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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 6, 2007 11:35:21 AM PDT
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Subject: Fwd: Questions Linger About Bushes, B.C.C.I., and bin Laden!!
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17488.htm
*Questions Linger About Bushes and B.C.C.I.*
Analysis by Lucy Komisar*
04/05/07
NEW YORK, Apr 4 (IPS) -- Now that the U.S. Congress is
investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements
about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling
assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama
bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was
a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein
and Bin Laden was their banker, B.C.C.I. But the link went beyond
the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and
stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
B.C.C.I. was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty
offshore bank that then-president Ronald Reagan's Central
Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin
Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry
out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately;
one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W.
Bush's troubled oil investments.
B.C.C.I. was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan
Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler
of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate
strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and
arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters,
dictators and terrorists.
The C.I.A. used B.C.C.I. Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan
to funnel some of the two billion dollars that Washington sent to
Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in
Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and
government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It
also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.
The B.C.C.I. operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in
offshore black finance that he would put to use when he organised
the jihad against the United States. He would move money through
the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland
with two Osama siblings as shareholders.
At the same time, B.C.C.I. helped Saddam Hussein, funneling
millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-
owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (B.N.L.), Baghdad's U.S. banker,
so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make four billion dollars in
secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.
U.S. Congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on B.N.L. in 1992
during which he quoted from a confidential C.I.A. document that
said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters
was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.
Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on B.N.L.-sponsored loans
were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via
B.C.C.I. offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg
and Switzerland. B.N.L. was a client of Kissinger Associates, and
Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board,
along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s
national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush
administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs
in Iraq seem disingenuous.
Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham,
brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi
intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the C.I.A.'s liaison in the
area, became one of B.C.C.I.'s largest shareholders. George Bush
Sr. knew Adham from his time running the C.I.A. in 1975.
Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded
Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin
Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in
Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling
family, bought 20 to 30 percent of the stock for nearly one billion
dollars. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.
The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A
classified C.I.A. memo on B.C.C.I. in the mid-1980s said that "its
principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle
East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates,
and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in
profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."
The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through
Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United
States on behalf of the Saudi. In 1976, when Bush was the head of
the C.I.A., the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a
secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to
Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped
finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979
and 1980.
When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then
merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987,
Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically-connected Arkansas
investment firm helped it secure 25 million dollars in financing
from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place
on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha
Bakhsh, whose chief banker was B.C.C.I. shareholder Bin Mahfouz.
Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken
benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden,
Osama bin Laden's half-brother, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin
Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organising al Qaeda.
The money B.C.C.I. stole before it was shut down in 1991 --
somewhere between 9.5 billion and 15 billion dollars -- made its 20-
year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never
recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy
system effectively covered up the money trail.
But in the years after the collapse of B.C.C.I., Khalid bin Mahfouz
was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq
("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The
U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives
funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."
When the B.C.C.I. scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr.
Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice
Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to --
only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But
evidence about B.C.C.I.'s broader links exist in numerous U.S. and
international investigations. Now could be a good time to take
another look at the B.C.C.I.-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.
~~~
[Investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's chapter, "The B.C.C.I.
Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in the new
book "A Game as Old as Empire", just published by Berrett-Koehler
(San Francisco). (END/2007)]
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