From: Blunderov (squooker@mweb.co.za)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 12:33:37 MST
Dr Sebby
> Sent: 15 December 2003 0835
<snip>
> ...it will be interesting to see if he has any info on bin laden.
> politics aside...just as a curiosity
</snip>
[Blunderov]
Judging by what Michael Moore has to say, it is possible that Bush
already knows far more about Osama and the bin Laden clan than Saddam
will ever be able to tell him.
Best Regards
<q>
Dude, Where's my Country? Michael Moore, Penguin Books.
Question #1: Is it true that the bin Ladens have had business relations
with you and your family off and on for the past 25 years?
Mr. Bush, in 1977, when your father told you it was time to get a real
job, he set you up with your first oil company, something you called
"Arbusto" (Spanish for "shrub"). A year later, you received financing
from a man named James A. Bath. He was an old buddy of yours from your
days (the ones when you weren't AWOL) in the Texas Air National Guard.
He had been hired by Salem bin Laden-Osama's brother-to invest the bin
Ladens' money in various Texas ventures. Some $50,000-or 5% of control
of Arbusto-came from Mr. Bath.
Was he acting on behalf of the bin Ladens?
Most Americans might be surprised to learn that you and your father have
known the bin Ladens for a long time. What exactly is the extent of this
relationship, Mr. Bush? Are you close personal friends, or simply
on-again, off-again business associates? Salem bin Laden first started
coming to Texas in 1973 and later bought some land, built himself a
house, and created Bin Laden Aviation at the San Antonio airfield.
The bin Ladens are one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Their
huge construction firm virtually built the country, from the roads and
power plants, to the skyscrapers and government buildings. They built
some of the airstrips America used in your dad's Gulf War, and they
renovated the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. Billionaires many times
over, they soon began investing in other ventures around the world,
including in the United States. They have extensive business dealings
with Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the
Fremont Group-a spin-off of energy giant Bechtel. According to The New
Yorker, the bin Laden family also owns a part of Microsoft and the
airline and defense giant Boeing. They have donated $2 million to your
alma mater, Harvard University, $300,000 more to Tufts University, and
tens of thousands more to the Middle East Policy Counc1l, a think tank
headed by a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman. In
addition to the property they own in Texas, they also have real estate
in Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep in
our pants.
Unfortunately, as you know, Mr. Bush, Salem bin Laden died in a plane
crash in Texas in 1988 (his father, Mohammad, also died in a plane crash
in 1967). Salem's brothers-there are around 50 of them, including
Osama-continued to run the family companies and investments.
After leaving office, your father became a highly paid consultant for a
company known as the Carlyle Group. One of the investors in the Carlyle
Group was none other than the bin Laden family. The bin Ladens put a
minimum of $2 million into the Carlyle Group.
Until 1994, you headed a company called CaterAir, which was owned by the
Carlyle Group. The same year you left the soon-to-be-bankrupt CaterAir,
you became governor and quickly oversaw the University of Texas-a state
institution-make an investment of $10 million in the Carlyle Group. The
bin Laden family had also gotten on the Carlyle gravy train in 1994.
The Carlyle Group is one of the nation's largest defense contractors,
among their many other lines of work. They don't actually build weapons
themselves. Rather, they buy up failing defense companies, turn them
around by making them profitable, and then sell them for huge sums of
money.
The people who run the Carlyle Group are a Who's Who of past movers and
shakers, everyone from Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, Frank
Carlucci, to your dad's secretary of state, James Baker, to former
British Prime Minister John Major. Carlucci, the head of Carlyle, also
happens to sit on the board of directors of the Middle East Policy
Council along with a representative of the bin Laden family business.
After September 11, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both
ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence. Your first response,
Mr. Bush, was to ignore it, hoping, I guess, that the story would just
go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the bin
Laden investment. Your army of pundits went into spin control. They
said, we can't paint these bin Ladens with the same brush we use for
Osama. They have disowned Osama! They have nothing to do with him! They
hate and despise what he has done! These are the good bin Ladens.
And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of those "good"
bin Ladens-including Osama's mother, a sister and two brothers-with
Osama at his son's wedding just six and a half months before September
11. It has been reported in The New Yorker that not only has the family
not cut ties to Osama, but they have continued to fund him as they have
been doing for years. It was no secret to the CIA that Osama bin Laden
had access to his family fortune (his share is estimated to be at least
$30million), and the bin Ladens, as well as other Saudis, kept Osama and
his group, al Qaeda, well funded.
Mr. Bush, weeks went by after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon,
yet your father and his friends at the Carlyle Group refused to buckle
in their support for the bin Laden empire.
Finally, nearly two months after the attacks, with more and more people
questioning the propriety of the Bush family being in bed with the bin
Ladens, your father and the Carlyle Group were pressured into giving the
bin Ladens their millions back and asked them to leave the company as
investors.
Why did this take so long?
To make matters worse, it turned out that one of bin Laden's
brothers-Shafiq-was actually at a Carlyle Group business conference in
Washington, D.C., the morning of September 11. The day before, at the
same conference, your father and Shafiq had been chatting it up with all
the other ex-government Carlyle bigwigs.
Mr. Bush, what is going on here?
You've gotten a free ride from the media, though they know everything I
have just written to be the truth (and, in fact, I have taken it from
the very same mainstream news sources they work for). They seem
unwilling or afraid to ask you a simple question: WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?
In case you don't understand just how bizarre the media's silence is
regarding the Bush-bin Laden connections, let me draw an analogy to how
the press or Congress may have handled something like this if the same
shoe had been on the Clinton foot. If, after the terrorist attack on the
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was 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? Do you think at least a couple of questions might
have been asked, like, "What is THAT all about?" Be honest, you know the
answer. They would have asked more than a couple of questions. They
would have skinned Clinton alive and thrown what was left of his carcass
in Gitmo.
<...snip>
Question #3: Who attacked the United States on September 11 -a guy on
dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?
I'm sorry, Mr. Bush, but something doesn't make sense.
You got us all repeating by rote that it was Osama bin Laden who was
responsible for the attack on the United States on September 11. Even I
was doing it. But then I started hearing strange stories about Osama's
kidneys.
It turns out that there have been reports on Osama's health problems for
years. For example, In 2000 The Associated Press reported, a Western
intelligence official said Osama is suffering from kidney and liver
disease. Bin Laden has kidney failure and' his liver is going,' the
official said. . . . He said bin Laden's followers were trying to find a
kidney dialysis machine for their ailing leader.
After September 11, these reports escalated. I was watching Hardball
witb Chris Matthews one night on MSNBC, and one of the guests-a Taliban
expert-said, ". . . Osama bin Laden appears to need dialysis treatment
for his kidney problem, so he's got to be close to some dialysis. He
really can't travel far. Did he just say "dialysis"? The world's biggest
monster, the most sinister, evil man on all of planet Earth-and he can't
even piss in a pot without help? I don't know about you, but if I'm told
to be seriously frightened by an evildoer, especially the top evildoer,
I want that evildoer to have all his bodily functions working at 110
percent! I want him strong, scary, and omnipresent-and the possessor of
two working kidneys. How am I supposed to be supporting all these
Homeland Security measures when the lead bad guy is flat out on a table
somewhere hooked up to a kidney machine?
Suddenly, I don't know who or what to trust. I started to ask other
questions. How could a guy sitting In a cave in Afghanistan, hooked up
to dialysis, have directed and overseen the actions of nineteen
terrorists for two years in the United States and then plotted so
perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of
them would end up precisely on their targets? How did Osama do this? I
mean, I can't get this computer to stop crashing every time I type the
word "gingivitis." I can't get a cell signal from here to Queens! And
he's supposed to have pulled off all of September 11 from his little
cave, 10,000 miles away? What was he doing, then, when we started the
bombing over there? Was he running from cave to cave in Afghanistan with
his tubes and dialysis machine trailing behind him? Or, um, maybe there
was a dialysis machine in every third cave in Afghanistan. Yeah, that's
it! A real modern country, Afghanistan! It has about fifteen miles of
railroad track. And lots of dialysis machines, I guess.
None of this is to say that Osama isn't a baddie or even that he didn't
have something to do with the attacks. But it seems that maybe a few
journalists might want to ask a few commonsense questions, like how
could he have really pulled this off while his skin was turning green
and he was living in a country with no Kinko's, no FedEx, no ATMs. How
did he organize, communicate, control and supervise this kind of massive
attack? With two cans and a string?
Yet, we're told by you to believe it. The headlines blared it the first
day and they blare it the same way now two years later: "Terrorists
Attack United States." Terrorists. I have wondered about this word for
some time, so, George, let me ask you a question: If fifteen of the
nineteen hijackers had been North Korean, and they killed 3,000 people,
do you think the headline the next day might read, "NORTH KOREA ATTACKS
UNITED STATES"?
Of course it would. Or if it had been fifteen Iranians or fifteen
Libyans or fifteen Cubans, I think the conventional wisdom would have
been, "IRAN (or LIBYA or CUBA) ATTACKS AMERICA!"
Yet, when it comes to September 11, have you ever seen the headline,
have you ever heard a newscaster, has one of your appointees ever
uttered these words: "Saudi Arabia attacked the United States"?
Of course you haven't. And so the question must-must-be asked: WHY NOT?
Why, when Congress releases its own investigation into September 11,
you, Mr. Bush, censor out twenty-eight pages that deal with the Saudis'
role in the attack? What is behind your apparent refusal to look at the
one country that seems to be producing the "terrorists" that have killed
our citizens?
I would like to throw out a possibility here: What if September 11 was
not a "terrorist" attack but, rather, a military attack against the
United States? What if the nineteen were well-trained soldiers, the
elite of the elite, unquestioning in their duty to obey their
commander's orders? That they lived in this country for nearly two years
and were not discovered-that takes a certain amount of discipline, the
discipline of a soldier, not the erratic behavior of some wild-eyed
terrorist.
George, apparently you were a pilot once-how hard is it to hit a
five-story building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only
five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just
a hair, they'd have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at
learning how to fly jumbo lets by being taught on a video game machine
at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this
in the air force. Someone's air force. The Saudi Air Force?
What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed
on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of
either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi
royal family? The House of Saud, according to Robert Baer's book, is
full of them, and the royal family-and the country-is in incredible
turmoil. There is much dissension over how things are being run, and
with the king incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in 1995, his
brothers and numerous sons have been in a serious power struggle. Some
favor cutting off all ties to the West.
Some want the country to go the more fundamentalist route. After all,
this was Osama's originally stated goal. His first beef wasn't with
America; it was with the way Saudi Arabia was being run-by Muslims who
weren't true Muslims. There are now thousands of princes in the royal
family, and many observers have commented that Saudi Arabia is on the
brink of civil war, or perhaps a people's revolution. You can only
behead so many of your citizens and then, before long, they lose their
heads and go crazy and overthrow your ass. That is what is on the "To
Do" list for many Saudi citizens these days, and the royals are circling
the wagons.
A 1999 article in the political journal Foreign Affairs pretty much
spelled out why: "Like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia would like to leave bin
Laden in Afghanistan. His arrest and trial in the United States could be
highly embarrassing, exposing his continuing relationship with
sympathetic members of the ruling elites and intelligence services of
both countries.""
So, did certain factions within the Saudi royal family execute the
attack on September 11? Were these pilots trained by the Saudis? One
thing we do know: Nearly all the hijackers were Saudis and they were
apparently able to enter the United States legally, thanks, In part, to
the special arrangement set up by our State Department and the Saudi
government that allowed Saudis to get quickie visas without going
through the normal vetting process.
Mr. Bush, why have the Saudis received red-carpet treatment? Sure, we
need their oil. And, yes, they received the same kissy~face welcome from
all the presidents before you.
But why have you blocked attempts to dig deeper into the Saudi
connections? Why do you refuse to say, "Saudi Arabia attacked the United
States!"?
Mr. Bush, does this have anything to do with your family's close
personal relationship with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia? 1 would
like to think that's not possible. But what is your explanation? That it
was just some nut in a cave (who just happened to be on dialysis)? And,
after you couldn't find this nut, why did you try to convince us that
Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11 and al Qaeda, when
you were specifically told by your intelligence people that there was no
connection?
Why are you so busy protecting the Saudis when you should be protecting
us?
Question #4: Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the
U.S. in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the bin Laden
family and then fly them out of the country without a proper
investigation by the FBI?
Mr. Bush, not that this is personal or anything, but 1 was stranded in
Los Angeles on the morning of September 11. I scrambled to find a rental
car, and then drove 3,000 miles to get back home-all because traveling
by air was forbidden in the days following the attack. Yet, members of
the bin Laden family were allowed to fly in private jets, crisscrossing
America as they prepared to leave the country-can you explain that to
me?
Private jets, under the supervision of the Saudi government and with
your approval-were allowed to fly around the skies of America and pick
up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and take them first to a
"secret assembly point in Texas." They then flew to Washington, D.C.,
and then on to Boston. Finally, on September 18, they were all flown to
Paris, out of the reach of any U.S. officials. They never went through
any serious interrogation, other than a few questions that the FBI asked
them and a request to check each of their passports before leaving. One
FBI agent I spoke to told me that the FBI was "furious" that they were
not allowed to keep the bin Ladens in the country to conduct a real
investigation-the kind police like to do when they are trying to track
down a murderer. Usually, the police like to talk to the family members
of the suspect to learn what they know, who they know, how they might
help capture the fugitive.
None of the normal procedures were followed.
This is mind-boggling. Here you have two dozen bin Ladens on American
soil, Mr. Bush, and you come up with some lame excuse that you were
worried about "their safety." Might it have been possible that at least
one of the twenty-four bin Ladens would have possibly known something?
Or maybe just one of them could have been "convinced" to help track
Osama down?
Nope. None of that. So while thousands were stranded and could not fly,
if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass
murderer in U.S. history, you got a free tip to gay Paree! of course,
the bin Ladens have been your business associates. Why wouldn't you do a
little favor for some old family friends? But, to use the Clinton
analogy again, imagine, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing,
Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the "safety" of the McVeigh
family up in Buffalo-and then arranged a free trip for them out of the
country. What would you and the Republicans have said about that?
Suddenly, a stain on a blue dress probably wouldn't have been the top
priority for a witch hunt, would it?
With all that was happening in the days after September 11, how did you
find the time to even begin thinking about protecting people named bin
Laden? I'm amazed at your ability to multi-task.
As if bin Ladens Over America ("Air Laden?") wasn't enough, The Tampa
Tribune reported that the authorities also found the time to help even
more Saudis. Apparently, another Saudi jet, this one a private Lear jet
(arranged by a private hangar owned by defense contractor Raytheon,
which also happens to be a hefty GOP donor), was allowed to fly from
Tampa on September 13 (during the air-travel lockdown) to Lexington,
Kentucky, to drop off some members of the Saudi royal family to be with
other Saudi royals who had been in Kentucky looking at horses. Two
bodyguards for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were hired to travel along on
the flight and they told their story to the Tribune about how the pilot
revealed to them upon returning to Tampa that he had still another run
to make to Louisiana."
Why, Mr. Bush, was this allowed to happen?
A frightened nation struggled to get through those days after September
11. Yet, in the sky above us, the bin Ladens and Saudi royals jetted
home.
I think we deserve an explanation.
</q>
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