On the morning of 11 September, while CNN was broadcasting the first images of one of the towers of the WTC on fire, while we still didn't know if we were looking at an accident or an attack, the commentators of the all-info channel began to evoke the possibility of Osama bin Laden's responsibility. As time went on, this hypothesis began to impose itself as the only humanly acceptable explanation. Such barbarous attacks could only be the act of a monster, radically estranged from the civilized world, filled with an irrational hatred towards the West, whose hands were covered with blood. This demented soul had already been identified: it was US Public Enemy Number One, Osama bin Laden. The rumor was originally helped along by leaks to the press by "generally well-informed sources" or "sources close to the investigation." It became official when Colin Powell publicly named bin Laden as a "suspect." It then became dogma when President Bush named bin Laden as the guilty party. On this day, this accusation wasn't publicly backed up [[with evidence]]. But American authorities considered themselves excused from doing so by showing a video of bin Laden which, in their eyes, was tantamount to a confession.
Osama bin Laden [Numerous sources recount bin Laden's biography. Most of them smack more of propaganda or sensationalism than of rigorous investigation. The best-selling works, such as Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky (Prima Publishing, 1996) (Bodansky, by the way, is a Congressional consultant) or Au nom d'Oussama ben Laden ("In The Name of Osama Bin Laden"), by Roland Jacquard (Jean Picollec Press, 2001), are based on unpublished intelligence-service reports, thus on unverifiable sources. Some more serious works include those of the PBS magazine Frontline, notably Hunting Bin Laden (2001) and Inside the Terror Network (2002). See transcripts at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows.] is one of the 54 children of Sheikh Muhammad bin Laden, who founded the Saudi Binladen Group (SBG) in 1931. This holding, Saudi Arabia's most important, has half of its turnover in construction and public works, and the other half in engineering, real estate, distribution, telecommunications and publishing. It formed a Swiss investment society, called SICO (Saudi Investment Company), which created several societies with subsidiaries of the Saudi National Commercial Bank. The SBG holds important participations in General Electric, Nortel Networks, and Cadbury Schweppes. Its industrial activities are represented in the USA by Adnan Khashoggi (Mohammed Al-Fayed's former brother-in-law), while its financial holdings are managed by the Carlyle Group. Up until 1996, the [[montages]] of the SBG's subsidiaries were prepared in Lausanne by its advisor, the Nazi banker François Genoud, executor of Dr Goebbels' will and patron of terrorist Carlos [[the Jackal]]. The SBG is inseparable from the Wahhabite regime, to the point where it was the sole official construction and management contractor for the Kingdom's holy places, Makkah and Madinah. Likewise, it got most of the BTP contracts for building US military bases in Saudi Arabia, and for the reconstruction of Kuwait after the Gulf War. After the accidental death of Sheikh Muhammad bin Laden in 1968, he was succeeded by his eldest son Salem. Salem, for his part, also died in an "accidental" plane crash on the way to Texas in 1988. From then on, the SBG has been directed by the founder's second son, Bakr.
Born in 1957, Osama got his degree in management and economics from King Abdul Aziz University. He could pass for a sensible businessman. In December 1979, he was solicited by his tutor, Prince Turki al-Faysal as-Saud (director of the Saudi secret service from 1977 to Aug. 2001), to manage the financial aspects of the CIA's secret operations in Afghanistan. Over the course of ten years, the CIA invested $2 billion in Afghanistan to thwart the USSR, engaging in its most costly operations ever. The Saudi and American secret services recruited Islamists, trained them, armed them, and put them into a Jihad (holy war) to fight and defeat the Soviets in their stead. [See Les dollars de la terreur, les Etats-unis et les islamistes by Richard Labérivière (Grasset, 1999), and Jihad, expansion et déclin de l'islamisme (Editions Gallimard, 2000).] Osama bin Laden organized the needs of this heterogeneous world into a database called Al-Qaeda (literally "the base" of data).
After the defeat of the USSR, the USA became so disinterested in Afghanistan's fate that they left it to the hands of warlords and to mujahedeen whom they had hired from all over the Arab/Muslim world to fight against the Red Army. Osama bin Laden stopped working for the CIA and took these fighters under his own control. In 1990, he proposed to the Saudi monarchy to put his men at their service to eject the apostate Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and he did not appreciate seeing that they preferred the coalition led by President Bush père, Dick Cheney (Secretary of Defense at that time), and Colin Powell (at that time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
Soon the Islamists split into two camps, according to whether they were allies or enemies of the American-Saudi pact. Bin Laden was in the group led by Sudani leader Hassan at-Tourabi, as was Yasser Arafat as well. They participated together in Arab and Islamic conferences in Khartoum.
In 1992, the US embarked on a mission in Somalia, with a UN mandate to "Restore Hope." Some Afghan veterans took potshots at American GIs over there. They took part in an operation during the course of which 18 American soldiers were killed. Osama bin Laden was held responsible for the clash. The US Army hit the road. In the collective imagination, bin Laden had just defeated the Americans after already having whipped the Soviets.
Osama bin Laden was thus stripped of his Saudi citizenship and set himself up in Sudan. Breaking off relations with his family, he received his inheritance, estimated at $300 million. [On Osama bin Laden's financial investments, see Ben Laden, la vérité interdite ("Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth") by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié (Editions Denoël, 2001).] He invested this sum in creating several banks, agroalimentary societies, and local distribution societies. First with the support of Col. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, then of Hassan at-Tourabi, he developed various companies in Sudan, building an airfield, highways, installing a pipeline, and controlling most of the production of gum arabic. Despite these investments, he was expelled from Sudan in 1996, under pressure from Egypt, who accused him of having fomented a plot to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak. So he went back to Afghanistan.
In June 1996, 19 American soldiers were killed in an attack on a military base in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. The US accused Osama bin Laden of having led the attack. In response, he called for jihad against the USA and Israel in his famous fatwa entitled "Expel the Polytheists from the Arabian Peninsula." In this announcement, he used the same argument he had used with the CIA in Afghanistan: it had become every Muslim's duty to liberate Islam's occupied territories. Except it's difficult to compare the bloody Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with the contract-driven presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia. The billionaire's exhortations not having resonated with the Muslim populations as had been hoped, in 1998, he created, along with the Egyptian leader Ayman az-Zawahiri, the International Islamic Front Against Jews and Christians.
On 7 August 1998, attacks devastated the US embassies in Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 298 and wounding more than 4500. The US accused Osama bin Laden of having led the attack. President Clinton fired 75 cruise missiles at camps in Jalalabad and Khost (Afghanistan) and at the Al-Shifa laboratory complex in Sudan. The FBI judged bin Laden guilty and put a $5 million price on his head. All his financial assets were frozen.
On 12 October 2000, a bomb in a motor launch damaged the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden (Yemen), killing 17 sailors and wounding 39 others. The US accused Osama bin Laden of having led the attack.
On 8 May 2001, Donald Rumsfeld revealed that US Public Enemy Number One had at his disposal not only bacteriological and chemical weapons, but was also on the point of putting together an atomic bomb and putting a satellite into orbit.
Interviewed by the PBS magazine "Frontline," Milton Bearden, former CIA COS in Sudan during the 1980s and one of the primary leaders of secret operations in Afghanistan, expressed his skepticism: "To simplify matters to the extreme and to establish a link between him [bin Laden] and every terrorist act of the past decade is an insult to most Americans' [intelligence]. And it definitely doesn't encourage our allies to take us too seriously on this subject." Milton Bearden, who got back his freedom of speech when he retired in 1994, went on: "There's a whole lot of fiction in all this. It's all the mythology surrounding bin Laden. It's part of the spectacle. We don't have an enemy hostile nation. We haven't had an enemy hostile nation since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. And I think we love it. We love all this pretty bizarre international terrorism at a point in time where real terrorism is undergoing a dramatic change in character." [[My translation of Meyssan's translation of Bearden's remarks.]]
Be that as it may, "the show must go on." [[In English in the original.]] The USA accused bin Laden of having led the 11 September attacks. In the face of skepticism, Gen. Colin Powell appeared as a guest on NBC's "Meet the Press" and said: "We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack." [See http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5012.htm.] Announced several times, this document has still never been published.
On 4 October, British PM Tony Blair presented a report to the EU, entitled Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States. For every argument, one can read that: "No organization possesses simultaneously both the motivation and the capacity to carry out attacks such as those of 11 September, other than Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network." [[My translation of Meyssan's translation of Blair's comments.]] On the same day, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Riaz Muhammad Khan, declared that the "proofs" which the American government had sent to his government "constituted a sufficient base to bring [bin Laden] to justice." These "proofs" were classified Top Secret and have never been made public.
On 7 October, the US and British ambassadors to the UN informed the UN of the military actions which their governments had commenced in Afghanistan [Letter from Ambassador Negroponte to President of Security Council, document UN S/2001/946. See also Ambassador Eldon's letter, UN S/2001/947.]. John Negroponte (USA) wrote: "My government has obtained clear and indisputable information that the Al-Qaeda organization, which is supported by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, played a central role in the attacks." These "clear and indisputable" facts have never been given to the Security Council.
On 10 November, the Sunday Telegraph revealed the existence of a videotape (mailed on 20 October) in which Osama bin Laden had claimed responsibility for the attacks: "The twin towers were legitimate targets. They constitute a pillar of American economic might. These events have been greatly overblown from every point of view. What was destroyed wasn't just the twin towers, but the moral towers of this country." Bin Laden had also threatened the American president and the British prime minister: "Bush and Blair only understand the language of force. Every time they kill us, we'll kill them, until we reach a balance of power." These revelations were confirmed the same day by Tony Blair, who told the EU that he had had access to a transcription. This mysterious cassette is cited in the published version of Blair's report [see http://www.pm.gov.uk/file.asp?fileid=2590]. In fact, what it was was an interview obtained by the all-news channel Al-Jazeera and broadcast by CNN in January 2002.
A theatrical moment: on 9 December, the Washington Post revealed, on the front page, the existence of a new videotape [New Tape Points to Bin Laden, by Walter Pincus and Karen De Young, 9 December 2001]. Sent by a proxy agent of Public Enemy Number One on 11 September, it showed bin Laden's reactions and definitively proved his responsibility in planning the attacks. According to Reuters, citing an anonymous official, the al-Qaeda leader even said that most of the hijackers weren't kamikazes and didn't know they were on a suicide mission.
Appearing as a guest on ABC's "This Week," the Under-Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, commented: "It's repugnant. I mean, here's a man who brags and takes pleasure in killing thousands of innocent people. This confirms everything we already know about him. There's nothing new or surprising about it. It's just a confirmation. And I hope that this is going to definitively silence the insane conspiracy theories that are saying that in a way, the US or somebody else is responsible." [[My translation of Meyssan's translation of Wolfowitz's comments.]]
This videotape was disseminated by the Pentagon on 13 December 2001. Osama bin Laden made "confessions" therein, which conformed in all respects to the official version, which we know to be quite detached from reality. "I thought that the fire caused by the jet fuel would weaken the metallic structure [of the WTC] and that it would cause the damaged area to collapse and just the floors above it. That's all we were hoping for… We had finished our work for the day, and we turned on the radio… We changed the station to catch the latest news out of Washington. The news bulletin went as usual. The attack wasn't mentioned until the very end. Then, the newscaster announced that an airplane had just struck the WTC… A moment went by, then they announced that a second airplane had hit the WTC. The brothers who heard the news were delirious with joy… The brothers, those who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they had a martyr mission to carry out, and we asked each of them to go to America, but they didn't know anything about the operation, not a single word. But they were trained, and we didn't reveal anything about the operation to them right up until the moment when they were there and were getting ready to get on board the airplanes… They were filled with a delirious joy when the first airplane crashed into the building, and I told them, Be patient… The time lapse between the first and the second airplanes that crashed into the towers was 20 minutes, and the one that crashed into the Pentagon was an hour." [The State Department's transcription of the tape is reproduced in full in the appendix.]
The bin Laden agent not only backs up the fable of the towers collapsing through combustion, that of the kamikaze teams, and even the crash at the Pentagon, but it also takes care to refute the evidence. The video, indeed, ends with its acolyte's commentary: "They [the Americans] were terrified and thought a coup d'état was happening." If Public Enemy Number One says so…
Recidivist bin Laden's guilt in the 11 September attacks was therefore beyond doubt, because he had even taken responsibility for events that never happened. But has bin Laden really broken it off with the CIA, and has he really become an enemy of America?
From 1987 to 1998, the formation of Al-Qaeda combat units was overseen by Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian officer incorporated into the US Army. Mohammed taught simultaneously at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, where he formed the members of the most secret networks of influence, the stay-behind, and also US Special Forces officers. [The Masking of a Militant by Benjamin Weiser and James Risen, New York Times, 1 December 1998.] Knowing the security procedures of the American secret services, which reckoned on a constant surveillance of agents among them, can one believe for a second that Ali Mohammed would have been able to switch back and forth between working at a military base in the US and working at Al-Qaeda camps in Sudan and Afghanistan without immediately being unmasked? Ali Mohammed's arrest, covered in the press, at the end of 1998, isn't enough to hide the fact that the stay-behind formed the Al-Qaeda combatants and that bin Laden thus continued working for the CIA at least up until 1998!
Moreover, how could one not see that the bin Laden legend is a coverup, stitched together out of various pieces by the CIA? You're asking us to believe that bin Laden managed to kick the most powerful army in the world out of Somalia with only a couple dozen fighters!
Or again, we're asked to believe that the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam were anti-American, when not a single one of the eleven people killed in Dar es-Salaam were American, and in Nairobi, only 12 of the 213 dead were Americans. Whoever launched these falsely anti-American attacks took care to make somebody else deal with the consequences. [Terrorism: US Response to Bombing in Kenya and Tanzania, A New Policy Direction? by Raphael Perl, Congressional Research Service (Library of Congress, 1 September 1998). See http://www.house.gov/crstmp/98-733.pdf, and Significant Incidents of Political Violence Against Americas, State Dept (1998), http://www.dsosac.org/publications/documents/sig1998.pdf.]
In reality, the CIA continued to avail itself of bin Laden's services against Russian influence just as it had been doing against the Soviet Union. You don't mess with a winning team. Al-Qaeda's "Arab Legion" was used in 1999 to help the Kosovar rebels against the Belgrade dictatorship. [Osamagate by Michel Chossudovsky, Center for Research on Globalization, 9 Oct 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html, and Les Soldats de Ben Laden en Bosnie et Kosovo by Kosta Christitch, Balkans-Infos, October 2001.] The Legion was operational in Chechnya, at least up until November 2001, just as the NYT reported [War on Terror Casts Chechen Conflict in a New Light by Michael Wines, NYT, 9 December 2001]. Bin Laden's claimed hostility against the USA allows Washington to deny its responsibility in these warped coups.
The connections between the CIA and bin Laden weren't severed in 1998. Gravely ill, he went to an American hospital in Dubai, UAE, for treatment, from 4 to 14 July 2001. "During his hospitalization, [he] received visits from several family members and Emirati and Saudi personages. During the same visit, the local CIA representative, whom lots of people in Dubai knew, was seen taking the main elevator on his way to Osama bin Laden's room," wrote Le Figaro [La CIA a rencontré Ben Laden à Dubai en juillet by Alexandra Richard, Le Figaro, 31 October 2001.] "The night before the 11 September terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan… he was discreetly admitted to a military hospital in Rawalpindi to undergo dialysis," the CBS correspondent reports [Hospital Worker: I Saw Osama by Barry Petersen, CBS, 29 January 2002].
The man who called for jihad against the USA and Israel, the man on whose head the FBI put a $5 million price, the man whose training camps were bombed with cruise missiles, receives treatment in an American hospital in Dubai, where he has a chat with the CIA chief of station, then he goes for kidney dialysis under the protection of the Pakistani army in Rawalpindi.
The trickery implicates people close to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda combatants. For example, according to the American official version, the Ash-Shifa laboratory in Sudan had been used by bin Laden to manufacture chemical weapons of mass destruction. That why it had been bombarded by the USAF in 1998. Nevertheless, international observers, come to inspect the ruins, denied that the factory had been used to manufacture anything other than aspirin. This factory was co-owned by Osama bin Laden and Salah Idris. The CIA accused the latter of complicity in the manufacture of chemical weapons and financing the Islamic Jihad group in Egypt. They froze his financial assets, but then quietly lifted that measure in May 1999. The "terrorist" Salah Idris today controls 75% of IES Digital Systems and 20% of Protec through the offshore intermediary Global Security Systems. Now, IES Digital Systems is currently responsible for video surveillance of British government and military sites, just as Baron Cox revealed to the EU [Terror Links TVs Guard UK by Antony Barnett and Conal Walsh, The Observer, 14 October 2001; Inquiry Call Over Company Guarding UK Nuclear Plant, Barnett/Walsh, The Observer, 4 November 2001]. Meanwhile Protec oversees security for eleven British nuclear plants.
As for Mohammed Atta, whom the FBI accuse of being the Al-Qaeda agent responsible for leading the kamikaze commandos on 11 September and whose bank account was used to finance the operation, he was an agent of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI)—the ones who have always been considered a branch of the CIA [Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) by B. Rahman, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper 287, 1 August 2001, http://www.saag.org]. In July 2001, Gen. Ahmed Mahmud, ISI director, transferred $5000 into Mohammed Atta's American bank account, according to the Times of India [India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Link, Times of India, 9 October 2001]. This revelation didn't raise a single question in America. Calls were redoubled for Gen. Mahmud to take retirement, not without his having taken care to pick his own successor.
The measures the USA took against bin Laden are no more convincing. The 75 cruise missiles [The BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles were manufactured by General Dynamics in collaboration with McDonnell Douglas. They are invoiced to the US military at a cost of between $600,000 and $1.2 million each, depending on the model. The cost of munitions alone in this reprisal operation was thus somewhere between $45 million and $90 million.] which were fired at Al-Qaeda training camps and the Ash-Shifa factory killed 21 Islamist fighters, which really doesn't seem in proportion either to the amount of munitions expended or to the 298 people killed in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.
"Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the World's foremost terrorist. While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI --operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has --since the Soviet-Afghan war-- supported international terrorism through its covert operations," writes Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa. [http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html]
On the one hand, Osama bin Laden is not an enemy, but an agent of the United States; and on the other hand, he never broke off with his family, who are essential trading partners of the Bush family [We have dealt with these relations in detail in The Secret Financial Ties of the Bushes and bin Ladens, in Notes d'informations du réseau Voltaire, 16 October 2001].
We have already noted that the Saudi Binladen Group's financial holdings are managed by the Carlyle Group.
Created in 1987, the Carlyle Group today manages a $12 billion portfolio. It has a majority interest in Seven-Up (who oversees bottling operations for Cadbury Schweppes), Federal Data Corporation (who, for example, furnished the civil air-traffic monitoring systems equipment for the FAA), and United Defence Industries Inc. (the principal furnisher of equipment for the US, Turkish, and Saudi armies). Through the companies it controls, the Carlyle Group is the 11th largest US arms supplier.
In 1990, the Carlyle Group became the subject of an extortion lawsuit. A Republican lobbyist, Wayne Berman, had diverted pension funds and given them to the Bush campaign; one of these had paid a million dollars to the Carlyle Group to obtain a public contract in Connecticut.
This management fund is presided over by Frank C. Carlucci (former CIA assistant director, then Secretary of Defense). Advisors include James A. Baker III (former Reagan chief of staff, then Secretary of the Treasury, finally Secretary of State under Bush père) and Richard Darman (former budget director). To represent it overseas, the Carlyle group retains the services of John Major [John Major Link to Bin Laden Dynasty, Sunday Herald, 7 October 2001], former British Prime Minister, and George H. W. Bush [Bush of Arabia, The Nation, 27 March 2000, and Elder Bush in Big GOP Cast Toiling for Top Equity Firm, New York Times, 5 March 2001] (former CIA director, then President of the United States).
Among the other directors of the Carlyle Group, we find Sami Mubarak Baarma, who is Khaled Ben Mahfouz's authorized representative, and one Talat Othman… two people with direct ties to the current President of the United States.
Indeed, George W. Bush obtained his personal fortune through the good business deals he was able to make as head of the Harken Energy Corporation [which was originally named Arbusto]. This small Texas petroleum company held the Bahraini oil concessions, as a retrocommission of the American-Kuwaiti contracts negotiated by President Bush père [Fuel for Fantasy, Forbes magazine, 3 September 1990, and Ex-Bush Aide Turns to Stumping for Kuwait… While Junior Reaps Oil Windfall, The Guardian, 12 December 1990]. This, of course, is a completely illegal operation.
Khaled Ben Mahfouz was a Harken shareholder to the tune of 11.5%. His actions were "carried out" by one of his representatives, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh. Talat Othman was an administrator. Meanwhile, Osama's eldest brother, Salem, was represented on Harken's board of directors by his American representative, James R. Bath.
This whole little world (the Bush family, their political creditors, their financial partners, and the ineluctable CIA) isn't even done here with their first manipulations [[Tout ce petit monde... n'en sont pas à leurs premières manipulations]]. They were at the center of the huge banking scandal of the 90s: the BCCI collapse [The BCCI scandal has spawned quite a large body of literature. Here we have consulted principally The BCCI Affair, a report by Sens. Joseph Kerry (D-Mass.) and Hank Brown (R-Colo.) to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommitee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, 30 September 1992. See the complete text at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci. See also Evil Money, Encounters Along the Money Trail by Rachel Ehrenfeld (Harper Business, 1992); False Profits, The Inside Story of BCCI, The World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin (Houghton, 1992); A Full-Service Bank, How the BCCI Stole Billions Around the World (Simon and Schuster, 1992); The Outlaw Bank, A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne (Random House, 1993); and Bankrupt, The BCCI Fraud by Nick Kochan and Bob Whittington (Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1991)].
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was an Anglo-Pakistani establishment with branches in 63 countries. It was jointly held by three large families: the Gokals of Pakistan, the Ben Mahfouz family of Saudi Arabia, and the Geith Pharons of Abu Dhabi [The French chargé d'affaires of Geith Pharon, Farid Djouhri, took out a two-page ad in Le Figaro and Le Monde in October of 2001. This communication project was intended to deny any connections between Geith Pharon and Osama bin Laden and to assure its integrity. Nevertheless, the FBI and the IRS still have a warrant out for Gaith Pharon's arrest over the BCCI affair. Gaith Pharon is also involved in a lawsuit in Argentina in an arms-trafficing cadre implicating former president Carlos Menem. See Gaith Pharon s'offre la presse française, Intelligence Online, 18 October 2001, http://www.intelligenceonline.fr.]. Ronald Reagan used it to bribe the Iranian government to delay the release of American hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran, and thus to sabotage the end of Carter's presidency (what was called the "October Surprise"). Then, at the insistence of the former CIA director, Vice-President Bush (père), the Reagan administration used the BCCI again to transfer Saudi donations to the Nicaraguan Contras, and to transfer CIA funds to the Afghan mujahedeen. The BCCI is additionally implicated in the Syrian Sarkis Sarkenalian's arms deals, in the Keating scandal in America, in trader Marc Rich's affairs, in financing the Abu Nidal group, etc. For sure, the bank went down when it came out that the bank was also laundering money for the Medellin cartel. A million small investors were swindled out of their money when the bank shut its doors.
The fact that the BCCI was able to be manipulated, if not actually created, by the CIA, shouldn't come as a surprise. There's a long-standing banking tradition in the US intelligence services, ever since the founding of the OSS by corporate lawyers and Wall Street courtiers. Two former CIA directors, Richard Helms and William Casey, worked at BCCI, just as did two prestigious CIA influence agents [[deux prestigieux agents d'influence de la CIA]], Adnan Khashoggi [Adnan Khashoggi, The Richest Man in the World, by Ronald Kessler (Warner Bros. Books, 1986)] and Manucher Ghorbanifar (the central Irangate trader). Not to mention Kamal Adham (King Faisal's brother-in-law and head of the Saudi secret service until 1977), Prince Turki al-Faisal (head of the Saudi secret service from 1977 until August 2001, tutor to Osama bin Laden), and Abdul Raouf Khalil (adjunct director of Saudi secret service).
If memory serves, you'll note also that the BCCI seems to have played something of a supernatural role in France as well. Notably, it served to disguise the transfer of American/French nuclear technology to Pakistan and to pay for hostage releases. A businessman with close ties to Charles Pasqua, Dominique Santini was ejected from the country for his role in BCCI [L'énigme Pasqua, by Thierry Meyssan (Editions Golias, 2001)], independently of his being sued in France in the Elf-Thinet affair. Three years after the bank's collapse, its former directors acted as intermediaries in getting the Sawari-II contract passed, and they organized a system of retrocommissions which was supposed to finance Edouard Balladur's presidential campaign. The questioning brought forth by this star sale to Saudi Arabia led Jacques Chirac, upon his arrival at the Elysée, to have François Leotard, Edouard Balladur's former Defense Minister, listened in on. [[??]] [[Les interrogations soulevées par cette vente de vedettes à l'Arabie Saoudite conduisirent Jacques Chirac, dès son arrivée à l'Elysée, à faire placer sur écoute l'ancien ministre de la Défense d'Edouard Balladur, François Leotard.]]
The BCCI worked in very close collaboration with SICO [originally called CYGNET], a Swiss investment subsidiary of the SBG, and one will notice one of Osama bin Laden's brothers, Salem, among the ranks of its administrators.
Held solely responsible for the BCCI's failure, Khaled ben Mahfouz was put on trial in the United States in 1992. He managed to have the charges against him dropped in 1995, with the issue of a transaction with the bank's creditors in the amount of $245 million.
If it is the case, as numerous American officials aver, that the bin Laden family continues to maintain relations with Osama and to finance his political activities, then the Carlyle Group, which manages the financial holdings of the Saudi Binladen Group, would necessarily be implicated in insider trading. George Bush père would therefore be one of the lucky beneficiaries of the stock-trading maneuvers of 11 September 2001. A pretty good reason for the FBI and IOSCO to close the shutters on the investigation.
[[END OF CHAPTER EIGHT]]
[[This document is part of the English translation of
"L'effroyable imposture."
[[ (c) 2002, Christopher Schroen.
[[ See http://www.boss-tweed.com/gpdl.txt for copying
conditions.