- Where's George Orwell when we need him? Because we Americans
need him. We desperately need him. Consider: in August 2001, immediately
after reading a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US",
President George Bush went bass fishing - and never called a meeting to
discuss the issue.
-
- A month later, on September 11, when he was told that
the terrorists had attacked, Bush spent the next seven minutes reading
a children's book, The Pet Goat, with a group of schoolchildren.
-
- And when it comes to his own military service, recent
revelations show that Bush got out of fighting in Vietnam thanks to his
dad's political clout. Even then, Bush didn't fulfil his obligations to
the National Guard.
-
- Yet somehow the Bush-Cheney ticket is convincing Americans
that only a Republican administration can handle national security. If
John Kerry wins, Dick Cheney warned: "The danger is that we'll get
hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating." The
choice is simple: Vote Republican, or die. And voters are buying it.
-
- A poll just after the Republican convention showed that
27% of the voters preferred Bush to Kerry when it came to national security.
Increasingly, it is becoming clear that if Bush wins in November it will
be because of the fear factor.
-
- Yet the truth is that Bush is actually soft on terror.
When it comes to going after the men who were behind 9/11 and who continue
to wage a jihad against the US, Bush has repeatedly turned a blind eye
to the forces behind terrorism, shielded the people who funded al-Qaida,
obstructed investigations and diverted resources from the battle against
it.
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- One key reason is the Bush-Saudi relationship, the like
of which is unprecedented in US politics. Even after the success of Michael
Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the subject is largely taboo in the American media.
Never before has a president of the US - much less two from the same family
- had such close ties with another foreign power.
-
- Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a powerful
member of the royal family, has been a close friend of George Bush Snr
for more than 20 years. Nicknamed Bandar Bush, he drops by the Bush residences
in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Crawford, Texas, not to mention the White
House. He and Bush senior go on hunting trips together.
-
- Then there's the money. More than $1.4bn of financial
transactions have gone from the House of Saud to corporations and institutions
tied to the Bushes and their allies - largely to companies such as the
Carlyle Group, Halliburton, and HarkenEnergy. So what does all that influence
buy the Saudis?
-
- Let's go to the White House on September 13 2001. Just
48 hours after 9/11, the toxic rubble at the World Trade Centre site was
still ablaze. The estimated death count, later lowered significantly, was
thought to be as high as 40,000.
-
- On that afternoon, Bandar met on the Truman balcony with
President Bush and the two men lit up Cohiba cigars. At the time, the White
House knew that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. It knew that Osama
bin Laden was Saudi. And, as the 9/11 commission concluded, it knew that
Saudi Arabia was "the primary source of money for al-Qaida",
which was largely funded by wealthy Saudis via Islamist charities.
-
- President Bush was in the presence of the ambassador
from the country that is the guardian of Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist
sect which helped produce al-Qaida. This is where the war on terror and
a massive investigation into the greatest crime in US history should have
begun.
-
- But, given the intimate relationship between the two
families - and, of course, the fact that the Saudis help fuel America's
165m automobiles - this was not just a meeting between the president of
the US and the ambassador of a country that harboured and financed terrorists.
The Saudis were special.
-
- Because Bush and Bandar were the only two people present,
we do not know exactly what was said. But we do know that the president
failed to join the issue of the Saudi role in terror or how to stop the
funding of terrorism through Islamist charities and financial institutions.
-
- That same afternoon, the first of 11 chartered planes
began to pick up more than 140 Saudis scattered throughout the US. Saudi
Arabia and the president's defenders have mounted a massive PR campaign
to minimise the damage of the Saudi evacuation. But the facts in the 9/11
commission report remain unchanged. The Saudi evacuation flights were not
the fantasies of conspiratorialists. They actually took place. The departures
were approved by the White House and the vast majority of Saudi passengers
were not interviewed by the FBI.
-
- This was the biggest crime in US history. But, in the
midst of a grave national security crisis, rather than investigating it
the White House and the FBI spent their limited resources helping evacuate
the Saudis.
-
- Over the next two years, the 9/11 commission found, the
Bush administration failed "to develop a strategy to counter Saudi
terrorist financing". As a result, our Saudi allies were half-hearted
in cooperating on terrorist financing and, the commission concluded: "the
US government still has not determined with any precision how much al-Qaida
raises or from whom, or how it spends its money."
-
- Now, thanks to Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI,
Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America's War on Terror, a new book by
Senator Bob Graham, we know that the Saudis may have played an even bigger
role in 9/11 than previously reported. As a member of the Senate intelligence
committee, Graham said he learned that "evidence of official Saudi
support" for at least two of the 19 hijackers was "incontrovertible".
-
- As co-chairman of the joint House-Senate panel investigating
9/11, Graham found his efforts to get to the bottom of the Saudi role in
9/11 again and again were quashed by the Bush administration. When his
committee tried to subpoena a key witness who happened to be an FBI informant,
the FBI refused to cooperate. "It was the only time in my senatorial
experience that the FBI has refused to deliver a congressional subpoena,"
Graham told Salon.com in a recent interview. "The FBI wasn't acting
on its own," he added, "but had been directed by the White House
not to cooperate."
-
- In the end, 27 pages of the report on the role of the
Saudis in 9/11 were classified by the White House and not released to the
public. According to Graham, the Bush administration may have censored
the material because it did not want the public to be aware of Saudi support
for the 9/11 terrorists. "There has been a long-term special relationship
between the US and Saudi Arabia," he said, "and that relationship
has probably reached a new high under the George W Bush administration,
in part because of the long and close family relationship that the Bushes
have had with the Saudi royal family."
-
- Graham writes: "It was as if the president's loyalty
lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."
-
- If that is the case, no wonder the Bush-Cheney ticket
is counting on fear.
-
- - Craig Unger is the author of House of Bush, House of
Saud
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story
/0,14259,1302339,00.html
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