The smoking gun?

The smoking gun? 
 
Global Eye -- Kean Insight

By Chris Floyd

Moscow Times
http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/stories/2003/01/31/120.html

When George W. Bush's first choice to head an "independent" probe into the
Sept. 11 attacks -- suspected war criminal Henry Kissinger -- went down like
a bad pretzel, he quickly plucked another warm body from the stagnant pool
of Establishment worthies who are periodically called upon to roll out the
whitewash when the big boys screw up.

Kissinger's replacement, retired New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, was a
"safe pair of hands," we were assured by the professional assurers in the
mainstream media. The fact that he'd been out of public life for years --
and that he hadn't collaborated in the deaths of tens of thousands of
Cambodians, Chileans and East Timorese -- certainly made him less
controversial than his predecessor, although to be fair, Kissinger's
expertise in mass murder surely would have given the panel some unique
insights into the terrorist atrocity.

But now it seems that Kean might possess some unique insights of his own.
Fortune Magazine reports this week that both Kean and Bush share an
unusually well-placed business partner: one Khalid bin Mahfouz -- perhaps
better known as "Osama bin Laden's bagman" or even "Osama bin Laden's
brother-in-law."

Kean, like so many worthies, followed the revolving door out of public
service into lucrative sweetheart deals and well-wadded sinecures on
corporate boards. One of these, of course, is an oil company -- pretty much
a requirement for White House work these days. (Or as the sign says on the
Oval Office door: "If your rigs ain't rockin', don't come a-knockin'!") Kean
is a director of Amerada Hess, an oil giant married up to Saudi Arabia's
Delta Oil in a venture to pump black gold in Azerbaijan. (The partnership is
incorporated in a secretive offshore "tax haven," natch. You can't expect a
worthy like Kean to pay taxes like some grubby wage slave.)

One of Delta's biggest backers is the aforesaid Mahfouz, a Saudi
wheeler-dealer who has bankrolled some of most dubious players on the world
scene: Abu Nidal, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. Mahfouz
was also a front for the bin Laden family, funneling their vast wealth
through American cut-outs in a bid to gain power and influence in the United
States.

One of those cut-outs was Mahfouz factotum James Bath, a partner in George
W.'s early oil venture, Arbusto. Bath has admitted serving as a pass-through
for secret Saudi money. Years later, when Bush's maladroit business skills
were about to sink another of his companies, Harken Energy, the firm was
saved by a $25 million investment from a Swiss bank -- a subsidiary of the
Bank of Credit and Commerce International, partly owned by the beneficent
Mahfouz.

What was BCCI? Only "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history,"
according to the U.S. Senate. What did BCCI do? "It engaged in pandemic
bribery of officials in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas," says
journalist Christopher Bryon, who first exposed the operation. "It laundered
money on a global scale, intimidated witnesses and law officers, engaged in
extortion and blackmail. It supplied the financing for illegal arms
trafficking and global terrorism. It financed and facilitated income tax
evasion, smuggling and prostitution." Sort of an early version of the Bush
Regime, then.

BCCI's bipartisan corruption first permeated the Carter Administration, then
came to full flower in the Reagan-Bush years. The CIA uncovered the bank's
criminal activities in 1981 -- no great feat, considering how many of its
own foreign "associates" were involved, including the head of Saudi
intelligence, Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of King Faisal. But instead of
stopping the drug-runners and terrorists, the agency decided to join them,
using BCCI's secret channels to finance "black ops" all over the world.

When a few prosecutors finally began targeting BCCI's operations in the late
eighties, President George Herbert Walker Bush boldly moved in with a
federal probe directed by Justice Department investigator Robert Mueller.
The U.S. Senate later found that the probe had been unaccountably
"botched" -- witnesses went missing, CIA records got "lost," all sorts of
bad luck. Lower-ranking prosecutors told of heavy pressure from on high to
"lay off." Most of the big BCCI players went unpunished or, like Mahfouz,
got off with wrist-slap fines and sanctions. Mueller, of course, wound up as
head of the FBI, appointed to the post in July 2001 -- by George W. Bush.

In the late 1990s, U.S. authorities identified Mahfouz as a major financier
of his brother-in-law's extracurricular activities. He denied it, but the
spooked Saudis put him on ice, charging him with, of all things, bank fraud.
He's now under "house arrest" -- or rather, "palatial mansion arrest" -- but
still wheeling and dealing with Kean and Delta and other worthies. Indeed,
one of Mahfouz's hirelings -- the director of a Pakistani bank he owns --
sits on the advisory board of our old friend the Carlyle Group, cheek by
jowl with the firm's most celebrated shill: George Herbert Walker Bush.

Somehow we doubt that worthy Kean will poke very hard at the nexus of
intersections between his own business partner, Mahfouz, and the bin Ladens,
the Bushes, the Saudi royals, Saddam, the CIA and BCCI. We've only scratched
the surface here, but even this cursory glance makes the current world
crisis look less like some grand geopolitical "clash of civilizations" and
more like a nasty falling out among thieves, with rival mafias -- who
sometimes collude, sometimes collide -- now duking it out for turf, cloaking
their murderous criminality with pious rhetoric about freedom, security,
jihad and God.


Terrorists, Dollars and a Tangled Web
MSNBC.com, Sept. 24, 2001


Five Degrees of Osama
Fortune, Jan. 22, 2003


Who is bin Laden?
Frontline, Nov. 2002


Bush, Bath, bin Laden
Scoop, Aug. 28, 2002


Bin Laden Money Flow Leads to Midland, Texas
In These Times, October 2001


Spies Hide as Bank of England Faces BCCI Charges
Observer, Jan. 19, 2003


The BCCI Affair
Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Dec. 1992


Funding Terror: The Role of Saudi Banks
In These Times, Dec. 20, 2002


White House Connection: Saudi 'Agents' Close Bush Friends
Boston Herald, Dec. 11, 2001


US Ties to Saudi Elite May be Hurting War on Terrorism
Boston Herald, Dec. 10, 2001


Bush Advisers Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train
Boston Herald, Dec. 11, 2001


Bush Nominates Himself to Head 9/11 Commission
Truthout.org, Dec. 19, 2002


9/11 Chairman's Business Ties with bin Laden's Brother-in-Law
Scoop, Dec. 27, 2002


Kissinger, Scowcroft and Arming Iraq
Scoop, Jan. 28, 2003


U.S Army Gave Bio-Chem Training to Iraq
Government Executive Magazine, Jan. 28, 2003