7 Questions for George of Arabia

excerpted from the book

Dude, where's my country?

by Michael Moore

Warner Books, 2003, hardcover

pxi
Taking advantage of our grief, and our fear that "it" may happen again, an appointed president uses the dead of 9/11 as a convenient cover, a justification, for permanently altering our American way of life. Is that why they died, so that George W. Bush can turn the country into Texas?

p2
The questions I have about September 11 are not about how the terrorists got past our defense system, or how they were able to live in this country and never be detected, or how all Bulgarians who worked at the WTC got a secret communiqué to not show up to work that day, or how the towers came down so easily when they were supposedly built to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis, and truck bombs in their parking garage.

These were all questions that a special commission investigating September 11 was supposed to answer. But the very formation of that commission was opposed by the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress. Reluctantly, they finally agreed-but then they sought to block the investigative body from doing its job by stonewalling them on the evidence that they sought.

Why wouldn't the Bush people want to find out the truth? What were they afraid of? That the American people would learn that they screwed up, that they were asleep at the wheel when it came to terrorist threats, that they belligerently ignored the warnings of the outgoing Clinton officials about Osama bin Laden, simply because they hated Clinton ...

p3
So why, after this monumental breakdown of national security, does George W. Bush not come clean, or, at the very least, stop prohibiting the truth from coming out?

Perhaps it's because George & Co. have a lot more to hide beyond why they didn't scramble the fighter jets fast enough on the morning of September 11. And maybe we, the people, are afraid to know the whole truth because it could take us down roads where we don't want to go, roads that end with a sinking feeling because now we know too much about the people who run this <t

Though I myself was filled with the healthy skepticism that is required for a citizen in a democracy, I also shared the basic mind-set held by most Americans in the fall of 2001: Osama did it, and whoever helped him with it must be tracked down and brought to justice. I hoped that this was what Bush was doing.

And then one night in November 2001, as I lay in bed, half asleep reading The New Yorker magazine, in an article by investigative journalist Jane Mayer, I stumbled across a paragraph that made me sit up and read it again, because I couldn't believe what it said. It read:

Around two dozen other American-based members of the bin Laden family, most of them here to study in colleges and prep schools, were said to be in the United States at the time of the attacks. The New York Times reported that they were quickly called together by officials from the Saudi Embassy, which feared that they might become the victims of American reprisals. With approval from the FBI, according to a Saudi official, the bin Ladens flew by private jet from Los Angeles to Orlando, then on to Washington, and finally to Boston. Once the FAA permitted overseas flights, the jet flew to Europe. United States officials apparently needed little persuasion from the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that the extended bin Laden family included no material witnesses.

What? How had I missed this story in the news? I got up and went back through The New York Times, and there I found this headline: "Fearing Harm, Bin Laden Kin Fled From U.S." The story began:

In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States . . .

So, with the approval of the FBI and the help of the Saudi government-and even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudi citizens-the relatives of the number one suspect in the terror attacks were allowed not only to just up and leave the country, but they were assisted by our own authorities!

p7
Most Americans might be surprised to learn that you and your father have known the bin Ladens for a long time. What exactly is the extent of this relationship, Mr. Bush? Are you close personal friends, or simply on-again, off-again business associates? Salem bin Laden first started coming to Texas in 1973 and later bought some land, built himself a house, and created Bin Laden Aviation at the San Antonio airfield.

The bin Ladens are one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction firm virtually built the country, from the roads and power plants, to the skyscrapers and government buildings. They built some of the airstrips America used in your dad's Gulf War, and they renovated the holy sites at Mecca and Medina. Billionaires many times over, they soon began investing in other ventures around the world, including in the United States. They have extensive business dealings with Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the Fremont Group- a spin-off of energy giant Bechtel. According to The New Yorker, the bin Laden family also owns a part of Microsoft and the airline and defense giant Boeing. They have donated $2 million to your alma mater, Harvard University, $300,000 more to Tufts University, and tens of thousands more to the Middle East Policy Council, a think tank headed by a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman. In addition to the property they own in Texas, they also have real estate in Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep in our pants.

p8
After leaving office, your father became a highly paid consultant for a company known as the Carlyle Group. One of the investors in the Carlyle Group was none other than the bin Laden family. The bin Ladens put a minimum of $2 million into the Carlyle Group...

The Carlyle Group is one of the nation's largest defense contractors, among their many other lines of work. They don't actually build weapons themselves. Rather, they buy up failing defense companies, turn them around by making them profitable, and then sell them for huge sums of money.

The people who run the Carlyle Group are a Who's Who of past movers and shakers, everyone from Ronald Reagan's defense secretary, Frank Carlucci, to your dad's secretary of state, James Baker, to former British Prime Minister John Major. Carlucci, the head of Carlyle, also happens to sit on the board of directors of the Middle East Policy Council along with a representative of the bin Laden family business.

After September 11, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal both ran stories pointing out this strange coincidence. Your first response, Mr. Bush, was to ignore it, hoping, I guess, that the story would just go away. Your father and his buddies at Carlyle did not renounce the bin Laden investment. Your army of pundits went into spin control. They said, we can't paint these bin Ladens with the same brush we use for Osama. They have disowned Osama! They have nothing to do with him! They hate and despise what he has done! These are the good bin Ladens.

And then the video footage came out. It showed a number of those "good" bin Ladens-including Osama's mother, a sister and two brothers-with Osama at his son's wedding just six and a half months before September 11. It has been reported in The New Yorker that not only has the family not cut ties to Osama, but they have continued to fund him as they have been doing for years. It was no secret to the CIA that Osama bin Laden had access to his family fortune (his share is estimated to be at least $30 million), and the bin Ladens, as well as other Saudis, kept Osama and his group, al Queda, well-funded.

p10
Mr. Bush, what is going on here?

You've gotten a free ride from the media, though they know everything I have just written to be the truth (and, in fact, I have taken it from the very same mainstream news sources they work for). They seem unwilling or afraid to ask you a simple question: WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

In case you don't understand just how bizarre the media's silence is regarding the Bush-bin Laden connections, let me draw an analogy to how the press or Congress may have handled something like this if the same shoe had been on the Clinton foot. If, after the terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was revealed that President Bill Clinton and his family had financial dealings with Timothy McVeigh's family, what do you think your Republican Party and the media would have done with that one? Do you think at least a couple of questions might have been asked, like, "What is THAT all about?" Be honest, you know the answer. They would have asked more than a couple of questions. They would have skinned Clinton alive and thrown what was left of his carcass in Gitmo.

So, what is this all about, Mr. Bush? We have a right to know.

p13
To be fair, Mr. Bush, it's not just your family members who are the recipients of the Saudis' largesse. A major chunk of the American economy is built on Saudi money. They have a trillion dollars invested in our stock market and another trillion dollars sitting in our banks. If one day they chose to suddenly remove that money, our corporations and financial institutions would be sent into a tailspin, causing an economic crisis the likes of which has never been seen. That threat looms every day over our heads, and it is something no one ever wants to talk about. Couple that with the fact that the one and a half million barrels of oil we need daily from the Saudis also could vanish on a mere royal whim, and we begin to see how not only you, but all of us, are dependent on the House of Saud...

Here's what I don't get: Why have you and your father chosen to align yourselves with a country that is considered by most human rights groups to be among the worst and most brutal dictatorships in the world?

Amnesty International had this to say in its 2003 report on Saudi Arabia:

Gross human rights violations continued and were exacerbated by the government policy of "combating terrorism" in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA. The violations were perpetuated by the strictly secretive criminal justice system and the prohibition of political parties, trade unions and independent human rights organizations. Hundreds of suspected religious activists and critics of the state were arrested, and the legal status of most of those held from previous years remained shrouded in secrecy. Women continued to suffer severe discrimination. Torture and ill-treatment remained rife.

p20
Yet, members of the bin Laden family were allowed to fly in private jets, crisscrossing America as they prepared to leave the country-can you explain that to me?

Private jets, under the supervision of the Saudi government- and with your approval-were allowed to fly around the skies of America and pick up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and take them first to a "secret assembly point in Texas." They then flew to Washington, D.C., and then on to Boston. Finally, on September 18, they were all flown to Paris, out of the reach of any U.S. officials. They never went through any serious interrogation, other than a few questions that the FBI asked them and a request to check each of their passports before leaving. One FBI agent I spoke to told me that the FBI was "furious" that they were not allowed to keep the bin Ladens in the country to conduct a real investigation-the kind police like to do when they are trying to track down a murderer. Usually, the police like to talk to the family members of the suspect to learn what they know, who they know, how they might help capture the fugitive.

None of the normal procedures were followed.

This is mind-boggling. Here you have two dozen bin Ladens on American soil, Mr. Bush, and you come up with some lame excuse that you were worried about "their safety." Might it have been possible that at least one of the twenty-four bin Ladens would have possibly known something? Or maybe just one of them could have been "convinced" to help track Osama down?

Nope. None of that. So while thousands were stranded and could not fly, if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass murderer in U.S. history, you got a free tip to gay Paree!

p21
A frightened nation struggled to get through those days after September 11. Yet, in the sky above us, the bin Ladens and Saudi royals jetted home.

p22
Mr. Bush, in the days after September 11, the FBI began running a check to see if any of the 186 "suspects" the feds had rounded up in the first five days after the attack had purchased any guns in the months leading up to September 11. Using the instant background check files for gun purchases created under the Brady Bill, the FBI immediately found two of the suspects had indeed purchased weapons.

When your attorney general, John Ashcroft, heard about this, he immediately shut the search down. He told the FBI that the background check files could not be used for such a search and these files were only to be used at the time of a purchase of a gun, not to find out information on law-abiding gun-toting citizens.

So, the FBI was prohibited by Ashcroft from doing any further investigation as to whether those detained-because they were possible associates of the hijackers-had procured any weapons in the ninety days leading up to that fateful day. Why? Because even though all their other rights had been thrown out the window, your administration insisted that they still had one constitutional right that you were willing to protect: their sacred Second Amendment rights to bear arms and for the government not to know about it.

Mr. Bush, you can't be serious! Is your administration so gun nutty and in the pocket of the National Rifle Association that, even though you have not given a nanosecond of thought to protecting the rights of any of the Arab-Americans you have arrested, detained, and harassed in the past two years, when it comes to their GUN rights, then all of a sudden you are the biggest defender of constitutional rights and civil liberties that the nation has ever seen?

Do you realize that when most Americans figure out you have protected potential terrorists by stymying a legitimate police investigation, they are going to run you and Dick and Reverend John out of Dodge with their own six-shooters of ballot boxes a-blazing?

I guess none of this should come as a surprise, considering what Mr. Ashcroft was up to in the summer of 2001. Instead of protecting the country from events like the one that was about to take place, the attorney general was busy trying to dismantle the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. He said that the government should not be keeping a database on gun owners and wanted the law changed so that the files were kept for only twenty-four hours!

The Senate (and the public) did not find out about Ashcroft's orders to stop the search for the terrorists' gun files until December 2001, when Ashcroft not only proudly admitted to doing this in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but went on to attack anyone who would question his actions to protect the hijackers' gun rights. He told the panel that critics of his anti-terror practices were "providing ammunition to America's enemies.... To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of 'lost liberty,' my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists."

But who was the one aiding the terrorists, Mr. Bush? An attorney general who won't let the FBI do its job? An attorney general who won't let the police thoroughly investigate what the terrorists were up to, including the purchasing of weapons?

p27
The Taliban, as you know, were invited to come to Texas while you were governor of the state. According to the BBC, the Taliban went there to meet with Unocal, the huge oil and energy giant, to discuss Unocal's desire to build a natural gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and into Pakistan.

Mr. Bush, what was this all about?

According to London's Telegraph Online, your oil company friends rolled out the red carpet for some of the world's most notorious, murderous thugs and showed them a real good, down-home, Texas time.

First, the Taliban leaders spent a few days in Sugarland, Texas, enjoying the pleasures of Western extravagance. The oilmen put the brutal bastards up in a five-star hotel, took them to the zoo and, of course, to the NASA space center.

"Houston, we have a problem" apparently never crossed your mind, even though the Taliban were perhaps the most repressive fundamentalist regime on the planet. If the reverse had happened and they were hosting you in Kabul, the entertainment would have been the hanging of women who didn't keep themselves covered from head to toe. Now, that would have been some barbecue, huh?

p29
[Dick] Cheney was then the CEO of the giant oil services company, Halliburton. When not building jails in Guantanamo Bay, ignoring massive human rights violations in order to do business with Burma, and working deals with Libya, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq (which Halliburton did happily in the nineties), Halliburton built (and still builds) oil and gas pipelines. In 1998, your future co-president, Mr. Cheney, had this to say about the situation in that part of the world: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." And in a talk to the Cato Institute the same year, he revealed this information about Halliburton: "About 70 to 75 percent of our business is energy related, serving customers like Unocal, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and many other major oil companies around the world. As a result, we oftentimes find ourselves operating in some very difficult places. The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Dude, where's my country?

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