[Peace-discuss] Moore doesn't even come close to uncovering the intrigue of 9/11

[ndahlhei at uiuc.edu]

Moore doesn't even come close to uncovering the intrigue of 
9/11.  Moore is brave for openly discussing the ties of Bush 
with the Saudis and how the bin Ladens flew out of the 
country while the rest of America's planes were downed.  
But, it goes much deeper than this. . .

Check this article out from the Common Dreams News Center by 
Fran Shor, a member of the Wayne State University Faculty in 
Detroit, Michigan and a major anti-war activist with the 
Michigan Coalition on Human Rights.

Follow the Money:
Bush, 9/11, and Deep Threat 

by Fran Shor

"What did the President know and when did he know it?" This 
question, evocative of the Watergate investigation, is now 
being posed by politicians and pundits seeking to determine 
what information the Bush Administration had prior to the 
incidents of September 11, 2001. No amount of denial and 
back-pedaling by the Bush Administration can cover up the 
fact that Bush had advance knowledge of possible terror 
attacks on US targets by the followers of Osama bin Laden. 
While it's clear that Bush was personally briefed on August 
6, 2001 about the possibility of those attacks, it remains 
unclear about the nature and extent of precautions, if any, 
taken to prevent such attacks. 

Nonetheless, there is a welter of material that points to 
the Bush Administration's obstruction and neglect of 
important leads to link bin Laden to operations in the 
United States. Moreover, in the months and weeks leading up 
to 9/11 there were warnings and signs that some members of 
the Administration and its national security apparatus were 
anticipating something horrendous. In the aftermath of 9/11 
the Bush Administration mobilized the war machine and 
repressive legislation to promote policies that secured its 
economic and ideological agenda. Thus, a more intriguing and 
significant question is: in light of what the Bush 
Administration gained from the fall-out of 9/11, how was 
that gain embedded in the actions and inactions by the Bush 
Administration prior to 9/11? To ask the question about the 
reaping of political advantage from the tragedy of 9/11 need 
not assume that there was a conspiracy by the Bush 
Administration; merely that certain players acted out of 
their personal interests at the expense of the safety and 
security of the nation. 

To piece together the various activities of these players in 
the Bush Administration one should recall another key 
component of Watergate - the famous advice of "Deep Throat," 
the Washington insider, to Bob Woodward, the investigative 
reporter from the Washington Post. When Woodward was having 
trouble connecting all the dots and players, "Deep Throat" 
intimated: "Follow the money!" The money trail links Bush's 
oil background, his family's connections to Saudi 
investments, the politics of pipelines in Central Asia, and 
the military-industrial complex. By detailing Bush's 
background and fast-forwarding to the decisions of the 
Administration in its pursuit of war in Afghanistan, a 
possible war in Iraq, and a permanent war agenda, a money 
trail will unfold that will transform Deep Throat's 
admonition into a Deep Threat alarm concerning the lives and 
liberties of citizens of the United States and the world.

The Bushes, bin Ladens, and Carlyle

The Bush family's involvement with oil is not only deeply 
rooted in Texas oil wells, but also in the Middle East. 
George W's first experience in business was in the creation 
of the Arbusto Oil Company which eventually merged into 
Harken Oil. In 1986 Bahrain came to the rescue of the 
failing company by accepting a drilling contract with Harken 
even though Harken had no real background with drilling. 
When George W. sold his holdings in Harken for $848,000 in 
June of 1990, he cashed in at a point right before the 
company took a nose-dive in the aftermath of Saddam 
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. Questions 
about whether George W. had been given a warning by his 
father concerning what may have been the entrapment of 
Saddam Hussein in Kuwait have never been fully settled. 

On the other hand, conflicts of interest were definitely 
developed in the 1990's by father and son through their 
involvement with the Carlyle Group, an investment group 
filled with Reagan-Bush cabinet members. In 1990 with former 
Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, as the CEO of Carlyle, 
George W. was appointed to the board of a Carlyle 
investment, Cateair. After his defeat in the 1992 
Presidential election, George H. W. and James Baker, became 
Carlyle advisors and investors. Especially useful were the 
Bush and Baker connections to the ruling elite of Saudi 
Arabia. Those connections helped to generate large 
investments in Carlyle from the Saudi elite including the 
bin Laden family, a family made wealthy by an extensive 
construction business. 

Although in the aftermath of 9/11 the bin Laden 2 million 
dollar investment in Carlyle was withdrawn, prior to that 
time George W's administration had put up road-blocks to the 
investigation of the bin Laden family. The lead investigator 
of Osama bin Laden's involvement in terror actions against 
the US, from the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 to the 
African embassy bombings in 1998 to the assault on the 
U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was John O'Neill, a Deputy Director of 
the FBI. O'Neill had repeatedly been denied access to 
questioning the bin Laden family, including a January 2001 
directive from the White House to desist from investigating 
two of Osama's brothers who were residing in Falls Church, 
Virginia at the time. In the face of such continuing 
obstruction, O'Neill resigned in protest from the FBI 
claiming that the "main obstacles to investigating Islamic 
terrorism were U.S. oil interests and the role played by 
Saudi Arabia in it." Ironically, O'Neill became the chief 
security person at the World Trade Center shortly before 
9/11 where he, along with between 2-3,000 others, perished 
in the destruction of the WTC on that fateful and tragic 
day. 

If 9/11 was a tragedy to thousands of Americans and their 
families, Bush and his father's Carlyle cronies hit the 
jackpot, especially with renewed contracts for Carlyle 
defense investments. In particular, Carlyle had invested 
heavily in United Defense, the primary manufacturer of the 
Crusader artillery system. Although the Crusader faced a 
skeptical Congress before 9/11, Carlucci and his lobbyists 
certainly managed to line-up his old college buddy, Donald 
Rumsfeld, behind promoting the outmoded Crusader. When 
Carlyle went public with United Defense stock offerings in 
the fall of 2001, Carlucci, Bush, Baker, and other investors 
in Carlyle made out like bandits. However, when a possible 
paper trail and conflict-of-interest against Rumsfeld 
surfaced recently, he announced his opposition to Crusader. 
Of course, millions had already been made and Rumsfeld had 
to cover his own backside in light of the calls for the 
resignation of the Secretary of the Army, a former Enron 
executive already awash in dubious conflicts-of-interest.

The Taliban and Pipeline Politics

However, if the Saudi and Carlyle connections to father and 
son Bush don't raise alarms, then the whole history of the 
Bush Administration's dealings with the Taliban should. The 
primary focus of these dealings was the renewal of a planned 
pipeline from the natural gas rich fields of Turkmenistan 
through Afghanistan and Pakistan to other Asian markets. 
Behind this whole operation was the Unocal company. Among 
the advisors to Unocal was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-
American academic, who in addition to being an advisor to 
Unocal in the 1990's was also part of the foreign policy 
think-tanks that included Frank Carlucci. Khalilzad joined 
the Taliban's lobbyist, Laila Helms (a relative of former 
CIA director, Richard Helms) in direct talks between 
representatives of the Taliban and the Bush Administration 
right up through July of 2001. When the Taliban broke off 
the talks, refusing the pipeline offers, the Bush 
Administration made known its efforts to strike back at the 
Taliban as early as August of 2001. 

Ostensibly attacking the Taliban for its refusal to hand 
over Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration refused any 
alternatives to the military option. During the whole 
military operation, the Pentagon has tried to establish 
security points that reflect the route of the proposed 
pipeline. Moreover, Harmid Karzai, the hand-picked US leader 
of Afghanistan, was, at one time, also a consultant for 
Unocal. Along with Khalilzad, who now is the US 
representative to Afghanistan's interim government, Karzai 
is effectuating plans for the pipeline.

The CIA and Other Deep Pockets

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a number of news stories 
appeared concerning investments in "put" options in United 
and American Airlines. Put options are shares that are bets 
on falling market prices for specific stocks. In the week 
before September 11 put options in United and American 
Airlines went through a furious and unprecedented spasm of 
investment. In addition put options for Morgan Stanley and 
Merrill Lynch, two of the biggest occupants of the World 
Trade Center, also saw abnormal activity. Most of the 
investments in these put options originated in Germany 
through the Deutsche Bank. Deutshce Bank had earlier 
acquired Banker's Trust, a investment banking firm whose 
Vice Chairman in charge of "private client relations" in the 
late 1990's was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard. In March of 2001, 
Krongard was appointed Executive Director of the CIA. 

Certainly, the CIA has a history of laundering money and 
dealings with shady investment characters. What becomes 
particularly relevant in the lead-up to 9/11 is the August 
CIA briefing of Bush concerning the potential threat of 
attacks by bin Laden using hijacked planes on certain sites, 
such as the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and the fact 
that the CIA had bugging equipment on bin Laden messages and 
international banking operations. Although no one has 
apparently claimed the money from the put options, questions 
remain about Krongard and the CIA's involvement.

Warning Signals and Criminal Negligence

The CIA's briefing for Bush wasn't the only warning coming 
from intelligence agencies about the possible attack by 
hijacked planes on targets like the Pentagon and World Trade 
Center. Both German and Russian intelligence agencies picked 
up signals during the summer of 2001 about bin Laden plans. 
The FBI in its investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui's 
activities documented his desire to fly a plane into the 
World Trade Center. When those FBI agents requested a 
warrant to search Moussaoui's personal computer, the civil 
liberties-minded Attorney General, John Ashcroft, turned 
them down. On the other hand, Ashcroft was worried enough 
about the hijacking of commercial airplanes that starting on 
July 26, 2001 he stopped flying on commercial aircraft. Of 
course, neither Aschroft nor anyone else in the Bush 
Administration bothered to warn airport authorities to be on 
heightened alert and to tighten airport security in the face 
of such warning signals. 

To suggest that the Bush Administration arranged the 9/11 
tragedy is to resort to wildly speculative conspiracy 
theories. On the other hand, there is a substantive and 
documented record of neglect and obstruction to warrant a 
charge of criminal negligence by Bush and his national 
security state apparatus. It may be that part of that 
apparatus, especially elements within the FBI, are angered 
by how they and their reports were cavalierly treated by the 
White House. They and other congressional sources may be 
leaking the kind of information that was essential in 
bringing down President Nixon. Instead of waiting, however, 
for what appears as inevitable congressional investigations, 
we should be doing everything in our power to raise 
questions in public forums and the courts, if possible, 
about the criminal negligence of the Bush Administration. 
Before another pretext is created for another war for oil 
and the advancement of the military-industrial complex, this 
Administration needs to be confronted for the duplicitous 
and corrupt self-serving elite they are. 

Fran Shor teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. He 
is an anti-war activist and member of the Michigan Coalition 
on Human Rights.