Re: Pentagon Attack on 911
A very important and revealing publication has come out recently regarding the Bush dynasty in America and its intimate connections to the Saudi Royal family. Here is the transcript of the author's interview with Democracy Now. I hope you find it interesting.
Armenian
************************************************** ****************
Download MP-3 of Interview: http://www.archive.org/download/dn20...318-1_64kb.mp3
We speak with Craig Unger, author of the new book, "House of Bush, House of Saud" that details the complex negotiations on war, oil, illegal arms deals and murky banking deals conducted between the Bushes and the Saudis - connecting a US presidential dynasty to a foreign power.
AMY GOODMAN: The long-term relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi Royal family that dates back over two decades. And the subject of a new book by Craig Unger, which is called "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties." In it, Craig Unger writes that in order to understand this relationship, one would have to journey back to the time to the birth of Al-Qaeda. One would have to study the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq War of 2003. One would have to try to deduce what had happened within the corporate suites of the oil barons, of Dallas and Houston, the executive offices of Carlyle Group. Finally, one would have to put all this information together to shape a continuum, a narrative in which the House of Bush and the House of Saud dominated the world stage together in one era after another. Having done so, one would have to come to a singular, inescapable conclusion, namely that horrifying as it sounds, the secret relationship between these two great families helped to trigger the age of terror and give rise to see the tragedy of 9-11. Powerful words, Craig Unger.
CRAIG UNGER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about why you see this relationship as key to understanding 9-11?
CRAIG UNGER: Right. Well, to me this has been sort of the elephant in the living room, a powerful piece of logic that's really in plain sight and has been ignored by most of the American press. And it goes something like this, that is without the Saudis, you really don't have 9-11. And we haven't focused on that. It's not just that 15 out of 19 of the hijackers were Saudis, that it was master minded by Osama bin Laden who, of course, is Saudi. If you look at the roots of Al-Qaeda, it was largely funded by Saudi Arabia and that includes members of the House of Saud, the Saudi merchant elite, great billionaire bankers who do lots of work with the United States, and have had relationships with the Bush family itself. So, that is one element. Two is that Saudi Arabia is supposedly our friend, our ally. And with friends like these, you’ve got to wonder who needs enemies? But the entire country, the entire United States has been sort of in bed with Saudi Arabia. Anyone who benefits from it, who's filled up their tank with a cheap gallon of oil, and this dates back to the 1940's when Franklin Roosevelt made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. The Bush family in particular, has played a huge, huge role in all of this. That is they've been the architects of the policy for the last generation. The elder George Bush, James Baker, of course, who was his close friend, ally and secretary of state, and the younger George Bush. They've been active in this, in the private sector and the public sector, back and forth as they've been in and out of power. So, the question arises, are they ultimately so compromised they can't really fight the war on terror? Shouldn't this be one of targets of the war on terror?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of things that surprised me is how you have been – we’ve discussed the flight of the Saudis out of the country before. We've interviewed Kevin Phillips here on his recent book. But you've managed to put together the entire story from the early days of the first Bush, Bush the father, through actually most amazing part of your book seemed to me the relationship between the two 2000 election and the Saudis and the Bush family. Could you talk a little bit -- for instance, you mentioned one guy, Sami al-Arian in Florida and his relationship with the Bush family. Could you talk about that?
CRAIG UNGER: It is an extraordinary story that's largely untold. And it's interesting, only, I think, the right-wing press has been talking about this. And I saw a quote by David Frum, the Bush speech writer, who was very critical of his boss, President Bush, and said fortunately, we Republicans have enemies -- our rivals, the Democrats, are so crippled they won't discuss this politically. It goes back to the election of 2000, and one of the great untold stories is how the Bush administration had a secret strategy to win the Muslim-American vote. And I think very few people realize there are actually more Muslim-Americans than there are xxxs in the United States. There are roughly seven million. But they've almost never been approached as a block vote and, in fact, it's probably silly to regard them as a block vote. Muslims are not necessarily Arabs. Arabs are not necessarily Muslims. There are black Muslims who have no real allegiance to the Middle East particularly. It's much more religious and Wahhabism, and the militant Wahhabism is not really part of the entire Muslim-American community, except that the Saudis do play a huge role in funding that. Nevertheless, the Bush campaign aggressively went after this vote. And in Tampa, Florida, they began campaigning with Muslim leader, including this man you mentioned, Sami al-Arian, who was a professor at the University of South Florida. And it turns out he is now under indictment for alleged terrorist activities, for allegedly playing a key role as a leader in the Palestinian Islamic jihad, and funding suicide bombings that killed over 100 people in Israel, including two Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is the connection to this story?
CRAIG UNGER: Well, what’s extraordinary is that Bush not only campaigned with him, and there’s a photo of them campaigning together in Tampa in my book "House of Bush, House of Saud," and they -- he actually invited him to the White House after the election. And I think a very strong case can be made that Bush would not be president today, not having done that. During the second presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush suddenly became this rabid civil libertarian, which is extraordinary given his past. And he said that he was against racial profiling of Arab-Americans, and this came out of the blue. No, such question had been asked, there had been questions about racism against African-Americans, but not about Arab-Americans. And these were sort of code words he uttered to win that vote. Immediately after he said that, during the debate, an Arab – a Muslim-American leader got 31 calls on his cell phone, and said we have to now endorse Bush. The endorsements poured in. Bush won the Muslim-American vote in Florida by more than 90%. This proved obviously a key factor in winning Florida, and more than provided the difference of the 500 votes by which he allegedly won Florida.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Craig Unger, his book is "House of Bush, House of Saud." You begin with the great escape.
CRAIG UNGER: Right. I think the extraordinary story, again, it’s not been widely told. It has been referred to fleetingly in the American press. And here you have two days after 9-11 -- I mean, this is the most horrifying atrocity in American history, the worst crime in American history, 3,000 people are killed. Prince Bandar, the Saudi-Arabian ambassador to the United States, who had been a close, close member for -- well, I think he is virtually a member of the Bush family. Barbara Bush, the former first lady, calls him Bandar Bush, allows him to be the only person who is allowed to smoke in her home. And he has been a close friend of former president Bush. If you look at his body language in photos of him and President Bush, this is not a guy standing in awe of the president of the United States. This is a guy who is visiting his friend’s son, and he’s sort of lounging on the arm of a big armchair as if -- I wish I could be that relaxed, you know? But -- so they were meeting by 9/13 at the White House having cigars on the balcony on September 13.
AMY GOODMAN: September 13, 2001.
CRAIG UNGER: Exactly. And suddenly, flights began going out. I talked to two people on a flight from Tampa to Lexington, and that included three Saudi Royals on it as passengers, and the flights began. I found eight airplanes stopping in at least 12 American cities. This was a massive operation. It required White House authorization. It went from Los Angeles to -- there was Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, Newark. I mean, it is interesting. Two planes actually took off from -- flights from within cities from which the hijacked planes -- the hijackings had originated. And the airport officials were just agog that this was happening.
AMY GOODMAN: This was at Logan and Boston?
CRAIG UNGER: Exactly. And Newark. And the flights went out. I was --
AMY GOODMAN: All private jet plane traffic was grounded at that point?
CRAIG UNGER: Right. In fact, three private planes were forced down on September 13. Now the entire process took about two weeks. But the point is that it originated at a time when it required White House approval. And I was able to talk to Richard Clark, the former counterterrorism czar who was in the Situation Room at the White House at that time. And he told me that, in fact, he had been involved in discussions about it and he had said it was ok, so long as everyone was vetted by the FBI. Well, the problem is they were not really vetted by the FBI. I mean, in the most common place murder investigation, you want to talk to friends and relatives of the perpetrator, even if they're innocent, and you want to have serious investigation. Well, here you have such a humongous crime -- and their passports were identified, they were ID'd. But in many cases -- in virtually all cases, there was no serious interrogation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And who were some of the bin Laden family members that were here?
CRAIG UNGER: Well, what I was able to do for the first time was to obtain passenger lists for four of those flights. And the most astonishing name I found was a man named Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who is a very high ranking member of the royal family. A Saudi billionaire again. He was in Lexington, Kentucky. And he was best known to Americans as the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem. He was a great horse race owner.
AMY GOODMAN: War Emblem?
CRAIG UNGER: War Emblem, and he also owned Point Given, which won two legs of the Triple Crown the previous year. His horses won a total of four legs of the Triple Crown, and he was at the Yearling Sales in Lexington, Kentucky, and said he was very upset by 9-11. On September 12, he bought $1.2 million worth of horses. I don't know how upset he really was. And on September 13, that flight landed in Lexington, Kentucky from Tampa, and a couple of days later, flights took off and took him from Lexington to London.
AMY GOODMAN: Only one newspaper in Tampa reported that these flights had taken off. Even the old – was it an FBI-guy, a police guy who was sent to protect these people never believed they would get off the ground.
CRAIG UNGER: Right. That's right. The former FBI-men who were escorts said they went to the airport because they were being paid to do it.
AMY GOODMAN: Who were they paid by?
CRAIG UNGER: By the Saudis. And this one Tampa paper did an excellent job of reporting it, the Tampa Tribune. But not a single paper in the United States picked up on it. I eventually did a story in "Vanity Fair" that became part --
AMY GOODMAN: Was there a record at the airport that these planes had taken off, a ledger?
CRAIG UNGER: It was actually not terribly difficult to pin down. Again, the Tampa Tribune had done a very good job. I retraced the steps. I mean, essentially they printed the names, people were on the records. I got them from information. It doesn't take a genius to do this.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Craig Unger, author of "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.” We'll come back with him, and talk about issues like what did global PR-firm Burson-Marsteller do to help the Saudis deal with the fallout of 9-11? Stay with us.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk in the book, obviously about the relationship over many years between the Bin Laden's and the Bush family and the Saudis in general. But clearly the Clinton Administration also, in many ways, had to deal with the Saudis and, to a certain degree, the Bin Laden family. You talk about the transition period also between -- as President Bush came in and Sandy Berger and the other Clinton officials briefed them on the war on terrorism and how they responded. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[...]
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/article....4/03/18/157206
A very important and revealing publication has come out recently regarding the Bush dynasty in America and its intimate connections to the Saudi Royal family. Here is the transcript of the author's interview with Democracy Now. I hope you find it interesting.
Armenian
************************************************** ****************
House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between The World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
Download MP-3 of Interview: http://www.archive.org/download/dn20...318-1_64kb.mp3
We speak with Craig Unger, author of the new book, "House of Bush, House of Saud" that details the complex negotiations on war, oil, illegal arms deals and murky banking deals conducted between the Bushes and the Saudis - connecting a US presidential dynasty to a foreign power.
AMY GOODMAN: The long-term relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi Royal family that dates back over two decades. And the subject of a new book by Craig Unger, which is called "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties." In it, Craig Unger writes that in order to understand this relationship, one would have to journey back to the time to the birth of Al-Qaeda. One would have to study the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq War of 2003. One would have to try to deduce what had happened within the corporate suites of the oil barons, of Dallas and Houston, the executive offices of Carlyle Group. Finally, one would have to put all this information together to shape a continuum, a narrative in which the House of Bush and the House of Saud dominated the world stage together in one era after another. Having done so, one would have to come to a singular, inescapable conclusion, namely that horrifying as it sounds, the secret relationship between these two great families helped to trigger the age of terror and give rise to see the tragedy of 9-11. Powerful words, Craig Unger.
CRAIG UNGER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about why you see this relationship as key to understanding 9-11?
CRAIG UNGER: Right. Well, to me this has been sort of the elephant in the living room, a powerful piece of logic that's really in plain sight and has been ignored by most of the American press. And it goes something like this, that is without the Saudis, you really don't have 9-11. And we haven't focused on that. It's not just that 15 out of 19 of the hijackers were Saudis, that it was master minded by Osama bin Laden who, of course, is Saudi. If you look at the roots of Al-Qaeda, it was largely funded by Saudi Arabia and that includes members of the House of Saud, the Saudi merchant elite, great billionaire bankers who do lots of work with the United States, and have had relationships with the Bush family itself. So, that is one element. Two is that Saudi Arabia is supposedly our friend, our ally. And with friends like these, you’ve got to wonder who needs enemies? But the entire country, the entire United States has been sort of in bed with Saudi Arabia. Anyone who benefits from it, who's filled up their tank with a cheap gallon of oil, and this dates back to the 1940's when Franklin Roosevelt made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. The Bush family in particular, has played a huge, huge role in all of this. That is they've been the architects of the policy for the last generation. The elder George Bush, James Baker, of course, who was his close friend, ally and secretary of state, and the younger George Bush. They've been active in this, in the private sector and the public sector, back and forth as they've been in and out of power. So, the question arises, are they ultimately so compromised they can't really fight the war on terror? Shouldn't this be one of targets of the war on terror?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of things that surprised me is how you have been – we’ve discussed the flight of the Saudis out of the country before. We've interviewed Kevin Phillips here on his recent book. But you've managed to put together the entire story from the early days of the first Bush, Bush the father, through actually most amazing part of your book seemed to me the relationship between the two 2000 election and the Saudis and the Bush family. Could you talk a little bit -- for instance, you mentioned one guy, Sami al-Arian in Florida and his relationship with the Bush family. Could you talk about that?
CRAIG UNGER: It is an extraordinary story that's largely untold. And it's interesting, only, I think, the right-wing press has been talking about this. And I saw a quote by David Frum, the Bush speech writer, who was very critical of his boss, President Bush, and said fortunately, we Republicans have enemies -- our rivals, the Democrats, are so crippled they won't discuss this politically. It goes back to the election of 2000, and one of the great untold stories is how the Bush administration had a secret strategy to win the Muslim-American vote. And I think very few people realize there are actually more Muslim-Americans than there are xxxs in the United States. There are roughly seven million. But they've almost never been approached as a block vote and, in fact, it's probably silly to regard them as a block vote. Muslims are not necessarily Arabs. Arabs are not necessarily Muslims. There are black Muslims who have no real allegiance to the Middle East particularly. It's much more religious and Wahhabism, and the militant Wahhabism is not really part of the entire Muslim-American community, except that the Saudis do play a huge role in funding that. Nevertheless, the Bush campaign aggressively went after this vote. And in Tampa, Florida, they began campaigning with Muslim leader, including this man you mentioned, Sami al-Arian, who was a professor at the University of South Florida. And it turns out he is now under indictment for alleged terrorist activities, for allegedly playing a key role as a leader in the Palestinian Islamic jihad, and funding suicide bombings that killed over 100 people in Israel, including two Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: And what is the connection to this story?
CRAIG UNGER: Well, what’s extraordinary is that Bush not only campaigned with him, and there’s a photo of them campaigning together in Tampa in my book "House of Bush, House of Saud," and they -- he actually invited him to the White House after the election. And I think a very strong case can be made that Bush would not be president today, not having done that. During the second presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush suddenly became this rabid civil libertarian, which is extraordinary given his past. And he said that he was against racial profiling of Arab-Americans, and this came out of the blue. No, such question had been asked, there had been questions about racism against African-Americans, but not about Arab-Americans. And these were sort of code words he uttered to win that vote. Immediately after he said that, during the debate, an Arab – a Muslim-American leader got 31 calls on his cell phone, and said we have to now endorse Bush. The endorsements poured in. Bush won the Muslim-American vote in Florida by more than 90%. This proved obviously a key factor in winning Florida, and more than provided the difference of the 500 votes by which he allegedly won Florida.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Craig Unger, his book is "House of Bush, House of Saud." You begin with the great escape.
CRAIG UNGER: Right. I think the extraordinary story, again, it’s not been widely told. It has been referred to fleetingly in the American press. And here you have two days after 9-11 -- I mean, this is the most horrifying atrocity in American history, the worst crime in American history, 3,000 people are killed. Prince Bandar, the Saudi-Arabian ambassador to the United States, who had been a close, close member for -- well, I think he is virtually a member of the Bush family. Barbara Bush, the former first lady, calls him Bandar Bush, allows him to be the only person who is allowed to smoke in her home. And he has been a close friend of former president Bush. If you look at his body language in photos of him and President Bush, this is not a guy standing in awe of the president of the United States. This is a guy who is visiting his friend’s son, and he’s sort of lounging on the arm of a big armchair as if -- I wish I could be that relaxed, you know? But -- so they were meeting by 9/13 at the White House having cigars on the balcony on September 13.
AMY GOODMAN: September 13, 2001.
CRAIG UNGER: Exactly. And suddenly, flights began going out. I talked to two people on a flight from Tampa to Lexington, and that included three Saudi Royals on it as passengers, and the flights began. I found eight airplanes stopping in at least 12 American cities. This was a massive operation. It required White House authorization. It went from Los Angeles to -- there was Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, Newark. I mean, it is interesting. Two planes actually took off from -- flights from within cities from which the hijacked planes -- the hijackings had originated. And the airport officials were just agog that this was happening.
AMY GOODMAN: This was at Logan and Boston?
CRAIG UNGER: Exactly. And Newark. And the flights went out. I was --
AMY GOODMAN: All private jet plane traffic was grounded at that point?
CRAIG UNGER: Right. In fact, three private planes were forced down on September 13. Now the entire process took about two weeks. But the point is that it originated at a time when it required White House approval. And I was able to talk to Richard Clark, the former counterterrorism czar who was in the Situation Room at the White House at that time. And he told me that, in fact, he had been involved in discussions about it and he had said it was ok, so long as everyone was vetted by the FBI. Well, the problem is they were not really vetted by the FBI. I mean, in the most common place murder investigation, you want to talk to friends and relatives of the perpetrator, even if they're innocent, and you want to have serious investigation. Well, here you have such a humongous crime -- and their passports were identified, they were ID'd. But in many cases -- in virtually all cases, there was no serious interrogation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And who were some of the bin Laden family members that were here?
CRAIG UNGER: Well, what I was able to do for the first time was to obtain passenger lists for four of those flights. And the most astonishing name I found was a man named Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who is a very high ranking member of the royal family. A Saudi billionaire again. He was in Lexington, Kentucky. And he was best known to Americans as the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner, War Emblem. He was a great horse race owner.
AMY GOODMAN: War Emblem?
CRAIG UNGER: War Emblem, and he also owned Point Given, which won two legs of the Triple Crown the previous year. His horses won a total of four legs of the Triple Crown, and he was at the Yearling Sales in Lexington, Kentucky, and said he was very upset by 9-11. On September 12, he bought $1.2 million worth of horses. I don't know how upset he really was. And on September 13, that flight landed in Lexington, Kentucky from Tampa, and a couple of days later, flights took off and took him from Lexington to London.
AMY GOODMAN: Only one newspaper in Tampa reported that these flights had taken off. Even the old – was it an FBI-guy, a police guy who was sent to protect these people never believed they would get off the ground.
CRAIG UNGER: Right. That's right. The former FBI-men who were escorts said they went to the airport because they were being paid to do it.
AMY GOODMAN: Who were they paid by?
CRAIG UNGER: By the Saudis. And this one Tampa paper did an excellent job of reporting it, the Tampa Tribune. But not a single paper in the United States picked up on it. I eventually did a story in "Vanity Fair" that became part --
AMY GOODMAN: Was there a record at the airport that these planes had taken off, a ledger?
CRAIG UNGER: It was actually not terribly difficult to pin down. Again, the Tampa Tribune had done a very good job. I retraced the steps. I mean, essentially they printed the names, people were on the records. I got them from information. It doesn't take a genius to do this.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Craig Unger, author of "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.” We'll come back with him, and talk about issues like what did global PR-firm Burson-Marsteller do to help the Saudis deal with the fallout of 9-11? Stay with us.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk in the book, obviously about the relationship over many years between the Bin Laden's and the Bush family and the Saudis in general. But clearly the Clinton Administration also, in many ways, had to deal with the Saudis and, to a certain degree, the Bin Laden family. You talk about the transition period also between -- as President Bush came in and Sandy Berger and the other Clinton officials briefed them on the war on terrorism and how they responded. Can you talk about that a little bit?
[...]
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/article....4/03/18/157206
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