A Wolf in Sheikhs Clothing:
Bush Business Deals with 9 Partners of bin Laden’s Bankerby Martin J. Rivers
- Geocities, 15 March 2004
- www.globalresearch.ca 27 March 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR403A.html
Bush's Deal with Saudi Sheikhs: A Reason to Cover-Up
The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International
Bin Laden's "Banker of Terror"
Fathers and Sons: The Precedent of the United States
Bush’s Bahrain Oil Deal: "I Beseach Thee, Oh Godfather"
The Sheikh's Texas Oasis: Refueling Air Force One and Money Laundering
The Axis of Speak No Evil
REFERENCES:
Oil-related business deals between George W. Bush and several powerful Saudi Sheikhs, from 1979 to 1991, lacked both ethical integrity and Congressional intelligence oversight, since Bush used the same Saudi-controlled global banking network that was also used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and by Osama bin Laden. once a CIA asset. Yet, several abbreviated FBI and Congressional investigations later, this explosive truth still remains mostly hidden from the American public.
Consider the facts. For decades the current President's father, former President George H. W. Bush, has had publicly close ties to the oil-enriched Saudi royal family in regards to both politics and business. Then consider that the bin Laden family is the most entrusted of all families by the Saudi Royal household. For many decades, every Saudi King has granted the bin Laden’s giant construction conglomerate exclusive contacts to restore all castles and holy sites within the country, and for numerous public works and infrastructure projects.
Also, consider that soon after bin Laden's September 11 attacks, it was public knowledge that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, as was critical funding for bin Laden's al Qaeda network and for his earlier Arabic anti-Soviet fighters in Afganistan. Al Qaeda's predecesor was, in fact, bin Laden's 50,000 highly disciplined "Arab-Afghan" mujahideen, who were the most elite among Ronald Reagan's famous "freedom fighters", that were covertly given massive U.S. CIA support.
What is not generally known is that in years past, George W. Bush had several important business relationships with principle cohorts of Osama bin Laden's long-term financial sponsor, the powerful Saudi multibillionaire and banker to the king, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz.
Bush's Deal with Saudi Sheikhs: A Reason to Cover-Up
This amazing story centers around and begins with the fraud-enshrouded Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB), until recently owned by Sheikh Mahfouz. Following Osama bin Laden's U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the Saudi Arabian Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, that Mahfouz had channelled tens of millions of dollars into terrorist accounts in London and New York. While treasurer to the Saudi King, Mahfouz plundered 2 billion dollars of the 21 billion dollar National Commercial Bank, of which he was then president.
The Saudi National Commercial Bank was affiliated with a global network of many Mahfouz-connected banks, including the InterMaritime Bank of Geneva and New York, whose vice-president brokered a 25 million dollar investment into George W. Bush's Harken Oil and Gas in 1987. Thus, the InterMaritime Bank was once related to the current President Bush through its Mahfouz-connected VP, a man named Dr. Alfred Hartmann. The InterMaritime Bank was also involved in multiple covert CIA operations.
During the 1980's, Sheikh Mahfouz's banking syndicate performed major CIA-inspired banking operations for such former CIA assets as Osama bin Laden, as well as for Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and other drug dealing generals, such as in Pakistan. Much of this is documented in the 1992 U.S. Congressional testimony of Senator John Kerry.
George W. Bush, for his part, had important business relationships not only with Dr. Hartmann, but with a total of nine prominent individuals that are central to Mahfouz's financial empire, including both the “Godfather of Saudi Intelligence” and his partner, a billionaire Bush campaign donor.
If George W. Bush and Sheikh Mahfouz were ever coexisting in each others financial network, then the question is begged as to whether any personal or political reasons exist for the President to have censored the Saudi section of the Senate's report on bin Laden's September 11 attacks.
When two principal individuals are directly connected to the same group of nine persons -- with each of the the eighteen subsequent relationships having zero degrees of separation -- then one would say that a "network" exists that profoundly connects the two principals in question.
If personal motives, such as control of public perception, existed for the president to have covered up his "indirect" involvement with Sheikh Mahfouz, then Bush's claimed reason for the 911 report censorship could be a lie. Willful presidential deception would have occurred when Bush stated as the reason for his censorship, the need "to protect intelligence 'sources and methods'".
In politics, truth is often stranger than fiction: Sheikh Mahfouz's sister is actually one of four wives of Osama bin Laden, making the two men brothers-in-law, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony. Thus, Osama bin Laden is sleeping with the sister of Bush's business partner. Really.
The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International
If you consider the key players and follow the money trail, you will see that from a foreign policy perspective, Bush's his connection to bin Laden's banker, Mahfouz, is far more interesting than Bill Clinton's imbroglio with Monika Lewinsky.
Firstly, consider the fact that Mafouz's Saudi National Commercial Bank was affiliated with the InterMaritime bank, whose president, Bruce Rappaport, was deeply implicated in the BCCI Affair. That was the 1992 scandal of the infamous Mahfouz-dominated Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) involving secret accounts for illegal arms sales to Iran. To accomplish that task secretly, Rappaport partnered with Oliver North, who was in charge of the National Security Council during the Reagan-Bush administration. The BCCI affair was documented in the 1992 Senate Kerry Committee report.
With numerous branches in dozens of countries, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was also the drug-money laundering bank for the Pakistani generals, simultaneously essential long term bin Laden supporters, nuclear proliferators and American allies. Paradoxically, Robert Gates, the CIA director under former President George Bush Sr., referred to BCCI as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" in Senate testimony.
Most important, consider Dr. Alfred Hartmann, the multi-site executive, who was both the InterMaritime Bank's Vice President and no less than the chief financial officer of Mahfouz's BCCI Holdings of Luxembourg. Simultaneously, Dr. Hartmann was also the managing director of a subsidiary of BCCI, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP) in Geneva. It was BCP that helped to finance the business for the vice-president's son, George W. Bush.
In 1987, the original plan for George W. Bush's Harken Oil and Gas Company was to obtain 25 million dollars in investment capital from BCP, a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and BCCI, with BCCI as the controlling interest.
Harken's financing by BCP of Geneva was originally structured by billionaire Bush donor, Jackson Stephens from Little Rock and apparently did not comply with U.S. banking regulations, according to the Asian Wall Street Journal. In the course of restructuring the deal, UBS decided to sell its shares as soon as possible.
Stephens obligingly found a new buyer for the UBS's share of Harken, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh. Sheikh Bakhsh was a principle shareholder in Mahfouz's BCCI until its 1992 collapse and a major investor in Stephens' own Worthen National Bank. Sheikh Bakhsh's purchase of 3.5 million Harken shares and eventually 20.8 percent of the total outstanding, is documented in U.S. Security and Exchange Commission reports.
In this way, Bush's Harken deal was concluded with the BCCI's Geneva subsidiary, BCP, whose managing director and man-of-a-thousand-faces, Dr. Hartmann, was also the chairman of the the Swiss affiliate of yet another criminal bank, the Italian Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). According to the Congressional Record in 1992, Dr. Hartmann's bank, BNL was alleged by U.S. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez, to have secured billions of dollars in illegally-used, weapons-directed loans from the first Bush administration to Saddam Hussein just prior to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
After 1996, George W. Bush’s Harken-investor, Sheikh Bakhsh, was a principle shareholder in Mahfouz's Middle East Capital Group, a British offshore investment bank involving the Saudi BinLaden Group (SBG), the bin Laden family's giant construction and investment conglomerate.
The Saudi BinLaden Group is partners with Mahfouz in the Saudi Investment Corporation (SICO). In turn, SICO was covertly involved in supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the late 1980's, in connection with the BCCI-controlled National Bank of Oman. Arranging SICO's capitalization of Osama bin Laden were the top two InterMaritime Bank executives, Alfred Hartmann of Harken and Bruce Rappaport, in addition to the infamous deceased CIA director, William Casey.
Thus, during the late 1980s, the ubiquitous Harken financier, Dr. Alfred Hartmann, was both rearming Saddam Hussein and supporting Osama bin Laden's Jihad. With BCCI Holdings having Dr. Hartmann as CFO, Hartmann was at the very center of Mahfouz's BCCI scandal, a more than 13 billion dollar bank loss, termed "the largest bank fraud in world financial history" by Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morganthau.
By 1990, Harken's financial practice look more like an "Axis of Evil" network than an oil company. The soup thickens when one looks at the overall business resume of our "CEO President" and that of his business partners.
Bin Laden's "Banker of Terror"
Khalid's bin Mahfouz's 4 billion dollar financial universe includes his brother, Mohammed, also a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who replaced Khalid as head of the Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB) after the scandal broke over Khalid’s massive 2 billion dollar embezzlement.
No stranger to the secret financing of his brother-in-law, Osama, Mohammed bin Mahfouz is the founder of the Al Qaeda-financing, Saudi Sudanese Bank. Mohammed bin Mahfouz is also the founder of the terrorist-directed International Development Foundation (IDF) located at the same Oxford address as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) one of bin Laden's main recruitment centers.
With the “Saudi King’s banker", Khalid bin Mahfouz, as CEO, the Jeddah-based advertising agency, Tihama, was cited in 1999 as being an intermediary in the sponsoring of Al Qaeda.
Continuing the family tradition, Khalid's son, Abdul Rahman bin Mahfouz, is manager of the bin Laden-sponsoring charity, Blessed Relief, that received funds through the Saudi National Commercial Bank several years earlier. Blessed Relief is suspected of organizing a terrorist attack on Egypt's president Mubarak in 1995 and was found by the U.S. Treasury Department to have agreed to transfer millions of dollars to bin Laden. Could one even doubt that Abdul Rahman considers his aunt’s husband, Osama bin Laden, the greatest hero of Islam since Mohammed?
As if sealing a pact, the bin Mahfouz family holding company, the Saudi Economic Development Corporation (SEDCO) was located as of 1999 at the same Oxford address as the IDF and the IIRO. Mahfouz's SEDCO had as a president, the vice-president and CEO of the defrauded Saudi National Commercial Bank, Camille Chebeir.
Fathers and Sons: The Precedent of the United States
Consider Sami Baarma, another top executive of the Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB), who is one more among the group of men forming the web connecting both Bush Presidents to archterrorist banker Mahfouz. As an example of interactions within the “Bush-Mahfouz axis”, NCB's Sami Baarma also sits on the board of Mahfouz's Middle East Capital Group (MECG) that had on its board, Harken-investor Sheikh Bakhsh. In addition, Baarma sits on the board of the Carlyle Group, which had former President George Herbert Walker Bush as a senior advisor at the moment of the 911 attacks.
Carlyle is the 11th largest military contractor in the U.S. and was a leading contributor to George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Former President George H.W. Bush has visited Saudi Arabia at least twice to successfully court bin Laden family financing for Carlyle, whose long-term chairman was Frank Carlucci, an assistant CIA director and Defense Secretary under Reagan. Further establishing Carlyle’s elite intelligence pedigree, former President Bush was the director of the CIA during the Ford administration.
Seemingly above reproach, Carlyle's Sami Baarma was the director of two divisions of the Mahfouz’s Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB), when the bank's money disappeared in the late 1990s; namely, the International and the Investment Services Divisions. Baarma then advised the next NCB president after this second Mahfouz banking scandal broke in 1998, who was none other than Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz’s brother, Mohammed.
Literally thriving after Mahfouz’s now forgotten scandal, Baarma sits on the international investment committee of George Bush Sr.’s Carlyle Group, while having simultaneously sat on the National Commercial Banks's Executive Management Committee.
Carlyle's Sami Baarma is also the CEO of the Pakistani Prime Commercial Bank, another Mahfouz-owned bank, that has as an executive board member, Abdul Rahman bin Mahfouz, the manager of the bin Laden-sponsoring “charity”, Blessed Relief. In 1995, Abdul Rahman and his brother, Sultan bin Mahfouz, both directors in the defrauded National Commercial Bank (NCB), made a 30 million dollar investment into George Bush Sr.’s Carlyle, held for their benefit by Baarma.
The current president, George W. Bush, was once a director of and held shares in one of Carlyle's components, the Caterair Company, between 1990 and 1994. Thus, both Bush President’s Carlyle tenure was during the period that 2 billion dollars of terrorist-directed NCB funds were stolen by Mahfouz, under the nose of Baarma, a top executive at both NCB and Carlyle.
After decades of massive, documented bank fraud, Mahfouz has merely relinquished a few posts and he has never more than paid a minor fine, by his standards. Moreover, his family still controls the Saudi National Commercial Bank.
To illustrate the overwhelming avidity of the bonds between politicians and the defense industry, consider former President Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker III, who is a senior couselor to Carlyle, alongside the former President himself. In that position, Baker has travelled to Saudia Arabia to counsel the bin Laden family on investments into Carlyle, once flying on the bin Laden's family-owned jet. Earlier, in 1985, James Baker sold his skyline-dominating Texas Commerce Bank Tower to Sheikh Mahfouz, then wearing the disguise of a strategically placed Houston real estate magnate, for two hundred million dollars.
Like father, like son? The father of Harken's chairman, Alan Quasha, was Manila-based attorney William Quasha, who advised executives of the defunct, scandal-ridden Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, which employed a number of former high ranking CIA and Pentagon officials. According to a 1983 Australian government report and the Wall Street Journal, Nugan Hand Bank was involved in money laundering for international heroin syndicates and secretly aided U.S. covert activities, at the same time that the former U.S. CIA director, William Colby, was also its attorney.
Some of the persons interacting with Nugan Hand executives in the 1970s were later to become central figures in the Iran-Contra affair, such as Major General Richard Secord, convicted Middle-East adviser to Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, who was himself pardoned by former President Bush.
Iran-Contra figure Weinberger is now chairman of the closely held publishing company, Forbes Inc., and has twice in recent years sent executives and staff to the bin Laden family headquarters “to get their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors”.
Other Iran-Contra conspirators that have resurfaced, now hold or have held several top positions within the current Bush administration. Consider just two of such persons. Take the current Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was deeply involved with Iran arms sales with Oliver North and left his post as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan-Bush administration over a cascading series of scandals. Questions linger regarding his involvement in the illegal provision of war materials to both Iran and to Libya, through convicted rogue CIA operatives that included General Secord.
Armitage received Pakistan’s highest award available to a civilian by virtue of his assistance to the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, in part, by supplying the fighters with shoulder-launched Stinger missles, that have not yet been recovered by the U.S.. Currently, Carlyle’s Frank Carlucci and the re-emerged Richard Armitage, are board members of the influencial Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council.
Another Iran-Contra conspirator is Elliot Abrams, the current National Security Council special assistant for democracy, human rights and international operations. As the Assistant Secretary of State during the Reagan-Bush administration, Abrams was charged with contempt of Congress by Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh after evading questions about Oliver North’s secret mission to extract 10 million dollars from the Sultan of Brunei and about the Contra supply plane shot down.
Abrams gave the Sultan of Brunei the number of the bank account owned by InterMaritime Bank president, Bruce Rappaport, a golfing friend of then CIA director, William Casey. General Secord was the subsequent recipient of the $10 million cash, which was used for distribution to the Contras. Elliot Abrams, the current National Security Advisor, earlier had pleaded guilty for withholding information from Congress and was pardoned by the former President Bush in 1992.
It was soon after October 1984 that CIA director Casey paired North and Secord as a Contra-support team when the Congressional Boland Amendment forced the CIA to refrain from direct or indirect aid in matters of the covert making of wars.
Bush’s Bahrain Oil Deal: "I Beseach Thee, Oh Godfather"
The younger Bush's insider trading allegations relating to Harken lead a trail to the reportedly lucrative and exclusive offshore oil drilling contract that Harken received from the government of Bahrain in 1990, despite having had no previous international or off-shore drilling experience.
Bush sold his shares in Harken in 1991, immediately after the wells were found to be dry and just before the first Persian Gulf War, using his artificially inflated profits from the stock sale to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team, making him personally wealthy enough to sell out before going into politics. George W. Bush's Bahrain deal was arranged by Houston oil consultant, Michael Ameen.
At that time, Ameen was a paid consultant for the U.S. State Department and had briefed the incoming U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Charles Hostler. Simultaneously, Ameen was also the head of government relations for the Saudi's Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) that had Mahfouz on its Supreme Council. In that position, Ameen spent years dealing with members of the Saudi royal family and their associates, including his close friend Sheikh Kamal Adham, the long-term and influencial director of Saudi Intelligence from 1963 until 1979, overlapping former President Bush's tenure as CIA director. Sheikh Adham was formally involved in the Bahrain deal.
As an example of well-connected men, for over 25 years, the U.S. State Department’s deal maker, Michael Ameen, has known Harken-investor Sheikh Bakhsh, who at various times was also a principle shareholder in Stephens’ Worthen Bank, in BCCI and in Mahfouz’s Middle East Capital Group. As an example of a close and tight network, by Michael Ameen’s own account, within 10 minutes of discussing the matter of his recommendation of Harken for Bahrain's offshore deal with their Oil Minister, he received a call from one of Harken's investment bankers at Stephens Inc. of Little Rock. Before long, Ameen was leading Harken delegations to Bahrain, earning $100,000 for his services.
Earlier, during the 1980’s, Sheikh Adham and his successor as Saudi Intelligence Director, Abdul Khalil, secretly acted as BCCI nominees in a hostile take-over of Washington D.C.’s largest bank, Financial General Bankshares, that soon became First American Bankshares. First American was, in fact, a Bank of Credit and Commerce International front for Mahfouz that was set up in the U.S. with the pivotal assistance of billionaire Jackson Stephens, a lavish financial backer of many political campaigns for both Bush presidents.
Another principle shareholder of 25 million dollars in First American was arms merchant, Mohammed Hammoud, a long-time friend and business associate of Bahrain's Ambassador Hostler. And according to the Kerry Committee report, five Iran-Contra related wire transfers were made out of North/Secord accounts at First American in the amount of $346,000.00.
Previously, the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia, Raymond Close, who had illegally and covertly transferred weapons from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan in the 1970s, went to work for Sheikh Kamal Adham, a BCCI director, upon leaving the agency. A principle way in which BCCI was used as a money laundering service by drug traffickers and arms dealers was through its commodities affiliate, Capcom, that had both Stephens’ associates at First American, Sheikhs Adham and Khalil, as directors and majority shareholders.
A central figure in the 1990 off-shore drilling contract with George W. Bush’s company, Harken, was the Prime Minister of Bahrain, Sheikh Khalifah, who was also a major investor in BCCI Holdings. Prime Minister Khalifa and his brother, the Emir, both signed off on Harken's Bahrain oil deal, along with Sheikh Adham, who was termed the “Godfather of Saudi Intelligence” in the Kerry Report.
With much whitewash, in August 1991, Ed Rogers, political director in the administration of George Bush Sr., suddenly left his White House position to start a "consulting firm" and within a few weeks Rogers received a $600,000.00 contract with Kamal Adham.
Legally representing George W. Bush in the 1991 SEC probe of insider trading allegations related to his selling off his Harken stock was Dallas attorney Robert W. Jordan, the present U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Until recently, Jordan worked for Baker and Botts, whose principle attorney, former Secretary of State, James Baker III, is now strategically-placed in Bush Sr.’s Carlyle Group.
Extending the fabric of Executive nondisclosure and nepotism, the presiding SEC Chairman at that time, Richard Breenen, was a Baker and Botts senior partner and a political nominee of former President Bush. Plus, the litigating SEC General Counsel in the Harken insider probe, James Doty is another Baker and Botts alumnus who later represented George W. Bush in matters related to the ownership of the Texas Rangers.
The Sheikh's Texas Oasis: Refueling Air Force One and Money Laundering
One of Kamel Adham's close contacts, Adnan Khashoggi, is among the richest men in the world, who is a life-long friend of the bin Laden family and was the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. In 1985, Sheikh Mahfouz's Saudi National Commercial Bank loaned Khashoggi 35 million dollars to purchase weapons to illegally sell to Iran, at the behest of Oliver North. Kashoggi's father was the physician to the bin Laden patriarch, Mohammed, and he got his start in business by arranging a large truck import deal for Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother.
When Salem bin Laden died in Texas in 1988, Sheikh Mahfouz inherited his interests in Houston, so close was their life-long relationship and also that of their fathers, who likewise, were friends and business partners. The family patriarchs of both the bin Laden and the bin Mahfouz clans emigrated into Saudi Arabia from the same ancestral valley in Yemen in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Thus it was, in 1976, that Salem bin Laden employed James R. Bath, a long-time friend of George W. Bush since their days together as flyers in the Texas Air National Guard, as his business representative in the U.S.. Then in 1979 and 1980, Bath, while still an agent for Salem bin Laden, invested 50,000 dollars in Bush's first oil company, Arbusto Ltd..
Until the early 1990s, Bush's friend, James Bath, was also involved in multiple business ventures in the Houston area with Sheikh Mahfouz, BCCI's largest shareholder, including their company, Southwest Airport Services, refuelers of the presidential plane, Air Force One, when it came there.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Bath and Sheikh Mathouz, "The Saudi King's Banker", along with former Texas governor John Connally, owned the money-laundering Main Bank in Houston, which moved highly suspicious amounts of one hundred dollar bills and funded political campaigns during the late 1970s and 1980s.
During his Arbusto period, in 1979, James Bath purchased a Houston mansion for Mahfouz at 4.3 million dollars, with the payment made through none other than James Baker III’s law firm, Bakers and Botts. In 1990, during his Harken period, Bath obtained a 1.4 million dollar loan from Mahfouz. Bath was also the sole director for Mahfouz's Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd, which did a brisk business with Saudi Sheikhs and began in the Grand Cayman Islands in 1980 as a company briefly called Cotopax Investments.
It should be noted that several unusual business behaviors of Mahfouz’s Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd. demonstrated a pattern reminiscent of money laundering. First, within a month of its incorporation, the temporary board at Cotopax named Bush’s friend James Bath as company president, changed the company name to Skyways and then resigned en mass, leaving Bath as a sole director. Second, the Cayman Islands are an effective tax-shelter and haven for banking secrets. Third, one of the original subscribers to Cotopax, a company called Cayhaven Corporate Services, Ltd., was also a subscriber to “I.C., Inc.”. In reality, IC Inc. was the same entity as ICIC, which is the International Credit and Investment Corporation of Grand Caymans, termed BCCI’s “bank-within-a-bank” in the Kerry Committee report. Thus, James Bath’s Skyways Aircraft Leasing is an enterprise related to Mahfouz’s BCCI via “IC Inc.”.
Curiously, Mahfouz’s “IC Inc.”, the company related to George W. Bush’s friend James Bath, was found by investigators to be at the very center of a chart drawn by Oliver North, in North’s own White House safe, that showed the private banking network supporting the Iran-Contra operation.
Finally, in 1992, a division of the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, along with the FBI, reviewed the now forgotten accusations that George W. Bush's friend, James R. Bath, guided money to Houston from Saudi investors who wanted to influence U.S. policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Therefore, neither George W. Bush's Harken, nor Arbusto, were really oil companies as such, but were rather intimate financial connections with powerful Saudi sheikhs and criminal bankers, people whose true intentions were to service the various covert operation schemes of the current President's father.
At the end of the day, when the lights go out, Osama bin Laden sleeps with Mahfouz's sister, so says the CIA.
The Axis of Speak No Evil
So, if you wonder why the Democrats didn't shout these revelations from the top of the Washington monument, consider the power of "hush money". When big Bush-backer Jackson Stephens' name kept popping up in the Senate's Kerry Committee report on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1992, his Worthen Bank of Little Rock, Arkansas made a timely, much needed, two million dollar loan to the primary campaign of our then future president, William Jefferson Clinton. Earlier, Hillary Clinton, representing the Rose Law Firm, successfully defended Systematics, a subsidiary of Stephens Inc, during Stephen's and Adham's hostile takeover of Finanial General Bankshares, that subsequently became First American Bankshares of D.C..
Recently, Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, has demanded that the heavily censored Saudi section of the Senate's 911 report, covered-up by President George W. Bush, be made public, so that the royal household could defend themselves from the accusations of their complicity in the events of 911.
Saudi royal complicity in supporting bin Laden is supposed by some to have been documented in that report, although the Prince claims that most of the support was inadvertent. As one of many examples of Saudi royal support, Prince Sultan, Prince Bandar's father and the Saudi minister of defense, has admitted to having contributed millions of dollars to the IIRO, while claiming to have been ignorant of their clandestine behavior.
However, if some significant measure of culpability for the September 11th attacks is shifted onto Sheikh Mahfouz, bin Laden's principle sponsor, and away from the Saudi royal family, the loser might actually be the current Bush administration. President Bush may be caught in a trap of his own making. Consider that George W. Bush never disclosed the true extent of his financial relationship to terror-sponsoring Saudi Sheikhs and CIA-dealing bankers.
In reality, George W. Bush had important business dealings with nine men that were deeply connected to Mahfouz, including seven men asssociated with Harken, namely: Dr. Hartmann, Sheikh's Bakhsh, Adham, Khalil and Khalifa, Bahrain deal-maker Michael Ameen and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock. Other individuals that are simultaneously connected to both Bush and Mahfouz are Sami Baarma of the Carlyle Group and James Bath of Arbusto.
Of the nine “business” persons connecting George W. Bush and Sheikh Mahfouz, three have been actively involved in financing covert U.S. military operations, they are Dr. Hartmann, Sheikh Adham, the “Godfather of Saudi Intelligence”, and his cohort, Sheikh Khalil.
It is clear that in a total of nine cases, Bush and bin Laden’s banker are connected by merely a single degree of separation. Consequently, one must ask if the purpose of Bush’s censorship of the Saudi section of the Senate’s 911 report is to obscure his business relationships to a number of high ranking individuals in Sheikh Mahfouz’s financial empire.
There were nine interrelationships listed above between George W. Bush and Sheikh Mahfouz, that have only a single degree of separation. There is another, interesting triangular relationship between Mahfouz and both Bush Presidents, and also between father and son. First, consider the ubiquitous Harken-financier, Dr. Hartmann, who was the corporate Vice President of the Mahfouz-connected InterMaritime Bank, under it’s President, Bruce Rappaport. In turn, Rappaport was the manager of multimillion dollar North/Secord accounts at the InterMaritime Bank and a friend of CIA director, William Casey, the architect of Iran-Contra subversion of the Boland Amendment.
By the same token, one might ask if Jackson Stephens, the long-term Bush family campaign benefactor, is possibly implicated in Sheikh Adham’s involvement with North/Secord accounts at First American, the BCCI front that these two billionaires setup together up in D.C.. The question is now begged. Does President George W. Bush’s former involvement with so many business cohorts of bin Laden’s banker, Sheikh Mahfouz, particularly men such as Dr. Hartmann and Sheikh Adham, reveal the outlines of a covert involvement in Iran-Contra by his father, George Bush Sr., when he was Vice President “under” Reagan?
The bottom line is that any BCCI connection to the Bush name spells serious political trouble for the current president. Moreover, three important questions must be asked regarding national security. First, did George W. Bush utilize international bankers and investors, for his seeming personal financial gain, who had previously been involved in the financing of covert wars by the CIA, in violation of the 1984 Congressional Boland Amendment. Second, did each Bush administration manipulate both the CIA and FBI in a manner intended to prevent the public revelation of these documented Bush-Saudi relationships? Third, how might manipulation of CIA and FBI “information output” on bin Laden’s archterrorist banker Mahfouz, by either Bush President, have resulted in negative effects on these agencies’ function?
After Mahfouz's second multi-billion dollar bank scandal broke in 1998, the international bank robber once again found himself profitably in bed with America, this time with the United States Navy. It was in the Port of Aden in October 12, 2000, three weeks before the 2000 Presidential election, that suicide bombers were able to maneuver a supply boat packed with explosives next to the USS Cole. The ensuing blast killed 17 sailors. U.S. authorities believe that Osama bin Laden ordered the attacks.
It turns out that the Bin Mahfouz Group and the Port of Singapore Authority comprise an entity called Yeminvest, that is under contract with the Yemen government to run the facilities and operations of the Port of Aden, critically located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, in 1999, the Saudi Binladen Group was hired by Yemen officials to rebuild the nearby airport.
Recall that earlier, Mahfouz's company in Houston, Southwest Airport Services, operated by George W. Bush's friend, James Bath, refueled the Presidential plane, Air Force One.
After the Cole bombings, the man in charge of the FBI’s bin Laden investigation, John O’Neill, the deputy director of the agency’s New York office, was refused entry into Yemen by the U.S. Ambassador, Barbara Bodine. This occurred after Yemen authorities had disparaging referred to O’Neill and his team as “Rambos”. O’Neill had already lead investigations into Osama bin Laden’s series of bombings at the World Trade Center in 1993, at the U.S. military base in Saudia Arabia in 1996 and at the U.S embassies in Africa in 1998.
Following the Rambo incident, O’Neill’s attempts to properly investigate within Yemen were also thwarted by his FBI higher-ups and by the recently installed U.S. State Department under George W. Bush. O’Neill complained bitterly and resigned his FBI post in August 2001. Earlier, after the 1996 bombings that killed 19 American soldiers in Saudi Arabia and a foreshadowing of the hindered Yemen investigation, O’Neill was not allowed by King Fahd to interrogate the Al Qaeda-connected suspects, who were executed first.
Immediately after his FBI resignation, O’Neill became the head of security at the World Trade Center and then tragically met his fate in the attacks of September 11th. Some of John O’Neill’s final words were: “All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.”
The weight of evidence linking President Bush and bin Laden’s banker indicate that his censorship of the Senate 911 report was a willful nondisclosure of these connections and could come to represent a “high crime and misdemeanor”, that is, an impeachable offense.
The resume of America’s CEO President, George W. Bush, is clearly a subject that is worthy for a Congressional investigation, yet it reads like a lurid and twisted spy novel; with guns, drugs, money laundering, politics, “nukuler” proliferation and sex. I imagine some future tabloid headine: “Archterrrorist bin Laden is Sleeping with the Sister of Bush’s Business Partner.
REFERENCES:
1) Security and Exchange Commission. Official Summary of Security Transactions and Holdings... SE 1.9: 54;10-12. 1987. (Harken Oil and Gas; Bakhsh, Abdullah T; 3,500,00 shares; November 12, 1987). < http://www.geocities.com/rivers_mj/BushBakhsh.gif >
2) Security and Exchange Commission. Mergers and Acquisitions Database, December 3, 1987: SEC Document 13D -- Amendment 1, December 3, 1987.
3) Petzinger, Thomas Jr.; Truel, Peter; Abramson, Jill. "Oil Firm Links Bahrain, BCCI and President's Son". Asian Wall Street Journal. Dec. 9, 1991.
4) "I’m Not Rappaport". Legal Times. July 31, 1989.
5) Kerry, J ohn (Senator) and Senator Hank Brown. "The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate" 102d Congress 2d Session Senate Print 102-140. Dec. 1992.
6) "BCCI, the CIA and Foreign Intelligence". Congressional Record. 1992. < htp:// www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm >
7) "Bin Laden linked to BCCI accounts; 1991 fraud scandal cost depositors millions". The Guardian. UK. Associated Press. (9/27/01).
8) Gonzalez, Henry (U.S. House of Representatives. Dem-TX) "Kissinger Associates, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Stoga, Iraq and BNL". Congressional Record. April 28, 1992. < www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920428g.htm >
9) Kelly, Andrew. "Saudi Money Aiding Bin Laden. Businessmen Are Financing Front Groups". USA Today. October 29, 1999.
10) Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill. "Saudi elite linked to bin Laden financial empire. Special Report". Boston Herald. October 14, 2001.
11) Ahmed Rashid. "Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist". (Ahmed Rashid of Pakistan is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity.) < http://www.public-i.org/excerpts_01_091301.htm > 9/16/01.
12) Michel Chossudovsky. "Who Is Osama Bin Laden?" Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal. < http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html > 9/12/01.
13) Brisard, Jean-Charles and Dasquie, Guillaume. Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden.Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books New York. (2002).
14) Arnaud Montebourg, MP. French Parliamentary Report: "The City of London, Gibraltar and the Crown Dependencies: offshore centres and sanctuaries for dirty money". Annex: "The Economic Environment of Osama bin Laden": < http://www.geocities.com/yeslam2003/BenLaden4.PDF >
15) Unger, Craig. "Saving the Saudis". Vanity Fair. pp. 162-179. October 2003.
16) Dan Briody. "Carlyle's way: Making a mint inside 'the iron triangle' of defense, government, and industry". Redherring. 1/8/02.
17) Kevin Dowling. "The ties that bind: Barclays, a bin Laden relative, Carlyle and the BCCI boys" . Online Journal. 11/3/01.
18) Mark Watts, "Bin Laden probe Eyes Guernsey Connection", The Express. October 14, 2001.
19) Jon Henl ey. "City 'Haven' For Terrorist Money Laundering". The Guardian. (10/10/01).
20) Middle East Capital Group. MECG Web Site: Directors -- < http://www.mecg.com.lb/general/directors/frameright.htm > and Principle Shareholders -- < http://www.mecg.com.lb/general/shares/shares.htm >
21) Kwinty, Jonathan. Nugan Hand Aided U.S. Covert Acts. Wall Street Journal. S2:p. 36. (8/16/83). (Also see 8/26/83 WSJ; p.1 by Kwinty.)
22) Houston Chronicle News Service. "Bank indicted in scheme owned by Arab families". Houston Chronicle. A: 1. (10/12/88).
23) Jerry Urban. "Flow of $100 bills through Houston bank questioned". Houston Chronicle. B: 2. (08/09/91).
24) Jerry Urban. Banking scandal figure seeks claim to airport contract. Houston Chronicle. pA26. (09/10/94).
25) Jerry Urban. "Feds investigate entrepreneur allegedly tied to Saudis". Houston Chronicle. A:21. 06/04/92.
Email this article to a friend
To express your opinion on this article, join the discussion at Global Research's News and Discussion Forum , at http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/index.php
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original Global Research (Canada) articles in their entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text & title of the article are not modified. The source must be acknowledged as follows: Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca . For cross-postings, kindly use the active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article. The author's copyright note must be displayed. (For articles from other news sources, check with the original copyright holder, where applicable.). For publication of Global Research (Canada) articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: editor@globalresearch.ca .
© Copyright Martin J. Rivers (2003). < http://www.geocities.com/rivers_mj/index For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement.
