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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: 24KT on April 05, 2007, 04:48:24 PM
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The Evidence Is There: It’s Time for Congress to Investigate
the Ties Between the Bush Family and Osama bin Laden
By Lucy Komisar
How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).
Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-President Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.
BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.
The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the $2 billion that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.
The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance, which he would put to use when he organized the jihad against the United States. He would move money through the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland with two Osama siblings as shareholders.
At the same time, BCCI helped Saddam Hussein, funneling millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Baghdad's U.S. banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.
U.S. congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.
Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.
Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.
Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 percent to 30 percent of the stock for nearly $1 billion. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.
The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."
The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi regime. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.
When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.
Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's father, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organizing al Qaeda.
The money BCCI stole before it was shut down in 1991 -- somewhere between $9.5 billion and $15 billion -- made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy system effectively covered up the money trail.
But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq ("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."
When the BCCI scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr. Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to -- only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But evidence about BCCI's broader links exist in numerous U.S. and international investigations. Now could be a good time to take another look at the BCCI-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.
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**CRICKETS**
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I heard they use to golf together, word is Bin Laden is a shaky putter.
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The Evidence Is There: It’s Time for Congress to Investigate
the Ties Between the Bush Family and Osama bin Laden
By Lucy Komisar
How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).
Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-President Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.
BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.
The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the $2 billion that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.
The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance, which he would put to use when he organized the jihad against the United States. He would move money through the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland with two Osama siblings as shareholders.
At the same time, BCCI helped Saddam Hussein, funneling millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Baghdad's U.S. banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.
U.S. congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.
Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.
Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.
Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 percent to 30 percent of the stock for nearly $1 billion. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.
The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."
The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi regime. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.
When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.
Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's father, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organizing al Qaeda.
The money BCCI stole before it was shut down in 1991 -- somewhere between $9.5 billion and $15 billion -- made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy system effectively covered up the money trail.
But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq ("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."
When the BCCI scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr. Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to -- only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But evidence about BCCI's broader links exist in numerous U.S. and international investigations. Now could be a good time to take another look at the BCCI-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.
Hey Jag, What do want to bet that the authors of all these articals you cut and paste are all Liberal Bush haters with a vindetta?
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Hey Jag, What do want to bet that the authors of all these articals you cut and paste are all Liberal Bush haters with a vindetta?
The motives of the authors have nothing to do with the accuracy of the information.
If you had to bet your life savings on it, would you wager these facts are true, or false, where would your money be, Mr I?
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The motives of the authors have nothing to do with the accuracy of the information.
If you had to bet your life savings on it, would you wager these facts are true, or false, where would your money be, Mr I?
I would wager there are ALOT of inaccuracies!
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I would wager there are ALOT of inaccuracies!
Not surprising. Neotaints have been wagering the lives of military personnel on inaccuracies for the past 6 yrs
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Not surprising. Neotaints have been wagering the lives of military personnel on inaccuracies for the past 6 yrs
$100k says there's a ton of inaccuracies
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$100k says there's a ton of inaccuracies
how about just naming a few
BCCI was also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals
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For Saudi National Security, this thread will now be deleted.
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this is exactly what we need congress spending it's time on....I mean there is nothing else going on in America...immigration, homless, schools, poverty, medical care...yeah this is what you guys want out of your government? Fucking libs. I will never say the GOP has done better but at least that is the shit I ask them to do, not investigate family ties...false leaks or defendsome poor baby that got fired. It is time WE demand more from the government.
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the movie "who killed john oniel" sums up these ties quite nicely
before anyone cries they should realize without the BCCI and events like 911 your amreekan economy would collapse faster than a 110 story skyscraper
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$100k says there's a ton of inaccuracies
bump
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you should not say dumb shit like that unless you have researched it joe ... nothing in that article is secret and you can find mainsteam media sources for pretty much all of it
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you should not say dumb shit like that unless you have researched it joe ... nothing in that article is secret and you can find mainsteam media sources for pretty much all of it
The mainstream media is the Liberal media, like I said, they report what THEY want you to hear!
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this is exactly what we need congress spending it's time on....I mean there is nothing else going on in America...immigration, homless, schools, poverty, medical care...yeah this is what you guys want out of your government? Fucking libs. I will never say the GOP has done better but at least that is the shit I ask them to do, not investigate family ties...false leaks or defendsome poor baby that got fired. It is time WE demand more from the government.
...but it's ok to spend money to discover whether Clinton got a blowjob? ::)
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The mainstream media is the Liberal media, like I said, they report what THEY want you to hear!
some mainsteam channels have a liberal leaning, and some have a conservative ... all have a decidedly jewish flare ... but thats beside the point ... they are all driven primarily by $$ and that comes from the nations largest corporations who either own them (did you know that GE owns the NBC empire?) or provide them with enormous revenues from advertising
once again, you are speaking without having done any research ... are you too lazy too look into it or too afriad?
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I suspect too stupid. :-\
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To get this straight....
The President's family does billions of dollars of business with the family of the terrorist who did 9/11?
Yes, that doesn't stink like day-old diaper, does it?
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To get this straight....
The President's family does billions of dollars of business with the family of the terrorist who did 9/11?
Yes, that doesn't stink like day-old diaper, does it?
Well, according to Mr. Hate the story is full of inaccuracies and half truths because the Liberal Media only reports what they want you to hear. It's all a Liberal conspiracy.
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The mainstream media is the Liberal media, like I said, they report what THEY want you to hear!
Since when is Washington Post "Liberal"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post#Political_leanings
What about ABC?
Or NBC?
-Hedge
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...but it's ok to spend money to discover whether Clinton got a blowjob? ::)
yeah because I was on here in the 90s saying just that...no bitch, that is why I said "and GOP for that matter"
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To get this straight....
The President's family does billions of dollars of business with the family of the terrorist who did 9/11?
Yes, that doesn't stink like day-old diaper, does it?
you idiots are trying to link this as if Bush and OBL are doing buisness directly...240 you have sniifed to many of those diapers
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you idiots are trying to link this as if Bush and OBL are doing buisness directly...240 you have sniifed to many of those diapers
No, but if any other country's president's family was so far in bed with a terrorists' family for billions of dollars, even AFTER a 9/11, you'd smell the same shit.
you're a gullible guy.
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The mainstream media is the Liberal media, like I said, they report what THEY want you to hear!
From a general analytical point of view this is unlikely. By the accounts of opponents of liberal/democrats, they are spineless, without direction, cowardly, coreless and generally incompetent.
Yet,
The Democrats/Liberals are diabolically controlling the national media in a grand conspiracy to discredit the honorable workings of the US's rightwing and republican party.
That is not likely. Nor do I see any evidence supporting your contention.
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If there is a liberal conspiracy now, then SURELY there was a neoconservative conspiracy from 2001 to 2003, when Bush walked on water in the media.
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No, but if any other country's president's family was so far in bed with a terrorists' family for billions of dollars, even AFTER a 9/11, you'd smell the same shit.
you're a gullible guy.
this is the other subject I am done talking about..CTs
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this is the other subject I am done talking about..CTs
You're not done accusing TODAY'S media of a bias.
yet you're done talking about the 2001-2003 strong right bias.
Thought so... ;)