Bin Laden's Family Link to Bush/Bin Laden was CIA

[food for thought]

Bin Laden's family link to Bush
by PETER ALLEN, Daily Mail

n summer 1971, Osama and Salem Bin Laden enjoyed a holiday in Sweden with some of their 55 brothers and sisters.

Yet within a few years, the two teenagers' lives had taken stunningly different turns.

As the world knows to its cost, Osama embraced Islamic fundamentalism and 30 years later was named the world's most wanted man. He is prime suspect in the murder of nearly 7,000 in the worst ever terrorist atrocities in the U.S. earlier this month.

Incredibly, Salem went on to become a business partner of the man who is leading the hunt for his brother. In the 1970s, he and George W Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Mr Bush's home state of Texas.

Photos reveal the brothers on family holiday to the Swedish town of Falun, 150 miles north-west of Stockholm, when Osama was 14 and Salem around 19.

The brothers had recently inherited a fortune from their construction magnate father, Mohammed. He left millions to each of his 57 children by 12 wives after dying in a plane crash in 1968.

Osama and Salem first visited Falun in 1970, arriving in a blue Rolls-Royce flown to Copenhagen by private jet. They liked the town so much they returned with other family members a year later.

Learning that the Bin Ladens, originally from Saudi Arabia, were staying at the Astoria Hotel, a local photographer asked the unusual visitors to pose.

Astoria owner Christina Akerblad said last night: 'They were beautiful boys, so elegantly dressed. Everybody loved them.

'Osama played with my two boys, Anders and Gerk.

'What's happened since is absolutely terrible. The first time I realised Osama had turned into a terrorist was when I saw his photograph in a magazine article about the bombing. He and his brother were such nice boys.'

At that time the brothers both delighted in their enormous wealth. Salem - wearing a polo neck and slacks as he crouches three places from Osama, in jeans and a skinny rib jumper - put a large part of his money into business ventures, including Arbusto Energy.

Mr Bush was not long out of Harvard Business School when he started the company in 1978.

Salem watched it grow into a hugely successful business until his death in a microlight plane crash in Texas in 1983.

As he built his own business empire, Salem Bin Laden had an intriguing relationship with the president-to-be.

In 1978, he appointed James Bath, a close friend of Mr Bush who served with him in the Air National Guard, as his representative in Houston, Texas.

It was in that year that Mr Bath invested $50,000 (about £34,000) in Mr Bush's company, Arbusto. It was never revealed whether he was investing his own money or somebody else's.

There was even speculation that the money might have been from Salem. In the same year, Mr Bath bought Houston Gulf Airport on behalf of the Saudi Arabian multimillionaire. Three years ago, Mr Bush said the $50,000 investment in Arbusto was the only financial dealing he had with Mr Bath.

Last night a White House spokesman was unavailable for comment.

Before his death, Salem was married to Briton Caroline Carey, now 35.

She has never spoken about her brother-in-law Osama, who was disowned by the rest of his family in 1991 when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for his anti-government activities.

Now living in luxury in a Cairo villa, she has married twice into the Bin Laden family - first to Salem, and now to a younger brother, Khaled. She has a daughter by each brother.

Three years ago a family friend said: 'She first met Salem when she was just a child - no more than five years old.

'He was a friend of the family but at that stage no one would have dreamed that they would end up marrying.

'When they met again as adults, Caroline was 20 and Salem twice her age.

'Salem was the head of the Bin Laden family as the oldest of all the brothers and sisters.

'He was a man with a powerful presence.'

They married and, after his death, Caroline decided to bring up her daughter in Saudi Arabia.

'Caroline was a widow for nearly ten years before deciding to marry Khaled,' said the friend. 'He is one of the younger brothers and very quiet and loving.

'She can never speak publicly about her marriage, or anything else for that matter, or she would be cut off from the family.'

Caroline's father, a retired psychology lecturer from Hampstead, said: 'My daughter is very happy with Khaled. She decided to stay on in Saudi Arabia because she found her family there to be so loving and supportive.'

Yesterday FBI agents swooped on a Boston suburb where around 20 of the wealthy relatives of Bin Laden live. They questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even began visiting nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family.

Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who is said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years ago, owns a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland.

Another younger brother, Abdullah, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. The family has given it £2million in endowments to research Islamic law.

Most of Bin Laden's family have in the past strongly denounced the 44-year-old fugitive, now living in Afghanistan.

The FBI in Boston has long been aware of his extended family and began monitoring their activities after the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.

The Bin Ladens still run one of the biggest construction companies in the world.

[food for thought]

We are posting this documentation here as proof that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset, and that he was built and funded by the U.S. government. The apologetic spin that the controlled media puts on the scenario is to be expected. History is replete with examples of how the U.S. funds and arms our "enemies" before they become our "enemies".

This article fails to mention the very cozy business relationship that the Bush family has with the Bin Laden family. The Bushes and the Bin Ladens are joint partners in an investment banking venture called the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group makes money from lucrative military contracts with the government. Hence, the continuing military operation that was the result of the "attacks" of September 11th, finds both the Bush and the Bin Laden families profiting from the war on "terrorism".

Prior to all of this, president George W. Bush founded an energy company called Arbusto Energy with Salam Bin Laden, Osama's brother. George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States was the director of the CIA prior to his presidency.

If one attempts to excuse all of this as just one big irony, it is a monstrous irony indeed. At a particular point, the turf must be surveyed and a determination made that when you're coughing and gasping from smoke, a fire must be somewhere in your vicinity.

- Darren Weeks


Bin Laden comes home to roost
His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story
By Michael Moran | MSNBC

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998 — At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.

BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia’s Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.

But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.

BIN LADEN’S BEGINNINGS

As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.

As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.

What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.

By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan’s mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan’s freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.

Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

WHAT’S ‘INTELLIGENT’ ABOUT THIS?

Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA’s reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.

In fact, while he returned to his family’s construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.

Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt’s Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.

Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.

“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION

It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden’s connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein’s monster like this.

It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA’s Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party’s grip on power in Moscow.

Even Hatch can’t be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its “mission,” had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual “Soviet Military Power” report right up to 1990.

Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.

That decision is coming home to roost.


Michael Moran is MSNBC’s International Editor

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