26 August - O$ama Who ?

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U.S. officials rebut WikiLeaks and defend the Afghan war. Are they right?
William Saletan

In a coordinated operation, National Security Adviser James Jones, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley have dismissed the leaked documents as old news that shouldn't alter U.S. policy.  Are their rebuttals persuasive?
There's nothing new here.
Reports don't have to be broad or grand to be sobering.
Gibbs compared the WikiLeaks documents unfavorably to the Pentagon Papers, noting that the former are "just on-the-ground reporting," a bunch of "one-off documents about an operation here or an instance there." That's an odd way to belittle them in front of the press. On-the-ground reporting about an operation here and an instance there is how good journalists compile evidence of a war gone wrong.
Reports on the ground seldom reveal a whole new category of trouble. They're damning enough when they show that a known category of trouble is worse or more persistent than our government admits.
Things have changed since 2009. 
On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years.
Let's not pretend a speech by our President suddenly alters patterns of corruption and double-dealing half a world away. ( or not ) American resources don't address Afghan nepotism or ulterior Pakistani  motives. The Pakistani Taliban went after Islamabad and scared the Pakistani government into treating them as a mortal threat.
The worst incident report in the Afghan war is still the one from nine years ago, in which 3,000 Americans died. Don't forget it.

 Everything always revolves around this one assertion. Yet the proof is so pathetic to nonexistent that the Bush Administration chose not to respect international right to self-government rather than provide requested Taliban government documentation of legal proofs against a Saudi prince - royalty - whose family was safely escorted out of the U.S. by the F.B. I. one week after 9/11. Nine years later he is still supposedly 'vanished into thin air'... a sick 6'4" man on dialysis and both C.I.A. operations funder in Afghanistan and friend of the Bush family.

U.S. BUSINESS AND BUSH FAMILY TIES TO OSAMA BIN LADEN REVEALED
http://www.rinf.com/news/aug-05/57.html 

One of the top U.S. contractors in Iraq was also intimately involved in the Bin Laden global financial empire

Wayne Madsen

The U.S. construction and engineering firm Fluor Corp. has raked in handsome profits from reconstruction contracts awarded by the Pentagon in Iraq. Fluor, which received the lucrative contracts because it was included by the Pentagon on an "invitation only" short list of eligible contractors, has contributed over $500,000 to Republican candidates since 2000. Kenneth Oscar, a Fluor Vice President, was the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement and was conveniently in charge of a $60 billion budget. One of Fluor's board members is retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy director of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) director.

What is not known about Fluor is its long standing ties to the Bin Laden family's worldwide financial interests. WMR has recently obtained the copy of a French intelligence report on the Saudi Investment Company Organization (SICO), an operation controlled by the Bin Ladens. The report reveals that Fluor was an integral part of the Bin Laden financial empire through a network of interlocking off-shore companies and directorships registered in such locations as Curacao, the Cayman Islands, London, the Netherlands, and Virginia.'

The Bin Laden banking organization is difficult to track -- but it is centered around the "nebulous" SICO (Saudi Investment Co. Organization), centered in Geneva and Jeddah with operations in Rotterdam, Bristol, London, Panama, Curacao, Cayman Islands and USA. SICO primarily engages in mergers and acquisitions. SICO also "talent spots" competent associates in new jurisdictions and off-shore locations.


The Al Qaeda drug supply network remains in operation and continues to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Bin Laden's global operations. All during the rule of the Taliban, Afghan drug mules hauling heroin abroad received a standard request for assistance letter from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader. Mullah Omar dispatched a number of envoys to Washington, DC to have talks with senior Bush administration officials prior to 911. They all carried the same assistance request letter. The Mullah Omar assistance request letter Download Large Version

The Bin Laden drug network also intersects with Geneva-based financial entities established by George H. W. Bush while he was CIA director and Vice President and President of the United States. Bin Laden and Bush money are held in some of the same financial tranches in Switzerland, the Isle of Man, and the Bahamas (see following story). The Bush family off-shore money tranches originated with gold bars and jewels spirited out of the Philippines upon the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The Marcos fortune was the price exacted by Vice President Bush for his being granted asylum in Hawaii. The gold bars were transported from the Philippines to the International Diamond Exchange Vaults near Rockefeller Center. A CIA proprietary firm called Oceaneering International of Houston procured barges to move some of the gold from secured warehouses to a specially-configured Boeing 747 which then flew the cargo to New York. Oceaneering sealifted the remaining gold to Oregon. After George W. Bush's victory in 2000, the last of the gold and jewels stored in New York was moved to UBS Bank in Zurich. Marcos and Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi set about to create Five Star Trust in 1983 as a means to create a vehicle to use the Philippine wealth to create and funnel fungible assets abroad. In 1989, Five Star Trust was officially established in the Isle of Man by a Houston-based attorney who was a close friend of the Bush family.

WMR is now in possession of a UBS letter to the Swiss Federal Police, dated October 30, 2001, which was in response to an October 2, 2001 request by the police to look for Bin Laden family "terrorist funds" ( Terroristengeldern ).The UBS letter states that two terrorist-related financial activities were detected with regard to the movement by Osama Bin Laden of suspicious funds in 1990 and 1991. [This was shortly after Bush's Philippine tranche of gold and jewels was established at UBS]. On 20/08/90, there was a $450,000 transfer of funds into Osama Bin Laden's account. The deposit included "jewels." On 28/10/91, there was a $482,000 transfer of funds into Osama Bin Laden's account from the Saudi American Bank in Jeddah, the same bank Israeli intelligence directly tied into Saudi terrorist funding in the West Bank. (See "Intelligence Whispers").

As reported in "Intelligence Whispers," on August 21, 2001, just a few weeks before the 911 attacks, a UBS Warburg/Paine Webber broker named Chung Wu advised his investors to sell their Enron stock, whereafter UBS quickly fired the broker. In addition, the "Intelligence Whispers" report regarding the mysterious Bush-connected Geneva and Zurich money mover who transferred $10 million and $10 billion in Saudi and other funds to Texas in 1995 and 1996, respectively, has been positively linked to Al Taqwa, a Swiss entity tied to "Al Qaeda."

The New U.S.
-British Oil Imperialism
http://www.oilcompanies.net/oil1.htm
The American and British ruling circles have been engaged in a policy of military imperialism for several centuries. The American revolution was fought to bring the United States under new, non-British ruling circles, with the new regime sold to the public as a democracy. In the twentieth century, these American ruling elites have revolved around the Rockefeller, Brown, Harriman, and Morgan family dynasties. The Bush family, beginning with Prescott Bush, have served as satraps of the Rockefeller, Brown, and Harriman interests.
the British and American ruling cabals decided that the energy of choice for the world would be oil and natural gas (not coal)--just as the drugs of choice would be alcohol and tobacco.

      To overcome the problem of his oil holdings being broken apart by the U.S. government in 1911, John Rockefeller set out to control the world's oil, gas, and nuclear energy reserves. World War I was the strategy of the world oil cartel (Standard, Shell, British Petroleum) to take over the colonies of France, Holland, Spain and Portugal. The engines of war now ran on petroleum-based products, so ownership of oil could now determine who won or lost a war--therefore who would rule the world. Oil, instead of gold, became the token of power.

By 1919, the Oil Empire, not based on countries or nations, but on private corporations, now ruled the world.

The Big Three oil cartel, which controlled oil in the Persian Gulf and southeast Asia areas, wanted to gain control over the vast oil reserves in the southern part of the Soviet Union. They financed the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan with the hope that they would invade and control Russia. The Oil Rulers planned to defeat the German, Italian, and Japanese regimes and take control of the oil reserves in the Soviet Union. The Rockefeller circle also planned to take control of Persian Gulf oil from the British-Persian Oil cartel and seize control of southeast Asian oil from Royal Dutch Shell.

The United States was brought into the second world war when in July 1941, President Roosevelt signed an embargo to stop all shipping to Japan. This was said to be in retaliation for the recent Japanese invasion of French Indo-China. Roosevelt's U.S. embargo cut off the Japanese oil supply, which would have quickly shut down Japan's entire economy. In late November 1941 the Japanese sent a written "war warning" through diplomatic channels to Washington, demanding that the embargo be stopped, or else American sites in the Pacific would be attacked in retaliation. That formal diplomatic warning was ignored and the U.S. made no reply. Just two weeks later the Japanese bombed the American embargo ships located in Pearl Harbor.

In 1939 and '40, the Germans and Italians did not attack Russia as the Big Three had planned. Instead, German General Rommel rushed across North Africa to grab the Suez Canal and control all oil shipping through the canal. Rommel then planned to drive through to Persia and toss out the British from the British-Persian oil fields. Meanwhile, after a failed attack on Russia in 1939, the Japanese swept through Southeast Asia and seized all the oil holdings of Royal Dutch Shell. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, most of those Royal Dutch fields came under the control of Rockefeller's Standard Oil.
Hitler had planned to capture the oilfields in Romania by 1939 so Germany would have its own supply of oil. This was accomplished. Then Rommel was to have captured the oilfields in Persia by 1941, the oilfields in Russia in 1942. Only then would Hitler have sufficient fuel for prosecuting a war with the United States. But less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese convinced Hitler to declare war on the United States. Hitler agreed only if the Japanese would attack Russia, since German troops were now bogged down in Russia and Hitler would gain strategic advantage if the Russians had to defend themselves from Japan on their eastern flank. When the Japanese failed to attack Russia, Hitler was driven out of Russia and now was without a fuel source. The Romanian oilfields in Ploesti were insufficient for Germany to carry on a war on two fronts, and Germany's war effort began to collapse.

     The last major German campaign was the Battle of the Bulge, in which Rommel was to attack the invading allies with his tanks, then capture the Allied fuel dumps. This would stop the American and British forces and obtain the necessary fuel for Germany to continue its war effort. But General Eisenhower ordered the Allied fuel dumps burned and Germany was defeated.


The Bush-Saudi Connection
http://www.hermes-press.com/BushSaud.htm


     The United States trained and armed troops in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The United States and Saudi Arabia spent about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan, recruiting, supplying, and training nearly 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among the recruits were Osama bin Laden and his followers. (2)

    With C.I.A. funding, Osama bin Laden imported engineers and equipment from his father’s Saudi construction company to build tunnels for guerrilla training centers and hospitals, and for arms dumps near the Pakistan border. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the C.I.A. and the Pakistani intelligence agency sponsored the Taliban organization, a government composed of the fanatic Wahhabi Islamic sect, the same sect that is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. Although followers of the Wahhabi sect do not refer to themselves as Wahhabis, the label is useful because it applies to a single Muslim group with a set of beliefs peculiar to them alone: Wahhabis maintain that Shi'ites and Sufis are not Muslims, and that Muslims should not visit shrines or celebrate Mohammed’s birthday. (3)

Wherever they ruled, the Wahhabis imposed their medieval code on their hapless subjects, making public spectacles of stoning adulterers to death and maiming thieves, destroying decorated mosques and cemeteries, prohibiting music, sequestering women, and promoting war on infidels. The Saudi sheiks have lavished funds on anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorists-in-training while indoctrinating other Muslims through its worldwide network of religious schools, mosques, newspapers, and presses. 
    Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother, has conducted all his American affairs through James Bath, a Houston crony of the Bush family. Bath’s former business partner Bill White testified in court that Bath had been a liaison for the C.I.A. In 1979 Bath invested $50,000 in Arbusto, George W. Bush’s first business venture. Rumor had it that Bath was acting as Salem bin Laden’s representative. "In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests." (4)

    In addition to doing aviation business with Saudi sheiks, Bath was part owner of a Houston bank whose chief stockholder was Ghaith Pharaon, who represented the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a criminal global bank with branches in 73 countries. BCCI proceeded to defraud depositors of $10 billion during the ‘80s, while providing a money laundry conduit for the Medellin drug cartel, Asia’s major heroin cartel, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and Islamist terrorist organizations worldwide. (5)

    Big Three wheeler-dealer Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of the largest stockholders in the criminal bank, was indicted when the massive BCCI banking scandal blew apart in the early 1990s. The Saudi royal family placed him under house arrest after discovering that Mahfouz had used the royal bank to channel millions of dollars through fake charities into bin Laden’s organizations, but Mahfouz was not so much punished as inconvenienced. (6)


Congress Must Cut Off Bush Family War Profits
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/42388 
Since this war on terror was declared following 9/11, the pay levels for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors have doubled. The average compensation rose from $3.6 million during the period of 1998-2001, to $7.2 million during the period of 2002-2005, according to an August 2006, report entitled, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Washington-based, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Boston-based, United for a Fair Economy.

This study found that since 9/11, the 34 defense CEOs have pocketed a combined total of $984 million, or enough, the report says, to cover the wages for more than a million Iraqis for a year. In 2005, the average total compensation for the CEOs of large US corporations was only 6% above 2001 figures, while defense CEOs pay was 108% higher.

But the last name of one family, which is literally amassing a fortune over the backs of our dead heroes, matches that of the man holding the purse strings in the White House. On December 11, 2003, the Financial Times reported that three people had told the Times that they had seen letters written by Neil Bush that recommended business ventures in the Middle East, promoted by New Bridges Strategies, a firm set up by President Bush’s former campaign manager, who quit his Bush appointed government job as the head of FEMA, three weeks before the war in Iraq began.

Neil Bush was paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times said.

But Neil Bush is by no means the only Bush profiting from the war on terror. The first President Bush is so entangled with entities that have profited greatly that it's difficult to even know where to begin. Bush joined the Carlyle Group in 1993, and became a member of the firm's Asian Advisory Board.

The Carlyle Group was best known for buying defense companies and doubling or tripling their value and was already heavily supported by defense contracts. But in 2002, the firm received $677 million in government contracts, and by 2003, its contracts were worth $2.1 billion. 

The Holocaust and the Bush family fortune
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/bush-j05.shtml 


A presidential visit to Auschwitz
The Holocaust and the Bush family fortune
By Bill Vann
5 June 2003

“History is a reminder of what’s possible.” These were the words spoken by President George Bush as he emerged from a guided tour of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The former Nazi death camp in Poland was one of the first stops on his seven-day tour of Europe and the Middle East.

What precisely the US president meant by this banal comment is not clear. However, given Bush’s political record—assembly-line executions in Texas, Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray, the indefinite imprisonment of US citizens without charges, two preemptive wars—it could be open to the most sinister of interpretations.

There is no doubt that the visit to Auschwitz was choreographed to serve immediate policy objectives: invoking the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps to further an agenda of militarism and domestic repression. Perhaps no greater disservice could be done to the memory of the six million Jews and the millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis.

In a speech delivered in Krakow that same day, Bush declared that the concentration camps “remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed.” He continued: “Having seen the works of evil firsthand on this continent, we must never lose the courage to oppose it everywhere.”

The cause of the Holocaust, Bush suggested, was “evil.” For the US president, the word “evil” serves to cover up a multitude of sins. He has used it repeatedly to describe the Islamic fundamentalist group that carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On numerous occasions he has referred to the leader of Al Qaeda as “the evil one.” This particular expression serves a very immediate political purpose, since it avoids naming Osama bin Laden and thereby calling to mind the longstanding business association between the Bushes and the wealthy bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.

The existence of “evil” constitutes the only explanation given by the Bush administration for the emergence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Such a semi-mystical and religious presentation (which, of course, assumes that the United States government embodies “good”) has the advantage of precluding any consideration of politics or history. In particular, it obscures the role played by US foreign policy—Washington’s alliance with despotic oil-rich regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia, US sponsorship of the Afghan Mujahadeen, the CIA’s covert war against secular nationalist and socialist groups in the Middle East, the unconditional support for Israel against the Palestinians—in creating the social and political conditions in which retrograde tendencies like Al Qaeda could grow.

The use of the word “evil” serves a similar function in the case of the Holocaust. This attempt to obscure the social, political and economic roots of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the horrific crimes that followed is not unique to Bush. The adoption of anti-communism as the core of the post-World War II US ideology made any analysis of the anti-socialist roots of fascism inconvenient. Rather, communism and fascism were equated as “totalitarian” and “evil.”

“Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by the most bestial and monstrous measures,” wrote Leon Trotsky on the eve of his assassination in 1940. “Capitalism obtained an opportunity to resort to fascism only because the proletariat did not accomplish the socialist revolution in time.”

This was not just the opinion of Trotsky. It was widely understood that the Nazis, like Mussolini’s fascist party, had been elevated to power with the backing of big business for the purpose of smashing the socialist workers’ movement and eradicating the threat of revolution. The “final solution” that Hitler’s regime developed against the Jews was bound up with this essential mission.

In his authoritative biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, describing the path taken by the Third Reich to the “final solution,” noted that the war in the East—and ultimately the Holocaust itself—was portrayed in Nazi propaganda as a “crusade against Bolshevism.” Kershaw wrote:

“The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with anti-Semitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.” (Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, New York and London, 2001, p. 389).

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the US occupation authorities found themselves obliged to recognize the culpability of German big business in the crimes carried out by the Nazi regime. Gen. Telford Taylor, one of the principal prosecutors in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, pressed for the conviction of some of the top German industrialists. One of these was Friedrich Flick, the co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen. From 1932 on, he was one of the main financial contributors to the Nazis and the SS.

Taylor declared in his summation to the court: “We are dealing with men so bent on the attainment of power and wealth that all else took second place. I do not know whether or not Flick and his associates hated the Jews; it is quite possible that he never gave the matter much thought until it became a question of practical importance, and not their inner feelings and sentiments.”

He continued: “The defendants were men of wealth; many mines and factories were their private property. They will certainly tell you that they believed in the sanctity of private property, and perhaps they will say that they supported Hitler because German communism threatened that concept. But the factories of Rombach and Riga belonged to someone else.”

So, one might well add, did the oil wells of Iraq.

The description given by General Taylor of the German ruling elite could, with little alteration, be applied to the predatory layer of multi-millionaires that constitutes the principal base of the Bush administration.

GORDON DUFF: YEARS OF DECEIT: US OPENLY ACCEPTS BIN LADEN LONG DEAD
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2009/12/05/years-of-deceit-us-openly-accepts-bin-laden-long-dead
Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry’s claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie.  Now we know that Pappas was correct.  The embarrassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific.  He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn’t nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.
However, since we lost a couple of hundred of our top special operations forces hunting for bin Laden after we knew he was dead, is someone going to answer for this with some jail time?  Since we spent 200 million dollars on “special ops” looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that?  Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that?  Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US?  This is a criminal act if there ever was one.
In 66 pages, General Stanley McChrystal never mentions Osama bin Laden.  Everything is “Mullah Omar”now.  In his talk at West Point, President Obama never mentioned Osama bin Laden.  Col. Pappas makes it clear, Vice President Cheney let it “out of the bag” long ago.  Bin Laden was killed by American troops many many years ago.
America knew Osama bin Laden died December 13, 2001.  After that, his use was hardly one to unite America but rather one to divide, scam and play games.  With bin Laden gone, we could have started legitimate nation building in Afghanistan instead of the eternal insurgency that we invented ourselves.
Without our ill informed policies, we could have had a brought diplomatic solution in 2002 in Afghanistan, the one we are ignoring now, and spent money rebuilding the country, 5 cents on the dollar compared to what we are spending fighting a war against an enemy we ourselves recruited thru ignorance.
The bin Laden scam is one of the most shameful acts ever perpetrated against the American people.  We don’t even know if he really was an enemy, certainly he was never the person that Bush and Cheney said.  In fact, the Bush and bin Laden families were always close friends and had been for many years.
What kind of man was Osama bin Laden?  This one time American ally against Russia, son of a wealthy Saudi family, went to Afghanistan to help them fight for their freedom.  America saw him as a great hero then.  Transcripts of the real bin Laden show him to be much more moderate than we claim, angry at Israel and the US government but showing no anger toward Americans and never making the kind of theats claimed.  All of this is public record for any with the will to learn.
How much of America’s tragedy is tied with these two children of the rich, children of families long joined thru money and friendship, the Bush and bin Laden clans.
One son died in remote mountains, another lives in a Dallas suburb hoping nobody is sent after him.  One is a combat veteran, one never took a strong stand unless done from safety and comfort.  Islam once saw bin Laden as a great leader.  Now he is mostly forgotten.
What has America decided about Bush?
We know this:  Bin Laden always denied any ties to 9/11 and, in fact, has never been charged in relation to 9/11.  He not only denied involvement, but had done so, while alive, 4 times and had vigorously condemned those who were involved in the attack.
This is on the public record, public in every free country except ours.  We, instead, showed films made by paid actors, made up to look somewhat similar to bin Laden, actors who contradicted bin Ladens very public statements, actors pretending to be bin Laden long after bin Laden’s death.
These were done to help justify spending, repressive laws, torture and simple thievery.

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• Obama To Announce That Bin Laden is Dead (macleans.ca)
• Years of Deceit: United States Openly Admits Bin Laden Long Dead (tipggita32.wordpress.com)