bin
Laden's Bush Family Connections
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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
by Michael C. Ruppert
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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