This is a 3-part column that was published on January 7, 2004.
I am reprinting it here today because I feel that it has not lost its relevance and because I believe that it goes a long way in explaining why the country is in such a mess...the running of it is simply a distraction to this administration.


The Bush/Bin Laden connection

I have been asked recently by some folks to explain the link between the President, his dad the former president, the Bin Laden family, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and the war in Iraq.
Well, you asked for it, so here goes:
Six Trillion dollars, that’s what it all seems to be about.
Six Trillion dollars is the estimated amount of oil that is in the Caspian Sea area. That is roughly more oil than in all of Saudi Arabia. As a bonus, the area boasts a lower population of anti-American Muslims. The problem however, is getting all that oil to the Arabian Sea, where it can be loaded onto tankers and brought back to the US.
Apparently, the only viable way of doing this is by building a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Yes, that Afghanistan. The one who’s Freedom Fighters—including Osama himself—we fed, trained and armed when they were knocking back the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion. As a matter of fact, according to some reports, the US supported Bin Laden and the Taliban as late as 1998.
At that time, UNOCAL, an American oil conglomerate, was in negotiation with the Taliban to construct (you guessed it) an oil pipeline. It was to be one thousand miles long, ending at (you guessed it again) the Arabian Sea. Unocal performed millions of dollars of geological surveys, made plans for construction and everything was hunky-dory.
But then something happened.
For some historically undocumented reason, the Taliban changed its mind.
Perhaps it was a culture clash, perhaps UNOCAL got too greedy or perhaps it was Osama who just wanted to stick his finger into America’s eye (he is, remember, part of a Saudi oil family; and one that the US would be less dependant upon should it complete the pipeline.)
Whatever the reason, after spending millions in preparation, after anticipating receiving and spending six Trillion dollars, UNOCAL was asked to leave. This was in late 1998.
Clinton’s eight years were quickly coming to an end. Candidates for the 2000 Presidential race were beginning to assemble. Bush (II) became a candidate.
At this point, former CIA Director and President Bush (I) had already held a seat for nearly ten years on the board of the Carlyle Group; an investment firm valued at $3.5 Billion dollars, which invests in huge oil deals worldwide. In 1990, Bush (II) had been appointed to the board of one of Carlyle’s first purchases, an airline food business called Caterair. He left the board in 1992 to run for Governor of Texas.
Who else holds seats on the Carlyle board? Let’s see: Former Prime Minister of England John Major, Former Secretary of State Howard Baker, Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, the list goes on.
According to the British publication The Guardian, “ Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current President’s father. And until (October, 2001), Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm’s multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama Bin Laden.”
The former president worked for the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, meeting with them at least twice. But their relationship goes all the way back to 1977. In that year, George Bush Senior set Junior up with an oil company named Arbusto, which means “Bush” in Spanish. Part of the financing came from a financier named James R. Bath.
Bath was a Houston aircraft broker who served with President Bush (II) in the Texas Air National Guard.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden, (Osama’s brother!) appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Salem invested at least $50,000 into baby Bush’s oil company.
The revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
Fast forward to November, 2001. After 9-11, some in-the-know people, appalled at the destruction of so many innocent lives, began to question the fact that the Bin Laden family was a major investor in the Carlyle Group (You remember, the firm that Poppa Bush has a seat on). So, under pressure, the group asked the Bin Ladens to withdraw their investments.
Supposedly, by this time Osama bin Laden had been “disowned” by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the Carlyle Group (about $2,000,000 in investments).
Other reports have stated his Saudi family has not truly cut off Osama bin Laden. The official stance is he was banned in 1994 and his assets were frozen. This is the official position of the Saudi government. But in an article published in 2001 in the New Yorker Magazine, it was reported that The Bin Laden family had not cut ties with Osama and that his share of the family fortune is estimated at approximately $30 Million.
In a book (Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth) written in 2002 by two French intelligence agents, it is proposed that until 1998, Osama was able to use economic and financial structures in Saudi Arabia. He could have linked working bank accounts in Sudan with companies registered in Saudi. He had various contacts with Saudi officials. And the Saudis were supporting the Taliban regime at the time, which was hosting him. According to the book, the FBI was fully aware of the situation.
According to the book, Former FBI deputy director John O'Neill (who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, where he was the chief of security) resigned in July, 2001 because of the policy of giving U.S. oil interests a higher priority than bringing al-Qaida leaders to justice.
The authors also allege that the terror attacks were aimed at sparking a widespread war in Central Asia and thereby reinforcing the Islamic extremists' grip on power.
Why spark widespread war in Central Asia?
The authors allege that the Bush administration was bargaining with the Taliban, over a Central Asian oil pipeline and Osama bin Laden, just five weeks before the September attacks.

In last week’s column I began a solicited look into the Bush/Bin Laden connection.
Since then, several interesting new developments have surfaced. Most notably, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s revelation— on the TV show “60 Minutes” this past Sunday—that the Bush administration had planned and prepared an invasion of Iraq just days after the president’s inauguration in January of 2001—a full eight months before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Also, Colin Powell admitted on Thursday of last week—at a state department news conference—that there was “no smoking gun or concrete evidence” of Iraq’s connection with al-Qaida or Osama Bin Laden.
Well, I beg to differ on that one. There is at least one mind-blowing connection: Osama is highly likely to be benefiting monetarily from the U.S. rebuilding of Iraq.
Insane? Read on.
As I explained last week, the official position of the Saudi government is that Osama was banned in 1994 from Saudi Arabia and cut-off from his family’s multi-billion dollar fortune.
But the New Yorker Magazine reported in 2001 that his family did not cut ties to Osama and that they continue to provide him with his estimated $30 million share of the family fortune.
The New Yorker’s assertion was reinforced by a video broadcast on Al-Jezeera, which showed Osama and his family together at a wedding of Osama’s son in January of 2001.
In May 2003, an article by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that Bin Laden's family is a substantial investor in a private-equity firm founded by the Bechtel Group of San Francisco. Bechtel is also the global construction and engineering company to which the Bush administration awarded the first major multimillion-dollar contract to reconstruct war-ravaged Iraq.
In a closed competitive bidding process, the United States Agency for International Development chose Bechtel to rebuild the major elements of Iraq's infrastructure, including its roads, railroads, airports, hospitals, and schools, and its water and electrical systems. In the first phase of the contract, the U.S. government will pay Bechtel nearly thirty-five million dollars. Overall, under the contract, Bechtel may make as much as six hundred and eighty million dollars before the whole deal is done.
When the contract was awarded last year, Bush failed to mention that his old business partners—the Bin Laden family—had an ongoing relationship with Bechtel.
That relationship is a ten-million-dollar stake in the Fremont Group—a company formerly called “Bechtel Investments,” which until 1986, was a direct subsidiary of Bechtel.
The Fremont Group's Website states, "Though now independent, Fremont enjoys a close relationship with Bechtel."
Also according to Mayer’s report, a spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Fremont's "majority ownership” is the Bechtel family. A list of the corporate board of directors still shows substantial overlap between the two companies: Five of Fremont's eight directors are also directors of Bechtel.
One Fremont director, Riley Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive officer of the Bechtel Group, and is also (hold on to your hat) a member of the Bush Administration: he was appointed in 2003 to serve on the President's Export Council.
So let’s recap. The Bin Laden family—who is highly likely to still be funding Osama—is a major investor in a company that “enjoys a close relationship” and shares five directors with, the company that the Bush administration contracted to rebuild Iraq to the tune of anywhere from$35 million to $680 million. In addition, an appointed member of the Bush administration also happens to be a director of the company in which the Bin Laden family is a major investor. Got all that?

This is the third, and last installment in this series of columns outlining the previous and current connections between the Bush and the Bin Laden dynasties. In the previous two, I’ve shown some of the more incredible and unpublicized history of business transactions between our President and Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
After looking back at the last two columns, I realized that I did not mention the events of September 11, 2001 itself. I also did not go into detail about Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s former company that has already received $6 billion from the current administration in reconstruction contracts.
Let’s take care of both these things right now.
According to The New York Times, on September 11, 2001, when all planes were grounded and no American citizen was allowed to be in United States airspace, 24 members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to fly their private jet to safety in Europe.
The New York Times reported that they were quickly called together by officials from the Saudi Embassy, which feared that they might become the victims of American reprisals. With approval from the FBI, according to a Saudi official, the Bin Ladens flew by private jet from Los Angeles to Orlando, then on to Washington, and finally to Boston. Once the FFA permitted overseas flights, the jet flew to Europe.
So, the relatives of the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks were allowed not only to just up and leave but our own authorities assisted them. Why?
Like I said in my first column on this subject, the Bin Laden Family, at the time, were longtime investors in Poppa Bush’s Carlyle Group.
Like investigative reporter Michael Moore says in his book, “Dude, Where’s My Country”:
“If after the 1994 terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 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 then it was later revealed that Clinton and his family had financial dealings with Timothy McVeigh’s family, what do you think the Republican Party and the media would have done with that one?”
Just imagine.
Now for Halliburton.
According to the Associated Press, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense discovered early last week that the same Pentagon auditors that accused Vice President Cheney’s former company “Halliburton” of overcharging the US by as much as $61 million for fuel in Iraq—criminally falsified its own internal reports.
The AP reported Sunday that an internal review of the agency’s New York office revealed that the office spent over 1300 hours illegally altering its own files.
The effect of the inspector general’s report is that it immediately undermined the auditors’ credibility. Coincidence? Or was it a stiff lesson set up and issued by the Vice President? You have to remember that Cheney still receives up to one million dollars a year from Halliburton as part of a "deferred compensation" package following his resignation as chief executive in 2000, the year he quit to run as Bush’s running mate.
Since then, Halliburton has come under criminal investigation by the inspector general and remains there now.
Halliburton was founded in 1919 by Earl Halliburton in Texas as an oil-field supply and services company.
Today, Halliburton provides a wide range of engineering services, technology and equipment for oil and gas fields, platforms, pipelines, refineries, highways and military operations around the world. Building pipelines is one of their main sources of income, so is drilling.
You know Bush’s recent plan to go to Mars? Well, in the 4/24/00 edition of “Oil & Gas Journal,” a top Halliburton scientist said that a "Mars exploration program presents an unprecedented opportunity" for the oil industry to make billions. He noted the reason there was such "great potential for a happy synergy between [Halliburton] and space researchers" was because the new drilling techniques developed in a Mars program would aid Halliburton's drilling for oil on Earth.
Vice President Dick Cheney headed the company as CEO from 1995 until 2000.
In the Cheney years, the company's revenues rose from $5.7 billion in 1994 to $14.9 billion in 1999, fueled primarily by growth outside the United States. During Cheney's tenure as CEO, Halliburton's overseas operations went from 51 percent of revenue to 68 percent of revenue. How did he do it? He primarily went to countries where American embassies didn’t exist and other American companies wouldn’t go because of human rights violations, such as Burma.
Since 1988, when the Burmese army killed thousands of pro-democracy protesters to stay in power, the country's military has been condemned worldwide as one of the world's most brutal violators of human rights. The U.S. withdrew its ambassador and suspended aid to Burma over a decade ago, and has since banned new U.S. investments in the country.
Halliburton however, was grandfathered in, and remains one of the last U.S. companies to keep an office in Burma.
Vice President Cheney, according to public records, has long opposed unilateral U.S. business sanctions on the grounds that they put American businesses at a disadvantage to foreign rivals and that the U.S. can influence a foreign government best by doing business with the country, rather than placing embargoes on it.
As a matter of fact, after taking the helm of Halliburton, he became one of corporate America’s most vocal opponents of sanctions.
"I personally have spoken many times on unilateral sanctions, I think they are a mistake. They almost never work," he said when asked if he supported easing sanctions against Iran. "We seem to be sanction-happy as a government," he said in 1997, according to an oil-industry newsletter. "The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."
"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't think about (political volatility) very much," Cheney told the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association in their annual meeting in 1998. Though neglected by major media in the United States, “Le Figaro,” one of France's biggest (and most conservative) newspapers, reports "an investigative judge is looking into allegations of corruption during construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria by Halliburton and a French oil company."
International news sources report that French law enforcement authorities have made Vice President Dick Cheney the target of a criminal investigation for his role in a massive bribery scandal during his time as CEO of Halliburton.
Dyed-in-the wool Republican Kevin Phillips says in his new book “American Dynasty”:
“You have to focus on the Bush family itself. They have made the presidency into an office infused with an almost hereditary dishonesty. There’s so much lying and secrecy and corruption to it. Just look at the way Neil and Jeb and Marvin and George W. have earned their livings, with all these parasitic operations: profiting from their political connections, cashing in on favors from big corporations and other governments. It’s a convergence of arrogance--the sense that you don’t have to pay attention to democratic values. It’s happening again with Halliburton. They can’t help but let their old cronies in there to make buckets of money off the war. Their own arrogance provides a handle for their defeat. If the country does not come to grips with what Bush has done, then we may lose what we value about our republican and democratic government.”
And Phillips is no left-winger, he served as the chief political strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, and, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” he formulated the “Southern Strategy” that helped hand the White House to the GOP for a generation. Here’s some proof that just might make you think about Phillip’s assertions. The US government seized several business operations managed by Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank’s shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two others corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being from organizations for Hitler’s Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler. Unbelievable, but unfortunately true.
So, when you take all this into consideration, it is not so difficult to perceive of the UNOCAL pipeline as the crux of the entire Middle-Eastern mess. I mean, if you think about it, you just cannot impose democracy on any given group of people, it only comes from within. Even if you could impose democracy on a nation, the first democratic vote it would cast would be to get rid of our presence in their country. So go figure.
Here’s a really interesting bit of information. Hamid Karzai (the American puppet leader of the new Afghanistan government) is a former employee of UNOCAL. And according to the Irish Times Newspaper, he and Pakistan President Pervez Musharref (you know, the guy who cooperated in reporting and capturing al-Qaida agents for the US) agreed at a very unpublicized meeting in 2002, to build a proposed gas pipeline from Central Asia (i.e. Caspian Sea area) to Pakistan via Afghanistan.
So, you could say that the UNOCAL pipeline through Afghanistan is on again. The only player that needs to join the black-gold rush now is Turkmenistan, and Donald Rumsfeld has been seen there recently. And what of “Osama-Been-Forgotten”? My guess is that he will never be caught as long as there is a Bush in the White House, and that’s no accident. Again, according to Kevin Phillips, “The (Bush) administration has not been interested in turning over any rocks that represent Saudi Arabia, because the Bush family has been in bed with them for so long. In addition, many of the people surrounding the president are former retainers of his father. They wanted to nail Saddam because he got away from them before. That’s a central element of restorations: the settling of old scores.”
Meanwhile the Bush administration as a whole insists that we remain in Iraq even though two American soldiers, on average, are killed every day.