George W. and Osama feeding at same trough
The Bushes and the bin Ladens go way back
Dateline: Thursday, October 25, 2001
CounterPunch, October 25
Chances are that George W. Bush didn't need to be tutored on how to pronounce Osama bin Laden's name, after the President was informed about the events of 9/11 while reading that story about the goat to grade-schoolers in Sarasota, Florida. The bin Ladens and the Bushes go way back.
Like many ultra-rich Saudis, the bin Laden brood has always had a thing for Texas. The patriarch of the bin Laden clan, Mohammed bin Laden, the son of a Yemeni bricklayer who moved to Saudi Arabia and struck it rich in the construction business, flew frequently to Dallas to seal deals with his associates in the oil industry, often in his private jet.
Mohammed died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia. One of his elder sons, Saleem, died near Houston when his ultra-light airplane hit power lines. Of all the bin Ladens, it was Saleem who had the close relationship to the Bushes. The connection was a Houston wheeler-dealer named James Bath, who haunted the darker back corridors of the Bush-Reagan years, amid the fragrance of scandals ranging from Iran/contra to BCCI to the Silverado Savings and Loan debacle to Iranian weapons mogul Adnan Khashoggi.
Bath was an Air Force fighter pilot in Vietnam who ended up in the National Guard in Houston, where he first met George W. Bush, who had fled to the Guard in order to avoid combat. Bath and Bush became fast friends, with Bush later recalling that "Bath is a lot of fun".
In the mid-1970s, Bath became vice-president of Atlantic Aviation, one of the world's top business-aircraft sales companies. At the time, Atlantic was owned by Edward DuPont, of the DuPont chemical empire. DuPont's brother, Richard, served on the board of Atlantic. According to Gerard Colby's excellent book, DuPont Dynasty, Richard's own company, Summit Aviation, was a longtime CIA contractor.
In 1976, Bath met Osama bin Laden's brother, Saleem. Saleem was entranced by planes and he and Bath hit it off almost immediately. Soon Saleem had Bath named as trustee for the bin Laden family operations and considerable investments in the United States. It was through the bin Ladens that Bath was introduced to one of their old family friends, Adnan Khashoggi. According to Robert Lacey's book, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Laden was a patient of Khashoggi's father, a prominent Iranian physician. The young Khashoggi became a middleman for the bin Laden conglomerate in the late 1950s, getting his start by negotiating a big truck sale that earned the Iranian $25,000.
The bin Laden construction empire has enjoyed the benefits of numerous contracts with the Pentagon, perhaps none so lucrative as those for the construction of the new airstrips and barracks following the 1996 truck bombing of the US army base in Dhahran, which killed 18 people - a bombing that many have blamed on Osama bin Laden
It wasn't too long after Bath met bin Laden that he made a $50,000 investment in Arbusto Energy, a small oil company that was George P. (sic) Bush's first business venture. Arbusto means Bush in Spanish. Bath later claimed in court records that the $50,000 came from the bin Laden family. Investigative journalist Peter Brewton asserts in his book on the Bush clan that one of Bath's former business partners, Charles White, claims that it was in this very same year of 1976 that George W. Bush, then director of Central Intelligence for the Ford Administration, recruited Bath to work for the CIA. Brewton cites White as saying one of Bath's jobs was to report on the investments of Saudi millionaires. White, by the way, was another fighter pilot and went to Annapolis with Oliver North.
Through the bin Ladens, Bath was also introduced to Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, the CEO of the National Commercial Bank, Saudi Arabia's biggest bank. The NC bank was a prime lender for Khashoggi. In 1985, at a time when the arms dealer was moving weapons to Afghanistan, Iran and the contras, NCB loaned Khashoggi $35 million. Bath would team with Khalid, and former Texas governor John Connally, in buying the Main Bank in Houston, an institution that helped finance the campaigns of many Texas politicians through the late 1970s and 1980s.
Khalid's banking empire would eventually extend to a stake in the Bank of Credit and Commerce Intenational, the institution that catered to crooks and spooks. Among other criminal enterprises, BCCI served as Khashoggi's chief bank for his arms deals with Iran, a depository for Oliver North's covert action funds and the conduit for CIA money bound for the Muj in Afghanistan. Khalid was indicted for fraud in 1992.
But the bin Laden group's ties to the Bushes and the elite of the US military and intelligence establishment extend far beyond the curious career of James Bath. The bin Laden construction empire has enjoyed the benefits of numerous contracts with the Pentagon, perhaps none so lucrative as those for the construction of the new airstrips and barracks following the 1996 truck bombing of the US army base in Dhahran, which killed 18 people - a bombing that many have blamed on Osama bin Laden.
The bin Laden family has also invested at least $2 million in the Carlyle Group's Partner's II Fund, which specializes in the acquisition of aerospace companies. The Carlyle Group is the DC investment house run by former Pentagon staffers, which specializes in the financing of weapons companies and security firms. The chairman of the Carlyle Group is Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense during the second Reagan administration. Its counselor is James Baker. And, despite his pledge not to trade in his presidency for a spot on corporate boards, it also employs George H.W. Bush as a senior adviser for the group's Asian Fund.
The bin Ladens' money has been zealously courted by the Carlyle Group. Baker, Bush and Carlucci have all made pilgrimages to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, headquarters of bin Ladin [sic] enterprises. Bush Sr. has met with the bin Ladens at least twice at the behest of the Carlyle Group-once in November 1998 and again in January of 2000. Baker has also courted the bin Ladens. He even flew from Washington to Saudi Arabia on the bin Laden family jet.
Carlucci's ties are even more involved, dating at least as far back to his days as chairman of Nortel Networks, the telecommunications giant, which engaged in several joint ventures with the bin Laden group.
The attention appears to have more than paid off. The Wall Street Journal, in a September 27 story, quoted an international financier with ties to bin Laden Enterprises as saying that the family's investments in the Carlyle Group are substantially larger than $2 million, saying that the holdings in the aerospace fund were "just an initial deposit".
Until 1997, the Carlyle Group used to own a security outfit called Vinnell which, as Ken Silverstein details in his book Private Warriors, holds a contract to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard. The National Guard's primary duty is protect Saudi military bases and the nation's oil infrastructure. According to Silverstein, many of Vinnell's operatives are veterans of the CIA and the US Army's Special Forces. Vinnell's roots can be traced to Vietnam, where it did some of the nastier work for the Pentagon and earned the nickname "our little mercenary force". During the Gulf War, Vinnell operatives basically led Saudi units. Today Saudi Arabia remains one of Vinnell's top clients. The company maintains more than 1,000 employees in the country, many of them working full time to protect Saudi assets against attacks from homegrown militants, such as Osama bin Laden and his followers.
*** Excerpted with permission from CounterPunch, October 1-15
Editors Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair |
