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Osama bin Laden's Bush family Business Connections
World War III - 'This Was Not An Intelligence Failure'
By Michael C. Ruppert
9/24/01
From The Wilderness
www.copvcia.com
2001 All Rights Reserved
[posted here with spoken permission]
Osama bin Laden's Bush family Business Connections
Alliance With Pakistan Will Stimulate Drug Trade, Bring Revenues Under
U.S. Control - Colombian Opium Production Will Soar
The Taliban's Biggest Economic Attack on the U.S. Came in February With
The Destruction of Its Opium Crop
FTW - Money connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden go
way back and the political and economic connections have remained
unbroken for 20 years. And what appears to be a "new" alliance with
Pakistan is merely a new manifestation of a decades-long partnership in
the heroin trade.
Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage since the tragic
events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State Colin
Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported
reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February.
That, in effect, made the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial
benefactor according to syndicated columnist Robert Scheer writing in
The Los Angeles times on May 22. But -- as we described in FTW's March
2001 issue -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the
single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic
interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift?
Critics of the Gulf War well recall how, just prior to Sadam's invasion
of Kuwait, President Bush (Sr.) dispatched Ambassador April Glaspie to
visit Sadam with a letter and a "wink and a nod" telling the Iraqi
leader that it was OK to invade his smaller neighbor. The May gift from
Uncle Sam could well have been sending the same kind of message, along
with necessary funds to complete the attacks. Drugs and terrorism go
hand in hand.
Until February, Afghanistan had been the world's largest producer of
opium/heroin, claiming close to 70% of the world's total production.
That opium, consumed largely in Western Europe and smuggled through the
Balkans, was a direct source of cash deposits in Western financial
institutions and markets.
I specifically commented on this at an economic crisis conference in
Moscow, Russia on March 7. In my formal statement to the Russian
conference I said,
"Just before coming to this conference I read in the Associated Press,
Agence France Press and other reliable sources that the Taliban has
recently eradicated most of its 3000 ton opium crop in Afghanistan. If
true, I view this as a form of economic warfare against Russia [and the
U.S.] because it would drive opium production more into Southeast Asia
and Colombia. However, I now suspect that this will result in a shift of
opium production to the Caucasus under the Kurds which will see an
increase in smuggling through Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. I should
note that both Vice President Richard Cheney and the designated Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage are members of the US-Azerbaijan
Chamber of Commerce. Such a move would have the effect of drastically
shortening smuggling routes and costs into Western Europe and of
bypassing unstable areas of the Balkans.
I have received additional reports that Uzbekistan is now awash in the
opium poppy and, as in the US with the CIA, that Russian military and
intelligence agencies facilitate the trade as a means of protecting
access to hard currency. The point here is not that the US it totally
evil or the only country doing these things. But the US is far and away
the most advanced nation when it comes to the use of such methods to
achieve superiority. As [Russian economist Michael] Khazin has noted,
the US and Britain and Germany started the conflict in Kosovo in 1999 to
stave off a collapse of western markets following the Asian collapse of
1997-8. Now Colombia is a last-ditch effort to protect the US markets
and European opposition is jeopardizing that plan."
The Taliban's actions this year severed the ruling military junta in
Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden
and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani
government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had
been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial
institutions connected to them.
Now as US military action will replace the Taliban government and fresh
crops will be planted in Afghanistan, the slack in cash flow will
assuredly be replaced by dramatically increased opium production in
Colombia; the revenues from that effort being needed to maintain the
revenue streams into Wall Street. Prior to the WTC attacks, credible
sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S.
Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S.
banks at around $250-$300 billion a year.
In that context, the real history of Osama bin Laden, as America's
useful terrorist-du-jour reveals a long and continuous history,
interwoven with the drug trade and the Bush family, of supporting
conflicts that have benefited U.S. military and economic interests.
bin Laden
There are direct historical links between Osama bin Laden's business
interests and those of the Bush family. On September 15 I received the
following message from FTW subscriber, Professor John Metzger of
Michigan State University:
"We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary
Palestinian terrorist known as Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to
American and Pakistan intelligence. Its clients included the Afghan
rebels, and the father of Osama bin Laden. The father of bin Laden named
Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative
in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in
1976. By 1977, Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business,
Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin Laden would soon become a CIA asset.
George W. Bush's FBI director Robert Mueller was part of the Justice
Department's questionable investigation of BCCI. (On BCCI, the bin
Ladens, and the Bushes, see the books, The Outlaw Bank, A Full Service
Bank, and Fortunate Son)." Further details of the business and financial
relationships between the Bush and bin Laden family are found in Peter
Brewton's 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. BCCI, incidentally,
was founded by a Pakistani.
Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has
just completed a detailed history of bin Laden's career detailing his
secret funding and logistical support to terrorist organizations
beginning from his early CIA-supported roots in the 1980s as a "freedom
fighter" through to the present day. Chossudovsky's compelling and well
documented article, Who Is Osama Bin Laden? dated Sept 12, 2001 can be
found on the Internet at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html.
Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts
but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the
world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to
the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading
the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya.
As FTW described in 1998, and as confirmed by Chossudovsky, the key to
understanding U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always
been controlled by a cutout, the Pakistani government and its
intelligence service the ISI. In this manner there has been virtually no
direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served the dual
purpose of maintaining his apparent "purity" with his followers and
providing plausible deniability for the CIA. The whole underlying
pretext for this relationship evaporated with the Taliban's destruction
of the opium crop in February.
Chossudovsky writes:
"The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to
the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium
production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional
markets. There was no local production of heroin. In this regard
[Professor] Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the
onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, 'the Pakistan-Afghanistan
borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per
sent of the U.S. demand
"With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium
production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of
opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed
insurgencies in the former Soviet republics -- reached a record high of
4600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet
Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic
control over the heroin routes.
"The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in
the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic
"jihad" out of Pakistan"
" The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and
equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In the last few months there is evidence
that Mujhideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of the KLA-NLA
terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia
" With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al
Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in
Afghanistan and Pakistan In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's
ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in
this war.
"Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan.
Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the
indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil
conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and
pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin."
The oil and drug connections were the subject of FTW's story, The
Bush-Cheney drug Empire in October, 2000. That story is online at
http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html. Both
Bush and Cheney are oil men.
George Bush, Sr. was Vice President and, by virtue of executive Order
12333, in charge of all U.S. intelligence and narcotics operations from
1981 through 1989. As President from 1989 through 1993, he continued and
expanded his control in these areas. Thus, it was Bush (the elder) who
directly nourished and nurtured bin Laden's evolution.
==============
Dramatic Confirmation From Indian Government
The web site of the Indian Embassy in Washington contains dramatic
confirmation for these positions. On September 4, 2000, B. Raman,
Director of India's Institute for Topical Studies wrote an open letter
to the U.S. Congress entitled Pakistan's Noriega's. That eight-page
article exposed the depth of Pakistani government involvement in the
drug trade. It may be viewed at
www.indianembassy.org/int_media/saag_september_04_2000.html.
The letter said, in part:
"For more than a decade, the people of India have been living in a state
of half-war and half-peace due to the depredations of a large number of
terrorists, outrageously called jehadists, who have been trained, armed
and funded and infiltrated into the State of Jammu & Kashmir and other
parts of India by Pakistan in order to make the people of India and its
security forces bleed in the name of religion.
"More people belonging to different religions -- Hindus, Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others -- have been killed in India by
these mercenary-terrorists sponsored by the State of Pakistan than by
any other terrorist groups anywhere else in the world"
"Many other States have suffered and have been suffering due to the
depredations of terrorists, made in and exported from Pakistan and the
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- [these include] Algeria, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, the Central Asian Republics, the Chechnya and Dagestan areas of
Russia, the Xinjiang province of China, Bangladesh, the Arakan area of
Burma and the southern Philippines."
"After his [1993] removal, [as official head of Pakistani intelligence,
trusted advisor to Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf] Lt. Gen.
Nasir traveled to Somalia, Chechnya, Dagestan, the Central Asian
Republics, China, and the Southern Philippines as a preacher and helped
Islamic organizations, including the group which killed U.S. troops in
Somalia."
"It was he, who, during his tenure as the DG [Director General] of the
ISI has entered into an agreement with the LTTE of Sri Lanka [which
secured] LTTE's assistance in smuggling Afghanistan produced heroin in
its ships to West Europe, the USA and Canada"
"Another reason for the ISI's helping the LTTE, despite its anti-Muslim
policies, was to use it for smuggling heroin to West Europe, the U.S.
and Canada. During Zia-ul-Haq's regime in the 1980s, heroin had become a
major source of extra revenue not only for the State of Pakistan,
especially the ISI and Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment, but
also to many senior officers of the Pakistan Army, including [Musharraf
et al]"
"The way Mr. Sharif before October 1999 and Gen. Musharraf since then
have been using the heroin money to prevent the Pakistani economy from
collapsing has not received due attention in the U.S. ."
"If one goes purely by economic indicators, Pakistan's must be in as bad
a shape as that of Russia, or even worse, since Russia has been in
receipt of Western and IMF assistance"
"Where does the money come from? From the smuggling of heroin to West
Europe, the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. Government might have stopped
economic assistance from the taxpayers' money. But why should the
Noriegas of Pakistan be worried when they get billions of dollars from
the heroin sale in the U.S.? "
Vice President Dick Cheney's recent comment that the CIA needs to get in
bed with "unsavory characters" is a joke. That's a bed that the CIA has
never left. And it's a marriage vow that President Bush has just
reaffirmed for all the world to see. ___
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