April/May 2004
Peace
Candidate Dennis Kucinich Vows to Stay in Race
Interview by Amy Goodman
Winds
of Change in Spain
William Rivers Pitt
"House
of Bush, House of Saud"
Interview with Craig Unger by Amy Goodman
"Seeds
of Deception"
Jeffrey Smith
Genetically
Engineered DNA Found in Traditional Seeds
New
Findings Show Health Hazards of Genetically Modified Crops
An
Evolutionary Conversatoin with Barbara Marx Hubbard
Alan Sasha Lithman
Making
A New Declaration of Independence
Michael J. Tamura
Empathic
Listening
Holley Humphrey
Intimacy
With Self and Others, Earth and Spirit
Loba
2004
State of the Universe Address
Swani Beyondananda
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
House of
Bush, House of Saud
The Secret
Relationship Between The World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties
Interview with Craig Unger by Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez
In the days after the September 11th attacks, former Vice President Al Gore was grounded, former President Bill Clinton was grounded, planes were forced down in mid-flight, including one carrying a heart to be transplanted to a deathly-ill cardiac patient.
American skies were empty, yet at the same time 140 influential Saudis were effectively chaperoned out of the country—allegedly by the US government. Among them were several dozen members of the bin Laden family. They were never questioned by the FBI.
Despite the fact
that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, top White House officials
approved the evacuation of Saudi citizens at a time when all other planes
were grounded. How was this possible? The answer lies in the long-term relationship
between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family that dates back over two
decades and is the subject of a new book by Craig Unger—House of Bush,
House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful
Dynasties—which details the complex negotiations on war, oil, illegal
arms deals and murky banking deals conducted between the Bushes and the Saudis.
AG: Craig, you write that in order to understand the relationship
between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family 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.
Can you talk about why you see this relationship as key to understanding 9-11?
This has been the elephant in the living room, a powerful piece of logic that’s in plain sight and has been ignored by most of the American press: Without the Saudis, you 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.
Saudi Arabia is supposedly our friend, our ally. The entire United States has benefited from this relationship, we all fill up our tanks with cheap gas (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, they’ve been the architects of the policy for the last generation. The elder George Bush, James Baker, 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?
AG: You begin your book with the “great escape.”
I think this extraordinary story, again, has not been widely told. It has been referred to fleetingly in the American press. On September 13, two days after the most horrifying atrocity in American history, Prince Bandar, the Saudi-Arabian ambassador to the United States, has a meeting with George W. Bush at the White House where he is photographed having cigars on the balcony. If you look at the body language in these photos of Prince Bandar with 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. By the way, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, calls him “Bandar Bush,” and he is the only person she allows to smoke in her home.
AG: September 13, 2001?
Exactly. And then suddenly, flights began going out. I talked to two people on a flight from Tampa to Lexington that included three Saudi Royals on it as passengers. I found eight airplanes stopping in at least 12 American cities. This was a massive operation. It required White House authorization. Flights left from Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Cleveland—even Boston and Newark, from which the hijackings had originated, had two planes taking off. And the airport officials were just agog that this was happening.
AG: All private jet plane traffic was grounded at that point?
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. 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 he had been involved in discussions about it and he had said it was ok, so long as everyone was vetted by the FBI. The problem is they were not really vetted by the FBI. 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. Here you have such a humongous crime but in virtually all the cases, there was no serious interrogation.
JG: You talk in the book 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 as President Bush came in and Sandy Berger and the other Clinton officials briefed them on the war on terrorism and how they responded.
Again, this is a relationship that goes back to the 40’s between the United States and Saudi Arabia. We need oil as strategic reserve, so it is not unusual that both democrats and republicans would try to be close to them. In addition, the Saudis were genuinely bipartisan in trying to win friends in both parties. They had contributed at one point $23 million to the University of Arkansas to a Middle East Studies program, I think as a way to try to win over President Clinton. Nevertheless, they were never as close to the Clinton Administration as they were to the Bush family.
The issue of terrorism was rather confused in the early 1990’s. Bin Laden had started to become a force right after the Gulf War. But the notion of terrorism throughout the mid 90’s was really one of state-sponsored terrorism, as in Libya for example. By the mid 1990’s, the Clinton Administration sort of figured out that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had invented a new form of terrorism—a transnational form that had its own businesses and its own channels of funding through Islamic charities—and they began to crack down on it. They put pressure on the Saudi Government, specifically on the banking system, with some mixed success.
At the same time, in the last half of the Clinton Administration, Clinton really became crippled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But in terms of striking back at Al Qaeda, he did so memorably in August of 1998, when Al Qaeda had bombed two American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, simultaneously, within five minutes of each other. These were massive, 1,000-pound bombs and it showed the sophistication of Al Qaeda and that they were capable of carrying out large operations.
At that point,
Richard Clark began a really aggressive campaign to strike back at Al Qaeda.
Clinton, however, was ridiculed for striking back at them and the republicans,
led by Senator Phil Gramm, fought a banking bill that was designed to restrict
funding of terrorism.
JG: You are referring to the attack on the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, and the attacks to take out bin laden in Afghanistan. You also mentioned that the lawyer representing the pharmaceutical factory happened to be a republican party stalwart and supporter of Bush in Michigan.
There are so many apparent conflicts like that, it’s just astonishing. As you go through this, for example, the Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, was George W. Bush’s personal lawyer. He defended him in an insider trading allegation at Harkin Energy in which Bush was bailed out by Saudi Arabia. He was a lawyer at Baker Botts, which is James Baker’s firm that represents Saudi Arabia against the 9-11 victims, and also represents the Carlisle Group, the giant private equity firm, which did so much business with the Saudis.
AG: That also involves James Bath who is featured in your book. Talk about the bailing out of George W. Bush and his relationship to the Bin Laden’s.
James Bath was a great, mysterious figure and I was stunned when he returned my phone call. I immediately flew down to Houston.
Bath had been in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush. He was friends with Bush and his father, and with James Baker, John Connelly and Lloyd Benson. He was selling aircraft at the time and happened to sell one to Salem Bin Laden, Osama’s older brother. Salem Bin Laden came over to Houston with Khalid Bin Mahfooz, who was a powerful banker in Saudi Arabia. They began striking up business interests with powerful Texas politicians. At this time, the Saudis began investing as much as $800 billion into American equities, most of which were massive blue chip companies that we all know on Wall Street.
What I was most interested in is how they put money into the sort of companies that weren’t doing well, but were linked to powerful politicians. Specifically there was a small oil company started by George W. Bush, and in the late 80’s there was Harkin Energy on whose board of directors George W. Bush sat. Harkin was doing terribly at the time, it was losing money hand over fist. There were enormous accounting irreg-ularities. At the time, the price of oil was plummeting. Now I ask you, why would Saudis, who have all the oil in the world, journey around the globe to invest in this pathetic, failing company? Except perhaps because George W. Bush, whose father at that time was president of the United States, is on the board of directors.
AG: Did the Saudis buy a president?
The figure that I found was astonishing. I traced all the transactions, as many as I could, and I’m sure this is a conservative figure. I found at least $1.4 billion going from the House of Saud and its allies into companies in which Bush and his allies had major stakes and prominent positions—the Carlisle Group, Halliburton, Harkin Energy and so on. This figure, to put it into perspective, is more than 20,000 times as much as the Clintons invested in Whitewater.
AG: In $1.4 billion what personally went to the Bushes, to their libraries, etc.?
There was at least $1 million to each presidential library and I have to say, the Saudis again, are generally bipartisan on this. They give to democrats and republicans alike. And Prince Bandar has been quite frank. If we give to our friends after they get out of office, the people in office will get the message. But, you know, again, the Bushes are certainly well off. I’ve never regarded them as people who are in it solely for the money. This is about power. And I think this is not money for the most part that is going directly into their coffers. I see them more as vessels for power to which money in the Oil Industry and the Defense Industry flow, and it goes to their friends and allies and the Carlisle Group, the giant private equity firm, which manages companies with assets of $16 billion and which was nonexistent a little more than 15 years ago.
JG: After 9-11 the War Against Terrorism morphed into the invasion of Iraq. In your book you explain how that developed and how the Bush Administration managed to ignore the deep Saudi connections to all of this terrorism.
Less than five hours after 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said “Let’s go wide with this. Let’s get Saddam. Related or not.” And you can trace back to 1992 plans to go after Saddam that were drawn up by the Neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. And in various iterations of those plans they once said that we really need a Pearl Harbor of sorts in order to kick this policy into gear. 9-11 seems to have been exactly that. Even though I believe that Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with this, somehow or another, the administration got 70% of Americans to believe that Saddam was the villain. He is a brutal, horrible man. There is no question about it. But he had nothing to do with 9-11.
AG: What about the fact that most people in this country do not believe that the vast majority of the hijackers, 15 of the 19, were from Saudi Arabia? Most still believe they were from Iraq. Can you talk about what the Saudi Ambassador to the United States did after 9-11?
The Saudis are fabulous at public relations. If you look at their whole campaign over the last 30 years, they spent $70 billion on propaganda. It’s the biggest propaganda campaign in the history of the world, more than Soviet communism at the height of the Cold war. Immediately after 9-11, Prince Bandar, who is quite a dashing and colorful character and sort of the Gatsby of the Arab World, hired Burson Marsteller, the huge American public relations firm. He went on every talk show imaginable. He said again and again that Osama Bin Laden was not Saudi and in fact they had withdrawn his citizenship. But the Bin Laden family is as Saudi as they come. They are a great, great part of Saudi Arabia, and are close to the Saudi royal family.
Burson Marsteller lined up interviews. If you want to get to the Saudis, you call their P.R. Agencies and they are immediately available. They are terrific at it. I was in Washington, DC just last week with Michael Moore shooting his new movie Fahrenheit 9-11. We were shooting on the sidewalk opposite the Saudi embassy and they sent out a lovely young Saudi Arabian woman who says, “Oh, Mr. Moore, we’re such great fans of yours!” I find that really very hard to believe, but it was a brilliant stroke of public relations. And they do that again and again.
Prince Bandar was on every talk show imaginable during those days immediately following 9-11. He said there is no terrorism in Saudi Arabia. They put together a rather compelling line that is hard to penetrate—they said that charity is one of the pillars of Islam, and the Saudi royals give enormous amounts to charity. That’s true, they have tens of billions of dollars with which to do it, and we can’t really trace what happens to it. It’s as if you gave to the United Way and some of the money ended up going to the Irish Republican Army. That wouldn’t make you a terrorist, that wouldn’t mean that you were culpable. But when you probe more deeply, it is much, much more complicated than that. You can see that by the mid 90’s. The United States counter-terrorism analysts were aware of them and the Clinton Administration had begun to crack down on that. So after the bombings started in 1995 and 1996 in Saudi Arabia, they began to pressure the Saudis and tried to look into the banking system. The Saudis were extraordinarily uncooperative. After bombers were caught, or suspects were caught for some of these bombings, they were generally beheaded before the FBI could interrogate them. So, the reality is far more complex than what the Saudis’ public relations campaign presents.
AG: Can you talk about the 9-11 report and the 28 pages that were blanked out?
I don’t know what’s in them, the administration has stonewalled on it. I believe the 9-11 commission really has to get to the bottom of some of these questions. They should be asking how the adminis-tration authorized the departure of so many Saudis right after 9-11. This seems to be a spectacularly egregious failure in intelligence to allow all these people—including Prince Ahmed Bin Salomon, who allegedly had Al Qaeda ties and allegedly advance knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center—to leave right after 9-11 without being interrogated by the administration. How could that happen? Was it because the Bushes were so closes to the Saudis?
I think a lot of these questions have been avoided because you become tainted as a conspiracy nut if you raise them. I don’t believe there is any conspiracy, by the way. I believe this is business. There’s been $1.4 billion worth of business going between the Bushes and Saudi Arabia. When you do business like that, one of the cardinal rules of business is “you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” If you have been fed with $1.4 billion, you regard them as clients, business associates, friends. Prince Bandar would visit the elder George Bush in Kenne-bunkport and go down to Crawford with the current President Bush. They’d all go hunting together.
AG: There was also a connection between the Bushes and the arming of Iran?
This was a policy that twisted back and forth. You see this brutal pragmatism emerge, in which there is really no principle whatsoever. There were two factions within the Reagan-Bush administration. Just after Iran had seized 52 American hostages, they were demonized as our great Muslim enemies. At the same time, one faction of the administration said “We have to arm Iran as a bulwark because Iraq is a greater threat to Israel and the enemy of our enemy is our friend.” Another faction in the admini-stration said, “We’ve got to arm Iraq, because if the Iranian fundamentalism spreads, then our oil will be endangered in Saudi Arabia.” And the senior President Bush was in both factions, he tilted back and forth, and he actually made a secret mission to the Middle East which was reported throughout the American press as “a great peace mission.” In fact, he was a covert operative working for William Casey and the CIA while he was Vice President of the United States. And he was supplying strategic military intelligence to Saddam Hussein to help Iraq get the coordinates to bomb Iranian soldiers.
At the time the US was trying to do an arms for hostages deal. They got one hostage released and then Iran said we don’t want anymore arms. So the administration had no bargaining position. How do you get Iran to want more arms? You get Iraq to bomb them. And to do that, you had to give them more strategic military intelligence. So, they got satellite intelligence and the senior George Bush made a special trip to make sure all that got in motion in 1986.
We were able to get top secret cables from the State Department and Murray Watts and I reported this in The New Yorker in 1992.
AG: And did Iraq also gas these Iranians?
Yes, they did. And they did so, it’s been alleged, with American helicopters. One of the striking things is that by 1983, the administration was well aware that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons.
Donald Rumsfeld, a special presidential envoy for President Reagan at the time, made two special trips to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. I have a photo of the meeting in my book. And he was basically saying that, publicly we’re going to come out very much against your use of chemical weapons, but wink-wink, don’t worry, we want to develop a warm relationship with you. This was reported in the Washington Post and there were cables. He returned in March of 1984 to amplify the same message.
That policy continued for another seven years, even as evidence continued to mount about Saddam’s brutality. So, again, these were the same people—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell—who were involved in this policy back then.
The lesson is things aren’t always what they seem. I wonder why more of this hasn’t been reported in the press, or why it’s buried. I think Americans are very reluctant to probe into areas that are part of the elemental fabric of the American way of life, which may suggest instability. Americans have benefited from this relationship, the policy was spectacularly successful if you want cheap gasoline. At the same time there comes a point when certain policy has outlived its usefulness. When Americans start being killed, it seems you have to ask questions and your great ally, Saudi Arabia, is not such a great ally anymore.
Craig Unger was deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor in chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush for the New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair.
Excerpted with permission from Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Airing on over 200 stations in North America. DN! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite television (Free Speech TV, channel 9415, DISH Network), shortwave radio, and online at www.democracynow.org. Amy Goodman’s recently released book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Loves Them is now available.
