New York Times - Saudis and Bin Ladens in Bed With Bushes and Profiting from 9/11!

LIHOPopotamus's picture

How can anyone still deny the obvious fact that 9/11 was planned by the Saudis and allowed by the Bush family to Happen On Purpose?  Included in this article is proof not only of bin Laden using his family's caterpillar earth movers to fortify his mountain fortresses but also of the bin laden family celebrations after 9/11 AND Osama's anti-Semitism™, which all Saudis share.  What more credible source than the Sulzberger family's New York Times is there when it comes to the Middle East?  Judy Miller and Curveball were obviously working for the Bush family to discredit the most liberalest paper in the world!

Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics — the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens’ lawyer called the family’s “favorite politician.” Since Salem’s own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family’s present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter’s causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own “an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war.”

Osama was timid. Coll suggests that he was haunted by the low status of his Syrian mother. An afternoon Islamic study group he joined during junior high school filled him with purpose, and eventually with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of photography. These stances got little attention. They were just a more ardent version of what Saudi kids were taught anyway.

Politicized piety did not make Osama a black sheep. It made him an asset. In the mid-1980s, Fahd granted the bin Ladens a contract to redevelop — critics would say Americanize — the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These projects replaced highway-building as the mainstay of the family income. They depended on the good graces of Saudi clerics and powerful princes like Prince Nayef, who later claimed the 9/11 attacks were a Zionist plot. Osama’s commitment to Muslim holy war impressed such people more than Salem’s bathroom humor. Far from hating the Saud family, Osama would fly into a fury if he heard someone question Fahd’s legitimacy. Even in 1990, Coll writes, he saw himself as “an international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king.”

Coll shows that Osama’s efforts supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan could never have been done on his own nickel. He inherited just 2.27 percent of his father’s fortune. What he had, though, was a court network — conservative princes, the company’s associates and the charitable funds of various elite families, including his own. He also had equipment. The bin Laden group was the largest owner of Caterpillar earthmovers in the world. Osama used them to fortify the caves that would shelter Arab and Afghan mujahedeen and, after 9/11, himself. Salem arranged shipments of anti-aircraft missiles. Khalid, a brother who worked in the company’s Cairo office, obtained Afghan visas for Egyptian radicals. The jihad was a family affair.

The question is whether it remained a family affair after Osama turned his sights on the United States. Coll did not crack the family’s inner circle, so his conclusions on the matter are provisional. But through government papers and interviews with various bin Laden associates, he gives us a judicious, painstaking and vivid picture of an exotic family pulled in two directions by world events. Occasionally, the picture is too vivid — there is more detail than most readers will need about Khaled bin Laden’s stud farm in Egypt, Khalil bin Laden’s Brazilian wife’s sister’s drug addiction and Yeslam bin Laden’s unsuccessful stock transactions.

Osama’s siblings repudiated his acts as early as 1994, but they left a door open to reconciliation. After 9/11, they seemed more interested in retaining legal counsel than in sharing information. Coll found allegations in a California custody case that there were scenes of celebration at the bin Laden compound in Saudi Arabia after the attacks. Coll does not believe any of the bin Ladens permitted to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after 9/11 had connections to radical Islam. He notes, though, that one who had possible connections — Omar Awadh — may not have been interrogated by the F.B.I.

Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. “To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama,” Coll writes. “To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.”

Seven years’ distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden’s attacks turned a profit.

full story

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
LIHOPopotamus's picture

this and the Patsystani wire transfer are OBVIOUS PROOF!!!

Especially telling is how that Saudi prince friend of the bin Laden's blames Zionists for 9/11!

gretavo's picture

better to die on your feet quote...

Is actually attributed to José Martí, Norm. It looks like Norm is slated to take over from Chomsky as the leading Israel-critic-gatekeeper. Bush was responsible for the Israeli attack on Lebanon? Come now, Norm. I used to have a lot of respect for Finkelstein but after my 9/11-related correspondence with him I realized he's just another egotistical gatekeeper providing ostensible diversity to cover the actual uniformity of Zionist apologetics.

gretavo's picture

related links...

A previous thread here where we talked about Norm... http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/806

Kevin Barrett's email exchange with Chomsky... http://www.barrettforcongress.us/chomsky.htm

And an old blog post about my own email exchange with Norm below:

The Norm and Noam Show

Let's get one thing straight. I happen to like and even now still respect both Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. But they are wrong about 9-11. What's worse, they admit they don't really know what happened. Because neither claims to be sure that the Bin Laden did it narrative is accurate--they just don't think it's worth pursuing. When I accosted him as he waited to cross the street in Harvard Square (on his way to a panel discussion at the Untiarian(?) church on Church Street. Prof. Chomsky told me that the obsession with 9-11 truth was directing energy away from more productive avenues of dissent (so the antiwar movement that ignores Bush's complicity in 9-11 is succeeding how?) He told me he would need to study engineering for two years in order to know what happened to WTC building 7. He says that these things cannot be understood just from what one reads on the internet. I suspect Noam doesn't do much reading about 9-11 on the Internet, or else he may not have made his comment about building 7. But then Noam (god bless him) has been at this for quite some time and has been known to be stubborn in the past. Today he works, with intent or perhaps unintentionally to divide the growing base of strong anti-Bush sentiment and that I cannot forgive. Noam, your old road is rapidly agin'--please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand, cause the times, well, they're a changin'.

Professor Finkelstein, on the other hand, is a sharp tack in his prime. His reluctance to even consider the evidence that 9-11 was an inside job cannot be a simple matter of his being set in his ways. Here are some of his replies to my entreaties on the subject, which are omitted for space and because I've said it all before on this blog--his responses are enough I think to get a sense of his attitude towards 9-11 truth:

4/8/2006 3:26 PM We're living in difficult times. It's important to preserve our sanity and clarity of thought.

4/10/2006 12:16 PM It seems that 9-11 is set to become your Kennedy Assassination industry. It's a waste of energy, I think.

4/11/2006 4:48 PM I've not looked into the matter closely, nor do I consider it a wise investment of my time. I wouldn't put it past George Bush senior to have his dearly beloved wife Barbara knocked off - crimes of passion do happen especially if your wife looks twice your age - but I don't think Bush junior would blow up the hub of the world financial network.

6/3/2006 10:19 PM Dear Gretavo, I'm sure you are a very smart and terrific fellow, so I won't even consider writing a flippant, let alone insulting, response. But please bear in mind that about 70% of Americans believe in the Devil as well as a Heaven and Hell, not to mention the 50% who still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. These sorts of "referendums" don't really prove much. Best, Norm

6/5/2006 1:02 AM Buddy, I squandered much of my youth wondering who killed JFK. It seems every generation needs an unresolved mystery to tickle its fancy: yours is the Twin Towers.

The thing is, Norm became famous in part by exposing a fraud in the form of a book by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, that cited false data in order to lend credence to the false argument that there was no siginificant Palestinian population inhabiting the land from which the British carved the Zionist state, aka Israel. This made him a "self-hating Jew", Nazi lover, and many other nasty things, according to the Israel Lobby. It also enabled Norman to out Hot Dog Law Professor Alan Dershowitz as a shameless plagiarist of Peters' fraud. As Finkelstein so eloquently put it, and I paraphrase, "Not only did he not write the book [The Case for Israel], he doesn't seem to have read it either" So here's a man who in his own words "trusted authority" and the authority turned out to be wrong. This is man who knows just how low humanity can sink, who in his seminal work The Holocaust Industry exposes those involved in the alleged quest for reparations for holocaust victims (which both his parents were) who abscond with most of the funds intended for those victims.

Where does he get off telling me that it's a waste of time to question Bush's assurances that19 mostly dead hijackers pulled off the incredible feat of knocking down three skyscrapers with two planes before making two other planes vanish into thin air, leaving only some small holes in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon, which looks like a worm ate a little round hole through six layers of reinforced concrete walls?

Why should we not question, and demand answers--demand the investigation that never happened, since the 9-11 commission simply took Bush and Rumsfeld at their word that this had been the work of bin Laden, and all they really needed to know was what went wrong and why we failed to foil the attacks. Why doesn't Professor Finkelstein, who does not seem to shy away from controversy, grant us even the benefit of the doubt when we impugn the credibility of the flawed bin Laden narrative? And if that's how he feels, why not publicly come out in support of the 9-11 Commission's findings? Why indeed...

Posted: 7:40 PM 06.13.06 by Gretavo

gretavo's picture

4.5 years later...

...and Norm still either doesn't get it or pretends not to get it. Is ANYone freakin' honest??


juandelacruz's picture

I don't get them. Are they

I don't get them. Are they afraid, traitors to humanity or simply stupid?