Bush-Bin Laden Family Connections (VERY Interesting Read!)
Found some of these articles and was puzzled how the press who protects this so called "president" never wants to report this to the American people. Another thing not reported in the article which is interesting footnote was how before 9/11 last year, Bush Admistration gave the Taliban $43 million dollars. Anyone I'd like some opinions and discussion of these pretty damning articles with so many facts between the Bush Family and Bin Laden Family ties.:
The Carlyle Connection
On September 11, 2001, members of the Carlyle Group were holding their annual investor conference in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC. Those in attendance included former Reagan Administration secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Administration chief of staff and secretary of state James Baker III, and representatives of the bin Laden family, including one of Osama bin Ladens brothers, Shafig bin Laden.
The Carlyle Group calls itself "a private global investment firm that originates, structures and acts as lead equity investor in management-led buyouts, strategic minority equity investments, equity private placements, consolidations and buildups, and growth capital financings. ... As of March 31, 2002, the firm had more than $13.5 billion of committed capital under management."
Very basically, Carlyle buys and sells privately held companies and divisions of publicly owned companies for big profits. Unlike other private-equity groups, Carlyle concentrates on companies funded by the government, or those affected by government regulation, such as telecommunications firms, and then hires people with relevant government experience, Melanie Warner explained in Fortune.
The revolving door has long been a fact of life in Washington, but Carlyle has given it a new spin. Instead of toiling away for a trade organization or consulting firm for a measly $250,000 a year, former government officials can rake in serious cash by getting equity cuts on corporate deals. Several of the onetime government officials who have hooked up with Carlyle--Carlucci, Baker, and [Richard] Darman, in particular--have made millions. ("The Big Guys Work for the Carlyle Group," Fortune, March 18, 2002)
(So, ironically, after September 11 Shafig bin Laden was well positioned to make a killing --financially--on a war being waged on his brother Osama. However, Carlyle reports that it gave the bin Ladens their money back a few weeks after September 11.)
Frank Carlucci is the Chairman of the Carlyle Group. Chairman of Carlyle-Europe is former British Prime Minister John Major. Former President George H.W. Bush does consulting work for Carlyle, often in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. (Saudi ties to the Bush family go deep; Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz gave $1 million to the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas.)
The current President Bush was on the board of Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary, for five years. While he was governor of Texas, the board of directors of the Texas teachers' pension fund--the infamous UTIMCO, previously discussed--voted to invest $100 million with the Carlyle Group.
(Connect the dots. Defense and aerospace firms make up a large part of Carlyle's portfolio. These firms depend on getting contracts from the U.S. government. The head of the U.S. government is ... ?)
In 1995, the bin Laden family invested $2 million in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. According to the Wall Street Journal,
The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. "So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return," the Carlyle executive said.
But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family's overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger. He called the $2 million merely an initial contribution. "It's like plowing a field," this person said. "You seed it once. You plow it, and then you reseed it again." ("Bin Laden Family Could Profit from a Jump in Defense Spending Due to Ties to U.S. Bank," Wall Street Journal Online, September 27, 2001)
United Defense Industries is one of Carlyle's firms. UDI makes a land-based weapon called the Crusader, which can fire ten rounds of 100-lb. shells per minute over a distance of 25 miles. In 1997 a Pentagon advisory panel rejected the Crusader program, calling it inappropriate for modern warfare -- a relic of the Cold War.
However, two weeks after September 11, 2001, the Army signed a $665 million contract with UDI to complete development of the Crusader. On December 13, Congress approved the program. The next day, Carlyle took UDI public and made a fast $237 million. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug on the program in May 2002 (news of which was considerately leaked to Carlyle by the Pentagon), but thanks to Crusader, Carlyle's investment in UDI brought a $315 million profit. (And the Crusader program may yet be resurrected, as many influential members of Congress receive campaign contributions from Carlyle.)
More troubling is Carlyle's connection to several wealthy Saudis, including the family of Osama bin Laden.
At the same time that the elder Bush counsels his son on the ongoing war on terrorism, the former president remains a senior adviser to the Washington D.C.-based Carlyle Group. That influential investment bank has deep connections to the Saudi royal family as well as financial interests in U.S. defense firms hired by the kingdom to equip and train the Saudi military. (Maggie Mulvihill, Jack Meyers, and Jonathan Wells, "Bush Advisers Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train," Boston Herald, December 11, 2001)
The Carlyle Group served as paid advisers to the Saudi royal family on the so-called ``Economic Offset Program,'' which required U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to give back a portion of their revenues in the form of contracts to Saudi businesses, most of which are connected to the royal family. The program was terminated some time in 2001.
Before becoming head of Carlyle, Carlucci spend most of the 1990s as head of B.D.M., a large defense contractor in which Carlyle had a controlling interest (B.D.M. was sold to TRW International in 1998). During its Carlucci years, B.D.M. had multimillion-dollar contracts to train and manage the Saudi National Guard and the Saudi Air Force.
There may be other connections between George W. Bush and the Saudis. For example, back in 1978 when Bush set up his first oil company, one of the partners was James Bath. Bath was financial representative in Houston for Salem bin Laden, an older brother of Osama. Although Bath says the money he put into Arbusto was his own, it has long been speculated the money came from Salem bin Laden. In "Questionable Ties: Tracking bin Laden's Money Flow Leads Back to Midland, Texas" (In These Times, The Institute of Public Affairs, undated article) Wayne Madsen describes extensive financial ties between the Bush and bin Laden families going back several years. See also this graphic from Bush Watch.
Although Shalem bin Laden may not be making money on the War on Terror, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, is doing quite well. Very recently, Halliburton was awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-cell detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold additional suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, according to Reuters.
In November 2001, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, was hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant, according to the Boston Herald (Maggie Mulvihill, Jack Meyers and Jonathan Wells, "Bush Advisers Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train," December 11, 2001).
Other members of President Bush's inner circle have business connections to the Saudis. Condoleeza Rice, national security adviser, is a former longtime member of the board of directors of Chevron. Through its subsidiary Saudi Chevron Philips, the company has many investments and interests in Saudi Arabia.
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArt...=011109_aw.htm
The Bush-bin Laden Connection BY ANDREW WHEAT
An intriguing sideline to the War On Terrorism lies in the murky Texas ties that existed between the Bush and bin Laden clans before September 11th. According to the official story, the rest of the huge bin Laden family has disowned Osama. While this argument creates a moral firewall for anyone dealing with the other bin Ladens, the firewall is undermined by circumstantial evidence to the contrary. The U.S.-led effort to freeze Osama-linked assets reportedly is probing financial transactions of the wider bin Laden clan, which is closely tied to the Saudi royal family. In fact, as Seymour Hersh reports in a recent New Yorker article, it is far from clear that the royal family, which has thousands of princes, has forsaken Muslim extremists. Indeed, some members of the royal family itself are said to bankroll Osama bin Laden. The Saudi monarchy, Hersh reports, has also quietly resisted U.S. efforts to conduct background checks of Saudi suspects in the wake of September 11. While much remains to be learned about these shadowy connections, it is clear that any investigation of the bin Laden’s family’s U.S. investments will lead to some well-placed Texans.
Like George W. Bush, the fortune of Osama bin Laden is rooted in oil and his family’s government connections. Before his death in a 1968 plane crash, Osama’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, made a fortune off construction contracts awarded by the Saudi royal family. The $5 billion per year construction conglomerate, known as the Binladin Group (the company uses another spelling of the name) remains closely tied to the Saudi royal family.
After the death of Mohammed bin Laden, control of the company passed to Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half brother. The roots of the first known Bush-bin Laden convergence date back to the mid-1970s, when the two clans were linked by a Houston businessman named James R. Bath. Bath had befriended George W. Bush in the late 1960s, when they both served in the Texas Air National Guard. By 1976, when Gerald Ford appointed the elder George Bush as CIA director, Bath was acting as a business agent for Salem bin Laden’s interests in Texas. (Texas and Saudi Arabia were well-connected by this point through U.S. oil companies and related industries with operations in both locations.) In 1991 Time magazine and later other publications reported on allegations by Bath’s former business partner that the Bush CIA hired Bath in 1976 to create offshore companies to move CIA funds and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia.
After W. lost a bid for Congress, he decided to launch an oil company in Midland in 1979. For $50,000, Bath bought a 5 percent stake in W.’s Arbusto (Spanish for "Bush") partnerships. At the time, Bath also served as business agent for several prominent Saudis, including Salem bin Laden. In exchange for a percentage of the deals, Bath made U.S. investments for these clients in his own name, according to Time. Although Bath has said that he invested his own money in Arbusto, not Saudi money, the fact that he was Salem’s agent at the time has fueled speculation that Osama bin Laden’s eldest brother was an early investor in W.’s first oil venture. It was around the time of this investment, incidentally, that Osama bin Laden made his first trip to the Khyber Pass, where he would soon join the Mujaheddin and the CIA in the holy war that expelled the Soviets from Afghanistan. (Salem, for his part, owned a house in Marble Falls, and died in a 1988 plane crash near San Antonio.)
The bin Ladens cemented clearer-cut financial ties with the Bush clan in 1995, when they invested $2 million in the Carlyle Group. Carlyle specializes in the buyout of government defense contractors, and many of its principals were heavyweights in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Carlyle’s chair is former Reagan Administration Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci. Former Bush Secretary of State James A. Baker III is a Carlyle partner and the firm’s senior counsel. Ex-President Bush himself is a Carlyle board member and its senior Asian advisor. In recent years, Carlyle has dispatched Carlucci, Baker and Bush to Saudi Arabia to butter up the bin Ladens. Amid controversy over the relationship last month, Carlyle and the bin Ladens severed their ties. The bin Ladens’ departure coincided with Carlyle’s announcement that it expected to raise approximately $300 million by taking its privately held United Defense Industries public. Among other things, this defense contractor pro- duces missile launch systems that are currently aboard U.S. war ships in the Arabian Sea.
Current President Bush has his own connections to Carlyle and the bin Laden family. Carlyle appointed W. in 1990 to the board of its Caterair subsidiary, an airline catering company. W. stepped down from this board in 1994, the year he was elected governor. With W. as governor, Carlyle landed at least two business deals involving Texas government funds. In the same month that Bush was elected president, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas selected Carlyle to invest $100 million of its pension funds. In 1996, the quasi-public University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) began awarding lucrative contracts to private firms to invest portions of UT’s $14 billion endowment. The Houston Chronicle reported that UTIMCO’s board (which is appointed by the governor’s handpicked UT System Regents) awarded many of these contracts to firms close to W.–including Carlyle. As of May 2001, Carlyle controlled more than $15 million of University of Texas public endowment funds. This includes $10.5 million that is commingled in the same Carlyle Partners II Fund where the bin Ladens parked their money.
It is a daunting task to unravel the ties between Texas and Saudi oil money, as well as the ties between the Saudi royal family, the bin Laden clan and Osama bin Laden. In this regard, the people of Saudi Arabia and the United States may share a common fate. We may never know the half of it.
Andrew Wheat is research director of Austin-based Texans for Public Justice, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that follows money in Texas politics (www.tpj.org).
