|
CounterPunch
January
31, 2003
Kean Insight
Bush,
bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 Commission
by CHRIS FLOYD
When George W. Bush's first choice to head an
"independent" probe into the Sept. 11 attacks--suspected
war criminal Henry Kissinger--went down like a bad pretzel, he
quickly plucked another warm body from the stagnant pool of Establishment
worthies who are periodically called upon to roll out the whitewash
when the big boys screw up.
Kissinger's replacement, retired New
Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, was a "safe pair of hands,"
we were assured by the professional assurers in the mainstream
media. The fact that he'd been out of public life for years--and
that he hadn't collaborated in the deaths of tens of thousands
of Cambodians, Chileans and East Timorese--certainly made him
less controversial than his predecessor, although to be fair,
Kissinger's expertise in mass murder surely would have given
the panel some unique insights into the terrorist atrocity.
But now it seems that Kean might possess
some unique insights of his own. Fortune Magazine reports this
week that both Kean and Bush share an unusually well-placed business
partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz -- perhaps better known as "Osama
bin Laden's bagman" or even "Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law."
Kean, like so many worthies, followed
the revolving door out of public service into lucrative sweetheart
deals and well-wadded sinecures on corporate boards. One of these,
of course, is an oil company--pretty much a requirement for White
House work these days. (Or as the sign says on the Oval Office
door: "If your rigs ain't rockin', don't come a-knockin'!")
Kean is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to
Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan.
(The partnership is incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax
haven," natch. You can't expect a worthy like Kean to pay
taxes like some grubby wage slave.)
One of Delta's biggest backers is the
aforesaid Mahfouz, a Saudi wheeler-dealer who has bankrolled
some of most dubious players on the world scene: Abu Nidal, Manuel
Noreiga, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. Mahfouz was also
a front for the bin Laden family, funneling their vast wealth
through American cut-outs in a bid to gain power and influence
in the United States.
One of those cut-outs was Mahfouz factotum
James Bath, a partner in George W.'s early oil venture, Arbusto.
Bath has admitted serving as a pass-through for secret Saudi
money. Years later, when Bush's maladroit business skills were
about to sink another of his companies, Harken Energy, the firm
was saved by a $25 million investment from a Swiss bank--a subsidiary
of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BBCI), partly
owned by the beneficent Mahfouz.
What was BCCI? Only "one of the
largest criminal enterprises in history," according to the
U.S. Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic bribery
of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas,"
says journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation.
"It laundered money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses
and law officers, engaged in extortion and blackmail. It supplied
the financing for illegal arms trafficking and global terrorism.
It financed and facilitated income tax evasion, smuggling and
prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush Regime,
then.
BCCI's bipartisan corruption first permeated
the Carter Administration, then came to full flower in the Reagan-Bush
years. The CIA uncovered the bank's criminal activities in 1981--no
great feat, considering how many of its own foreign "associates"
were involved, including the head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal
Adham, brother-in-law of King Faisal. But instead of stopping
the drug-runners and terrorists, the agency decided to join them,
using BCCI's secret channels to finance "black ops"
all over the world.
When a few prosecutors finally began
targeting BCCI's operations in the late Eighties, President George
Herbert Walker Bush boldly moved in with a federal probe directed
by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller. The U.S. Senate
later found that the probe had been unaccountably "botched"--witnesses
went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of
bad luck. Lower-ranking prosecutors told of heavy pressure from
on high to "lay off." Most of the big BCCI players
went unpunished or, like Mahfouz, got off with wrist-slap fines
and sanctions. Mueller, of course, wound up as head of the FBI,
appointed to the post in July 2001--by George W. Bush.
In the late 1990s, U.S. authorities identified
Mahfouz as a major financier of his brother-in-law's extracurricular
activities. He denied it, but the spooked Saudis put him on ice,
charging him with, of all things, bank fraud. He's now under
"house arrest"--or rather, "palatial mansion arrest"--but
still wheeling and dealing with Kean and Delta and other worthies.
Indeed, one of Mahfouz's hirelings--the director of a Pakistani
bank he owns--sits on the advisory board of our old friend the
Carlyle Group, cheek by jowl with the firm's most celebrated
shill: George Herbert Walker Bush.
Somehow we doubt that worthy Kean will
poke very hard at the nexus of intersections between his own
business partner, Mahfouz, and the bin Ladens, the Bushes, the
Saudi royals, Saddam, the CIA and BCCI. We've only scratched
the surface here, but even this cursory glance makes the current
world crisis look less like some grand geopolitical "clash
of civilizations" and more like a nasty falling out among
thieves, with rival mafias--who sometimes collude, sometimes
collide--now duking it out for turf, cloaking their murderous
criminality with pious rhetoric about freedom, security, jihad
and God.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Yesterday's
Features
Muqtedar Khan
Heavy
Rhetoric, Wistful Thinking and Hydrogen Cars: a response to Bush's
State of the Union
William Hughes
An
Open Letter to France:
Justice is On Your Side
David Wilson
Meet
the Gloucester Weapons Inspectors: the Protest at the Fairford
Stealth Bomber Base
Anthony Gancarski
Free
Press? "There's No Damn Thing"
Josh Frank
Who Would Jesus Bomb?: 10 Reasons to Oppose War on Iraq
Abu Spinoza
Iraq: Web Resources
Dr. Gerry Lower
Class Warfare Against the Poor
Natalie Johnson Lee
Green
Party Response to Bush's State of the Union
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Stealing Money from Kids
Maria Tomchick
Bush's Smallpox Boondoggle
Paul di Rooij
War: It's Already Started
Website of the Day
Tie
Yourself to the Mast Brave Odysseus: Ashcroft Sings!
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
January 25
/ 26, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
War as Football Game
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Too Many Smoking Guns: Israel, American Jews and the War on Iraq
Chris Clarke
Collateral Damage: Draft Resistance and the Peace Mvt.
Bruce Jackson
Killing an Oak Tree: a Gratuitous Death
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto Allegre Diary II: Building the Party, Lula Style
Forrest Hylton
Left Turns in South America
Edward Said
When Will Arabs Resist?
William A.
Cook
Israeli
Democracy: Fact or Fiction?
Anthony Gancarski
America Never Was America to Me
Subcomandante
Marcos
Zaps to Basques: Lighten Up!
Ellen Cantarow
Music Lives in Palestine
Marta Russell
Extinguishing Frida Kahlo
Adam Engel
Man in the Black Suit: a novelini
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|