[iwar] [fc:Osama.Bin.Laden's.Bush.Family.Business.Connections]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-12-29 18:50:13
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:And.the.Password.Is.......Waterloo]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:DNS.'hack'.fells.The.Reg]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200112300250.fBU2oDs19572@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 18:50:13 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Osama.Bin.Laden's.Bush.Family.Business.Connections]
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

An interesting article.  Reliability and accuracy are unknown. jwc
Osama Bin Laden's Bush Family Business Connections 

Š2001, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications. All Rights Reserved. 
May be reprinted and distributed for non-profit purposes only] - From the September 
18, issue of From The Wilderness. 

Money connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden go way back and the 
political and economic connections have remained unbroken for 20 years. And what 
appears to be a "new" alliance with Pakistan is merely a new manifestation of a decades-long 
partnership in the heroin trade. Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage 
since the tragic events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State 
Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward 
for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. That, in effect, made 
the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial benefactor according to syndicated columnist 
Robert Scheer writing in The Los Angeles times on May 22. But - as we described in 
FTW's March 2001 issue - the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the 
single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that 
the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift? 

Critics of the Gulf War well recall how, just prior to Sadam's invasion of Kuwait, 
President Bush (Sr.) dispatched Ambassador April Glaspie to visit Sadam with a letter 
and a "wink and a nod" telling the Iraqi leader that it was OK to invade his smaller 
neighbor. The May gift from Uncle Sam could well have been sending the same kind 
of message, along with necessary funds to complete the attacks. Drugs and terrorism 
go hand in hand. 

Until February, Afghanistan had been the world's largest producer of opium/heroin, 
claiming close to 70% of the world's total production. That opium, consumed largely 
in Western Europe and smuggled through the Balkans, was a direct source of cash deposits 
in Western financial institutions and markets. I specifically commented on this at 
an economic crisis conference in Moscow, Russia on March 7. In my formal statement 
to the Russian conference I said, "Just before coming to this conference I read in 
the Associated Press, Agence France Press and other reliable sources that the Taliban 
has recently eradicated most of its 3,000 ton opium crop in Afghanistan. If true, 
I view this as a form of economic warfare against Russia [and the U.S.] because it 
would drive opium production more into Southeast Asia and Colombia. However, I now 
suspect that this will result in a shift of opium production to the Caucasus under 
the Kurds which will see an increase in smuggling through Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. 
I should note that both Vice President Richard Cheney and the designated Deputy Secretary 
of State Richard Armitage are members of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Such 
a move would have the effect of drastically shortening smuggling routes and costs 
into Western Europe and of bypassing unstable areas of the Balkans. 

I have received additional reports that Uzbekistan is now awash in the opium poppy 
and, as in the US with the CIA, that Russian military and intelligence agencies facilitate 
the trade as a means of protecting access to hard currency. The point here is not 
that the US it totally evil or the only country doing these things. But the US is 
far and away the most advanced nation when it comes to the use of such methods to 
achieve superiority. As [Russian economist Michael] Khazin has noted, the US and 
Britain and Germany started the conflict in Kosovo in 1999 to stave off a collapse 
of western markets following the Asian collapse of 1997-8. Now Colombia is a last-ditch 
effort to protect the US markets and European opposition is jeopardizing that plan." 


The Taliban's actions this year severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from 
its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely 
expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars 
in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian 
financial institutions connected to them. 

Now as US military action will replace the Taliban government and fresh crops will 
be planted in Afghanistan, the slack in cash flow will assuredly be replaced by dramatically 
increased opium production in Colombia; the revenues from that effort being needed 
to maintain the revenue streams into Wall Street. Prior to the WTC attacks, credible 
sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed 
the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 
billion a year. 

In that context, the real history of Osama bin Laden, as America's useful terrorist-du-jour 
reveals a long and continuous history, interwoven with the drug trade and the Bush 
family, of supporting conflicts that have benefited U.S. military and economic interests 
of bin Laden . 

There are direct historical links between Osama bin Laden's business interests and 
those of the Bush family. On September 15 I received the following message from FTW 
subscriber, Professor John Metzger of Michigan State University: 


  "We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary Palestinian 
terrorist known as Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to American and Pakistan intelligence. 
Its clients included the Afghan rebels, and the father of Osama bin Laden. The father 
of bin Laden named Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative 
in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in 1976. By 1977, 
Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business, Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin 
Laden would soon become a CIA asset. George W. Bush's FBI director Robert Mueller 
was part of the Justice Department's questionable investigation of BCCI. (On BCCI, 
the bin Ladens, and the Bushes, see the books, The Outlaw Bank, A Full Service Bank, 
and Fortunate Son)." Further details of the business and financial relationships 
between the Bush and bin Laden family are found in Peter Brewton's 1992 book The 
Mafia, CIA and George Bush. BCCI, incidentally, was founded by a Pakistani." 
Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has just completed 
a detailed history of bin Laden's career detailing his secret funding and logistical 
support to terrorist organizations beginning from his early CIA-supported roots in 
the 1980s as a "freedom fighter" through to the present day. Chossudovsky's compelling 
and well documented article, Who Is Osama Bin Laden? dated Sept 12, 2001 can be found 
on the Internet. 

Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts but as a 
trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin 
Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. 
ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya. 

As FTW described in 1998, and as confirmed by Chossudovsky, the key to understanding 
U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always been controlled by a cutout, 
the Pakistani government and its intelligence service the ISI. In this manner there 
has been virtually no direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served 
the dual purpose of maintaining his apparent "purity" with his followers and providing 
plausible deniability for the CIA. The whole underlying pretext for this relationship 
evaporated with the Taliban's destruction of the opium crop in February. 

Chossudovsky writes: "The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately 
related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production 
in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no 
local production of heroin. In this regard [Professor] Alfred McCoy's study confirms 
that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, 'the 
Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 
60 per sent of the U.S. demand.... 

"With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has 
unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 
- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics 
- reached a record high of 4,600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the 
former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control 
over the heroin routes. "The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not 
dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic 
"jihad" out of Pakistan..." "... The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used 
to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and he 
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In the last few months there is evidence that Mujhideen 
mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of the KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults 
into Macedonia... "... With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev 
and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan 
and Pakistan... In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI and its radical 
Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war. "Russia's main pipeline 
route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation 
of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American 
oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors 
out of the Caspian Sea basin." The oil and drug connections were the subject of FTW's 
story, The Bush-Cheney drug Empire in October, 2000. That story is online. 

Both Bush and Cheney are oil men.George Bush, Sr. was Vice President and, by virtue 
of executive Order 12333, in charge of all U.S. intelligence and narcotics operations 
from 1981 through 1989. As President from 1989 through 1993, he continued and expanded 
his control in these areas. Thus, it was Bush (the elder) who directly nourished 
and nurtured bin Laden's evolution. 

Dramatic Confirmation From Indian Government 

The web site of the Indian Embassy in Washington contains dramatic confirmation 
for these positions. On September 4, 2000, B. Raman, Director of India's Institute 
for Topical Studies wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress entitled Pakistan's 
Noriega's. That eight-page article exposed the depth of Pakistani government involvement 
in the drug trade. It may be viewed at: www.indianembassy.org/int_media/saag_september_04_2000.html 
<a href="http://www.indianembassy.org/int_media/saag_september_04_2000.html">http://www.indianembassy.org/int_media/saag_september_04_2000.html> 


The letter said, in part: "For more than a decade, the people of India have been 
living in a state of half-war and half-peace due to the depredations of a large number 
of terrorists, outrageously called jehadists, who have been trained, armed and funded 
and infiltrated into the State of Jammu &amp; Kashmir and other parts of India by 
Pakistan in order to make the people of India and its security forces bleed in the 
name of religion. 

"More people belonging to different religions - Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, 
Buddhists and others - have been killed in India by these mercenary-terrorists sponsored 
by the State of Pakistan than by any other terrorist groups anywhere else in the 
world..." "...Many other States have suffered and have been suffering due to the 
depredations of terrorists, made in and exported from Pakistan and the Taliban-controlled 
Afghanistan - [these include] Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Central Asian Republics, 
the Chechnya and Dagestan areas of Russia, the Xinjiang province of China, Bangladesh, 
the Arakan area of Burma and the southern Philippines..." 

"After his [1993] removal, [as official head of Pakistani intelligence, trusted 
advisor to Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf] Lt. Gen. Nasir traveled to Somalia, 
Chechnya, Dagestan, the Central Asian Republics, ...China, and the Southern Philippines 
as a preacher... and helped Islamic organizations, including the group which killed 
U.S. troops... in Somalia." "...It was he, who, during his tenure as the DG Director 
General] of the ISI... has entered into an agreement with the LTTE of Sri Lanka [which 
secured] LTTE's assistance in smuggling Afghanistan produced heroin in its ships 
to West Europe, the USA and Canada..." "...Another reason for the ISI's helping the 
LTTE, despite its anti-Muslim policies, was to use it for smuggling heroin to West 
Europe, the U.S. and Canada. During Zia-ul-Haq's regime in the 1980s, heroin had 
become a major source of extra revenue not only for the State of Pakistan, specially 
the ISI and Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment, but also to many senior 
officers of the Pakistan Army, including [Musharraf et al]..." "The way Mr. Sharif 
before October 1999 and Gen. Musharraf since then have been using the heroin money 
to prevent the Pakistani economy from collapsing has not received due attention in 
the U.S. ..." "If one goes purely by economic indicators, Pakistan's must be in as 
bad a shape as that of Russia, or even worse, since Russia has been in receipt of, 
Western and IMF assistance..." "Where does the money come from? 

From the smuggling of heroin to West Europe, the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. Government 
might have stopped economic assistance... from the taxpayers' money. But why should 
the Noriegas of Pakistan be worried when they get billions of dollars from the heroin 
sale in the U.S.?... " Vice President Dick Cheney's recent comment that the CIA needs 
to get in bed with "unsavory characters" is a joke. That's a bed that the CIA has 
never left. And it's a marriage vow that President Bush has just reaffirmed for all 
the world to see. 

Messages to Mario Profaca may be published at Mario's Cyberspace Station and/or 
forwarded to its associated Spy News list. 

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Tiny Wireless Camera under $80!
Order Now! FREE VCR Commander!
Click Here - Only 1 Day Left!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/WoOlbB/7.PDAA/ySSFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:And.the.Password.Is.......Waterloo]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:DNS.'hack'.fells.The.Reg]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 21:00:00 PST