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(回答先: It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all【日本人に政府が知ってほしくない話】 投稿者 FakeTerrorWatcher 日時 2004 年 4 月 21 日 01:27:05)
ゲリラニュース・コムならこれもお勧め：911直後の飛行禁止期間にサウジへ飛んだ飛行機の乗客
クレイグ・アンガーという著者による” House of Bush, House of Saud : The Secret Relationship Between The World's Two Most Powerfull Dynasties”という本
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074325337X/qid=1079333802/sr=8-4/ref=pd_ka_4/103-2786451-4271835?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
にの内容に関する概略と著者のインタビュー。ブッシュ家とビンラディン家、サウジ王室とカーライルなど決定的な情報になっている。
Guerrilla of the Week
Editor's Pick, ﾊMarch 15, 2004
http://www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc4097.html
Last week, Salon ran what should have been a blockbuster scoop. Entitled, "The Great Escape," the article was an excerpt from a book released today called "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties." In it author Craig Unger exposes, among other things,ﾊhow 140 mainly Saudi nationals were whisked out of the U.S. on private jets in the days immediately following 9/11 whileﾊno other commercial aircraft was allowed toﾊleave theﾊtarmac.ﾊUnger originally broke the story of the flights in an October 2003 Vanity Fair article. But in last week's Salon article, he lists the actual passenger manifests, andﾊshows how theﾊauthorization for the flights came from the highest levels of the White House and the intelligence agencies.
Unger found that passengers on the flights included nearly two dozen members of the bin Laden family, including Osama bin Laden's sister, and, more ominously, a Saudiﾊprinceﾊlater identifiedﾊbyﾊAbu Zubaydah, the captured Al Qaeda operative alleged to have planned the USS Cole attack, as a fellow Al Qaeda terrorist. In other words, the U.S. government aided the escape of a man who may have been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Unger's disclosures should have been front-page news. But the story was all but ignored by the mainstream media. This week's release of the book may change that.
Last fall, while he was still working on his investigation, GNN met up with Unger in his Tribeca loft to discuss why so many people who should have been prime suspects were allowed to leave the U.S. in the days after 9/11; why the press has failed to cover so many important 9/11 stories;ﾊand the larger question of where, as Greg Palast says,ﾊBush family interests end, and America's foreign policy begins. The following is an excerpt from that conversation:
GNN: Let's start off by asking what your current research is about and what led you into this whole genre of looking into what's happening with the Saudis?
Craig Unger: Back in the 80s I had done work on the elder George Bush and his role in Iran-Contra and Iraq-gate and the piece I did for the New Yorker that I co-wrote, that appeared in 1992 just before the presidential election, took apart his secret role in Iran Contra and in Iraq-gate. And what I did that I think was a little unusual was I started looking at those not as two very separate episodes, but as part of a continuum. And what you saw in both of them too, was that he had big roles with the Saudis. So when 9/11 happened, most people saw this coming very much from out of the blue. The New York Times even published a book called "Out of the Blue." That's how most Americans experienced it.
But for me it was something quite different and I began to look at the Bush family's role with the Saudis. My book is called "House of Bush, House of Saud," and I started going back from Iran-Contra, to Iraq-gate, the BCCI scandal, which was a huge scandal involving a very corrupt bank called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and it also involved Bush and the Saudis again. The Gulf War in 1991 again was a Bush and Saudi, almost, joint venture. The elder George Bush had a very close relationship with Prince Bandar, the longtime Saudi Ambassador to the United States. And then you come right up to 9/11 and again you see that 15 out of 19 hijackers are Saudis and of course President Bush is there and I started looking at their relationship in depth.
And to many people, it was seen as ironic that the bin Ladens had actually been investors in the Carlyle Group, this huge private equity firm with the Bushes, and they were actually present at a Carlyle investment conference on September 11. In fact, as I see it, nothing could have been less ironicﾉ that it was really part of a long-term relationship. Irony suggests something unexpected. The Bushes are oil men.
The Saudis are about oil. It's not unexpected that they should have some relationship like this.
GNN: In terms of global finance and oil, specifically, the world is a small place. There are only a few individual players in that arena. The Bushes are one and the Saudi sheiks are another. And America's security really depends on those relationships. So was it surprising to find a man like George Bush Sr., who has a CIA history, involved with them and do you think the American public was surprised to find out about that? Given the legacy of the Saudis and American interests, to what degree do American interests in securing oil reserves have to do with the way these relationships have been nurtured?
Unger: The Saudis are enormously important for several reasons. One is, it's not just that they have the largest oil reserves in the world. It's partly the ease with which they are able to extract oil that allows them to just turn on the spigot and they can lower or raise the price of oil at their will. So in a certain way we are enormously dependent on them and having a close relationship with them has been a key part ofﾉ Oil is a strategic resource for the United States. It's enormously important to us - we need that in some way and we have to sort of deal with that in some way, so it's not surprising that we would turn to the Saudis for that. The question is that, in being so addicted to cheap Saudi oil, have we not looked aggressively and have we turned a blind eye to their role in fostering terrorism? And when 9/11 happened, suddenly I think it became much more difficult to turn a blind eye and you start to see this long term relationship start to unravelﾉ.
The House of Saud, the royal family, is a theocracy. They rule through an alliance with Wahabi Islam, so there is no separation of church and state in Saudi Arabia. It is a very puritanical fundamentalist version of Islam and that, in many ways, has provided a breeding ground for terrorism. Now in terms of what role they play in fostering terrorism, that's a very controversial and nuanced subject, but there's a spectrum of culpability, and when you talk to the Saudis, what most of them say...Charity is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is known as Zakat, which means giving a certain amount of your income to charity.
A lot of that money has been funneled off to terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, but the Saudis will tell you when you talk to them officially, that, 'gee it's just like you giving to the United Way. We can't control all of this, it goes through many many countries, we lose control over it, we don't have a strong enough system, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it, nothing immoral going on. We are not doing this knowledgeably.' That is probably true for a certain number of Saudis.
At the same time we have been aware of this since 1994 or 95, and by 98 when Al-Qaeda bombed two American embassies in East Africa - in Tanzania and Kenya - there was an effort on the part of the Clinton administration to crack down on this funding through charities, and it continued over the years. In truth, there is probably, as I say, a spectrum of culpability, and a certain number of Saudi princes seem to actually like al-Qaeda and support it openly. Some may do it inadvertently. It requires an effort to pin down exactly where each one sits, but it's very clear that for example, as Newsweek revealed, Prince Bandar's wife had, perhaps inadvertently, aided the terrorists of 9/11. So it happens at a very high level and if you read the Saudi press, you will see very militant, often anti-Semitic statements coming from official government peopleﾉ The Islamic clerics can say things that would horrify Americans and Americans rarely see that side in the American press. It's really only starting to come out now but it's been going on for years.
GNN: Obviously, when you are involved in business with people you tend to look the other way to preserve those relationships. To what degree have we avoided getting into the depths of the Saudi anti-American sentiment? I mean how long has it been there and how has the media dealt with it in the past?
Unger: It's been there for decades and it's simply been ignored in the past and I think we have turned a blind eye and especially the business people involved haven't particularly wanted it to come out. One of the very interesting things I am working on now is one of the first bombings by Islamic terrorists to kill Americans was in November 1995 in Riyadh. It was almost certainly done by al-Qaeda and bin Laden - not definitively but all the signs pointed to that - and it was a bombing of the Saudi Arabian National Guard headquarters in Riyadh which shared a building with Vinnell, which was owned by the Carlyle Group, and whose associates included James Baker, former President Bush, the bin Ladens themselves (the more official, professional, business wing of the bin Ladens), Khalid bin Mahfouz or rather his family, and yet here you have the bombing taking place and at least five Americans were killed in it, and when it was reported in this country, the ties to the Carlyle group were not reported whatsoever.
James Baker went on nationalﾊTV and talked about it. He was not identified as being a part of the Carlyle Group. It was not at all clear that Carlyle owned it. It is only in retrospect that people are starting to dig that up. So I think Americans weren't aware of it but it is extraordinary to me that here you had this bombing that was tied to former president Bush, to former Secretary of State James Baker, and none of that was reported.
GNN: What is it about the culture of news in general, or maybe the environment, that when Baker comes on, they don't identify him? Do you think that's a tacit move made from his perspective, or the news people just don't believe that would be of interest to the American public?
Unger: I think it happens on many different levels and I think one is, reporters tend to be lazy and they report what is given to them, they don't dig around much. It's sort of upsetting to me now in the days of the Internet and Lexis/Nexis when now you can do so much reporting online and you can find the stuff just by Googling or putting it into Nexis and there it pops up to you, but it doesn't come out in the mainstream press at all. I also think the business people - from their point of view, it's just discretion. They don't particularly want light shone on it. It is not so much a conspiracy as, let's not call attention to thisﾉ it's best - the less attention the betterﾉ this is bad news and we don't really want it out there.
GNN: In the days right after the attack, Saudis received certain preferential treatment that would surprise some Americans. Can you just describe the environment post 9/11 and how the Saudis were dealt with, specifically the higher-ranking families?
Unger: Right, well this was probably the greatest national security crisis in American history with the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis, and American airspace was entirely shut down for 48 hours and private planes were shut down even longer. So you had a situation where virtually no one in the United States could fly. Bill Clinton couldn't fly. Al Gore couldn't fly. An American who was expecting a heart transplant - his replacement heart was forced down in mid air because it was violating American airspace. The only people who really could fly during that period, surprisingly, were Saudis [Unger later found there were other nationalities on the flights - GNN] and starting on the 13th or roughly 48 hours after 9/11 took place, 140 Saudis were starting to be rounded up and flown from various cities in the United States over the next week, out to Saudi Arabia.
GNN: Just to put this into context for some people, these are billionaires. The oil business that we transact in is a huge business. Talk about the nature of these families and are there Americans that are comparable to them? Tell us of some of the individualsﾉ
Unger:ﾊFrankly there is no comparable family in the U.S. or even the world - it's the richest family in the history of the world and that's because they sit on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil, and they regard that as basically not the country's, but theirs. They run the country, they own the country, it is a theocracy run by a family who is wedded to Wahabi Islam, but in return for it, they control the oil. It's as simple as that. And they make deals with Americans and sell it to all the big American companies and we refine it in Houston and elsewhere in the United States and then it's distributed. It's just of enormous value and so there are many, many members. There are thousands of princes. Many of them are billionaires or multi-billionaires, some of them with 20 billion dollars or more. Exactly who was on the plane though, I don't know precisely at this point.
GNN:That kind of money is hugely influential, so it isn't really surprising that you can pull some strings to make this happenﾉ To what degree though does that kind of wealth buy you power in America and to what degree has it helped facilitate the American public's ignorance about the Saudi anti-Americanism or sympathies?
Unger: In terms of how they exercise power, there are many different reasons and I don't want to be too reductionist and say these rich guys paid off people to get access to get out of the country. I think it's much more complex than that. I think on some level America simply needs oil, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. There are a couple hundred million people with cars in this country and we see the Saudi resources as a huge geo-strategic resource that's part of the equation. At the same time they also have - the United States needs allies in the Middle East. We have Israel and we have always had one other ally and for whatever reason, they turned out to be our other ally, though that relationship has been deeply deeply disturbed since 9/11.
In addition I think still another factor is that the Bush family has a long - and this is really a unique relationship I think that is unprecedented in the history of the White House. You have two presidents - the current president Bush and his father - who have had a long personal and financial history with regard to the Saudis and it goes back roughly a generation to the late 70s or early 80s and I don't think ever before in the history of the White House have you had a president who was so close to the ruling family of another foreign power.
GNN: Let's talk about the specifics of that relationship and Harken oilﾉ
Unger: In October 1973 you had the OPEC oil embargo. That was a critical moment in American history. For the first time, the Middle East nations seemed to realize their huge powerful weapon over the United States, and when they embargoed oil, the price of gas went through the roof and the nation's economy went into a tailspin that lasted several years really. You had long gas lines, high inflation and so onﾉ Right after that period, two young Saudi billionaires started coming to Houston. One of them was called Salem bin Laden and it turns out he was the older half brother of Osama bin Laden, and he ran the Saudi bin Laden construction company which is a multi billion dollar construction company that is very close to the royal family and that's what made them billionaires.
They're roughly the Saudi equivalent of an American company like Bechtel. The other man was Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was a hugely rich Saudi banker who ran the national commercial bank of Saudi Arabia, the biggest bank in the kingdom, and he later was the chief stockholder in BCCI, the very corrupt bank I mentioned earlier. And they started coming to Houston and they started becoming close to American politicians. They started seeking out investments in their companies. In the late 80s, you saw them - bin Mahfouz, for example, who at that point was running BCCI and was the biggest stockholder in BCCI, his company indirectly started to save Harken Energy. Harken Energy was a company that George W. Bush was on the Board of Directors of and it was very interesting what was going on then because Harken wasn't doing particularly well as an oil company. It was also a very difficult time for the oil business for independence because the price of oil at that point was plummeting - it was going from 36$/barrel to around 11$/barrel. It was a terrible investment.
Also if you think about it, the Saudis were coming from a world where they had all the oil in the worldﾉ so why would they come to some piddling Texas oil company? What Harken really seemed to have going for it was one thing - it had George W. Bush on the Board of Directors. And increasingly you have to ask the question - were they looking for political influence by investing in it? And that's one of the questions that is raised by that period. It is not the only time the Saudis started investing in American companies. And I think the other most interesting example is the Carlyle Group. And in the case of Carlyle Group, you have these enormously powerful figures from the Reagan Bush era: former president George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, James Baker, former prime minister John Major of Great Britain, Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary, Richard Dinerman and so on - these great figures from the Reagan Bush era. And they ended up raising a significant amount of money from Saudi Arabia - from the royal family there, and from some of the key figures who are part of the wealthy Saudi merchant elite.
GNN: This is riveting stuff yet most of the public doesn't know any of thisﾉ Why is it that has shielded us from this knowledge?
Unger: I think there are a lot of different factorsﾉ what's happening now is not precisely new.
[...]
Institutionally that is also the case and I think certainly CNN andﾊThe New York Timesﾊwant to have a good relationship with the White House. They don't want to be shut out entirely and that means you only challenge things so far. You know that there is a breaking point. At the same time, I think the press is very opportunistic. And at a certain point, it will go towards the winning side.
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