saudi Air Force Major Ambarak S. Alghamdi had continued to remain in his position as a Pensacola Naval Air Station flight instructor after the 9/11 attacks, notwithstanding his Saudi Government ties - and that most of the terrorists were Saudis.
http://www.hermes-press.com/keys9_11.htmU. S. military officials gave the F.B.I. information that during the nineties, five of the highjackers were trained at secure U.S. military installations. Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmad Alnami, and Ahmed Alghamdi all listed their address at the Pensacola Naval Station. A high-ranking Pentagon official said another of the hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source. Why were they there?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_factAt the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
Perle's hostility to the politics of the Saudi government did not stop him from meeting with potential Saudi investors for Trireme. Khashoggi and Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme's objectives was to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed. The profits for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile border with Yemen, and the second stage of that process will require billions more. Trireme apparently turned to Adnan Khashoggi for help.
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/americas_new_war/side12102001.htm Two billionaire Saudi families scrutinized by authorities for possible financial ties to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network continue to engage in major oil deals with leading U.S. corporations.
These business relationships persist despite evidence that members of the two Saudi families - headed by patriarchs Khalid bin Mahfouz and Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi - have had ties to Islamic charities and companies linked financially to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.
So far, bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi, who have denied any involvement with bin Laden, have been left untouched by the U. S. Treasury Department, which has frozen the assets of 150 individuals, companies and charities suspected of financing terrorism.
http://www.rense.com/general19/profits.htm The Administration's apparently deliberate omission of key mid-Eastern banks in these two countries from post 9-11 investigations suggests clearly that the principal financial institutions of the countries where Harken did business have something to hide which the Bush Administration does not want to see the light of day - especially as potentially explosive Enron investigations gather steam.
Bush seems to be less concerned with national security--the only legitimate reason for censorship--and more concerned with not providing lawmakers and journalists information that might lead them to a sobering question: What if the "Saudi ties" are in reality homegrown?
http://news.globalfreepress.com/article.pl?sid=03/07/30/229223If Saudi ties find their knot in the U.S. then all current questions must be changed. No longer do we ask why the Saudi information is still classified, but which Saudi ties can be traced back to the United States? And who forced the classification? Who are these suspects President Bush is so scared to have mentioned?
Maybe they haven't been blacked out in the 9/11 Report, but "somewhere" else?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/092003F.shtmlThe links between the House of Bush and the House of Saud are deep, overlapping and notoriously opaque: the Saudi investment in the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm whose rainmakers include George Bush Senior; the Saudi bankrolling of Poppy's presidential library; the lucrative contracts the Saudis doled out to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was at the company's helm. The main law firm retained by the Saudis to defend them against the 9-11 families is Baker Botts -- as in James Baker, the Bush family consigliere. And, of course, there's oil, the black glue connecting all these dots.
In short, the Bushies have profited mightily from a relationship with a foreign government that can be indirectly, perhaps even directly, implicated in the September 11 attacks and other terrorist incidents and that has been the driving force behind a worldwide jihad.
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd09092003.htmlZubaydah, under torture (yes, we know, Americans never torture people--and they don't launch unprovoked wars of aggression, either), gave up names, dates, even telephone numbers of al Qaeda's enablers in the Saudi royal family and Pakistani military. True, the wily terrorist operative might have been lying. But shortly after Zubaydah spilled these red-hot beans, all three Saudi princes he had named turned up dead--within a single week, in June 2002. One died in a car crash, one reportedly had a heart attack, and the third wealthy prince somehow "died of thirst" in the Saudi desert. The following week, the top Pakistani official fingered by Zubaydah was also killed, along with his family, when his airplane suddenly fell out of a clear blue sky. Of course, this could just be coincidence--after all, planes fall, cars crash, hearts fail and multimillionaires die of thirst in the desert every day, right? Still, it looks as if Zub's canary-like warbling might have struck a nerve somewhere out there.
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