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Courtesy: Pearly
Gates
Pie Chart
Courtesy: The
Carlyle Group Web site
What's
interesting about this story is that it hasn't been picked up
by CNN, FOX, MSNBC, or any major news organization,
although the Washington Post, New York Times, New
York Post, and the Wall Street Journal have all attempted to
bring it to national attention.
The Carlyle Group|Bin Laden
Connection
The
Carlyle Group is a private investment firm that was
established in 1987. According the organization's online
manifesto,The Carlyle Group has invested over six
billion dollars of equity in 247 corporate and real estate
transactions that are valued at eighteen billion dollars.
According to this pie chart, the group's specialty
is investment firm buyouts, which contributes to the
Carlyle Group's monopoly potential. 
The
Connection: The Bin Laden family has
funded almost half of all Carlyle activities since the late
1980s. Why is that significant? It isn't really,
although the family claims to have "disowned" Osama bin
Laden. What is significant is the fact that the Bush family
oil business is in association with a group of Saudi
billionaires that finances the Taliban and Al-Qaeda
organizations. They also financed President Bush's
gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Salem bin Laden took
charge of the bin Laden family after his father Mohammed was
killed in a 1968 plane crash.
"Dubya" made his first
million with an oil company twenty years ago partly
funded by a US representative for Salem bin Laden . Salem is
the family member believed to have started the rumor that his
brother Osama bin Laden is the black sheep of the family and
that the bin Laden family has nothing to do with him. I call
it a rumor because Osama and his "former" family have
connections to two bin Ladens living in the
U.S.
Osama's cousin Abdullah
is president and treasurer of suspected terrorist
network World Assembly of Muslim Youth, or WAMY.
Osama's cousin Omar once
lived in a house that was located near WAMY headquarters. If
I'm not mistaken, they were located within two or three blocks
of each other. In addition to that, four 9-11 hijackers listed
their address as a home located two blocks from Omar's and
three or four blocks from WAMY. WAMY claims to be a charity,
but Pakistani officials expelled WAMY "operatives" and
officials in India accused WAMY of funding an organization
that had ties to another organization which claimed
responsibility for bombings in Kashmir.
The FBI Was Told To Back Off Bin
Ladens
Agents
were told to halt their investigation once President Bush took
office
*Parts of this article contain quotes from an
Austrailian news publication
*US special agents were
told to back off the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals
soon after George Bush became president, although that has all
changed since September 11, it was reported today.*
And the BBC2's Newsnight program also said the younger
George Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil
company partly funded by the chief US representative of Salem
bin Laden, Osama's brother, who took over as head of the
family after his father Mohammed's death in a plane crash in
1968.
The program said it had secret documents from the FBI
investigation into the terror attacks on New York and
Washington which showed that despite the myth that Osama is
the black sheep of the family, at least two other
American-based members of it are suspected of links with a
possible terrorist organisation.
*The program said it had obtained evidence that the FBI was
on the trail of bin Laden family members living in the US
after, and even before, September 11.*
A document showed that special agents from the Washington
field office were investigating Abdullah, a close relative of
Osama, because of his relationship with the World Assembly of
Muslim Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization, it
said.
The program said it had found where he used to live with
another close relative, Omar, also an FBI suspect, in Falls
Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington. The house was
conveniently close to WAMY, it said, and just a couple of
blocks down the road was a place listed by four of the alleged
hijackers as their address.
The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and insists
it is a charity, the program said, yet Pakistan had expelled
WAMY "operatives" and India claimed WAMY was funding an
organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir.
*The FBI did look into WAMY, but for some reason agents
were pulled off the trail, it said.*
The program has uncovered a long history of shadowy
connections between the State Department, the CIA and the
Saudis, it said.
*The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from
1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told the program: "In Saudi
Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department
officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants.
"People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their
own country. I complained there. I complained here in
Washington to Main State, to the inspector-general and to
Diplomatic Security and I was ignored."
He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists
- recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the
United States for training to be used in the war in
Afghanistan against the then Soviets."*
The US wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family
in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the
price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection - so
long as America was safe, the program said.
The program said the younger George Bush made his first
million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by the
chief US representative of Salem bin Laden, Osama's brother,
who took over as head of the family after his father
Mohammed's death in a plane crash in 1968.
Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary
of Carlyle Corporation, a little-known private company which
in just a few years of its founding has become one of
America's biggest defence contractors, and his father, Bush
Senior, is also a paid adviser, the program said.
And it became embarrassing when it was revealed that the
bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September
11, it added.
The program said it had been told by a highly-placed source
in a US intelligence agency that there had always been
"constraints" on investigating Saudis, but under President
Bush it had become much worse.
After the elections, the intelligence agencies were told to
"back off" from investigating the bin Laden family and the
Saudi royals, and that angered field agents, the program
added.
The policy was reversed after September 11, it reported.
The program was told by FBI headquarters that it could not
comment on its findings.
A spokesman reportedly said: "There are lots of things that
only the intelligence community knows and that no one else
ought to know."
UNOCAL Pipeline In
Afghanistan
The War on Terror will generate billions of
dollars for UNOCAL and the oil
business
- Since 1995, UNOCAL has sought to build $1.9
billion, 790-mile oil and natural gas pipelines in
Afghanistan from the Dauletabad Field in Turkmenistan across
Afghanistan to Pakistani ports in the Arabian Sea as an
alternate route for transporting Caspian region oil and gas
to the Indian markets.
- After the Taliban took control in 1997, UNOCAL
made attempts to establish an agreement for the transporting
of oil and natural gas across Afghan borders. But when the
Taliban demanded more than $100 million a year for hosting
the pipeline in the form of road construction, water
supplies, telephone lines, and electricity power lines, as
well as a tap in the pipeline to provide oil and gas for
Afghanistan, UNOCAL backed out of
the agreement.
- The
US Energy Information Agency says, "Afghanistan's
significance from an energy standpoint stems from its
geographical position as a potential transit route for oil
and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian
Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of
oil and natural gas export pipelines through
Afghanistan."
With
the Taliban out of its way, UNOCAL has already begun
discussions with the new Afghan governement to build its oil
and gas lines in Afghanistan.
Carlyle
Assets
The Carlyle Group owns several smaller investment
firms, real estate, health care companies, Internet
companies, a bottling company, and the French newspaper Le
Figaro, and has over $12 billion from private
investors.
"It owns so many companies that it's one of the
nation's largest defense contractors."- Democracy
NOW!
Bush Hides Presidential
Records
He's
not as dumb as you
think
*Parts of this article contain quotes from The Cox
News Service and Tom
Teepen.
Does George W. Bush have something to
hide?
An awkward question, unpleasant to ask at any time and
especially in the midst of a war, but inevitable after
Bush signed an executive order last Thursday putting the lid
on presidential papers that had been scheduled to become
public.
The wonder is that the question isn't being asked more
broadly and urgently than it has been so
far.
The order sabotages the intent of the 1978 Presidential
Records Act that made the papers of subsequent presidents
public 12 years after a president leaves
office.
Ronald Reagan's presidency was the first to fall under
the act, and the White House says Bush's order was prompted in
part by a request for some 68,000 pages of Reagan
records.
Covering also the records of former vice presidents,
the order authorizes the incumbent president or the former
president -- or his family, in some instances, if the former
president has died -- to withhold documents from researchers,
scholars, journalists and others.
The papers can be iced by the sitting president even if
a former president wants them released, or by a former
president even if the sitting president would release them. A
former president could, for instance, be denied the validation
or vindication his papers would provide by a politically
antagonistic successor. White Houses could effectively redact
whole previous presidencies.
Presumably withholdings under this order, and perhaps
the order itself, can be challenged in court, but that process
would take years.
This is an assault on history, on the public's
understanding of its government and on the principle of
accountability. And why? No cited abuse of the system was
proclaimed as provoking the order, and with his handlers
sharply limiting open-forum press conferences, the chances for
asking Bush are scant.
The device allows George W. Bush, if he wishes, to
throw a blanket over the vice presidency and presidency of his
father, an act of archival nepotism of which the very best
that can be said is that it is unseemly. At worse, suspicions
flourish.
Could this be still more stonewalling of the
Iran-Contra affair, the shady business that found the Reagan
administration running a secretly, often privately funded
foreign policy that, if it wasn't unconstitutional, was
certainly extra-constitutional? The role of Bush the First in
that murky matter has never been clear.
Are there members of the administration of Bush fils,
brought back from Bush pere, whose current roles could be
compromised if their past roles were closely
examined?
Is this president, commanding an anti-terror campaign
whose means may become, let's say, infastidious, cutting
himself some dubious tactical slack by assuring that he or his
family can keep his actions secret even long after he has left
office?
This quirky decision almost forces such questions,
however unwelcome they may be.
So far, the answer to only one question is clear: Just
who will the order hide information from?
You.
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