Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (4 page)

So do the conspiracy theorists have a case? The evidence that F-16s
did
catch up with Flight 93 is certainly troubling, as is the pattern of the debris from the crash. And it is hard to believe that the government would have simply allowed the plane to come any closer to Washington. On the other hand, none of the witnesses to the aircraft's eventual crash reported it as having being consumed by a fireball. So if it was hit by a missile it certainly did not explode on impact. Perhaps consideration should be given to the less discussed possibility that one of the terrorists on board may have been carrying a bomb. It certainly ties all the elements of the story together: the heroic passengers take on the hijackers, then one of the hijackers accidentally or deliberately detonates the bomb, and the aircraft plunges to the ground before the pursuing F-16s are forced to confront the option of killing a plane-load of their fellow citizens. Whatever the full truth of the matter, what remains undeniable is the courage of the passengers who were caught up in this terrible situation.

To put it mildly, some conspiracy theories seem far-fetched, depending as they do on the most unlikely details. However, the events upon which some theories are based are so outlandish that speculation is difficult to avoid. The theories that link the Bush and Bin Laden families started with just such an event. Consider this: on the morning of September 11, when a group of terrorists masterminded by Osama Bin Laden were bringing terror to an America led by President George W. Bush, the President's father, George Bush Snr., was in a business meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington with one of Osama Bin Laden's brothers.

So, coincidence or conspiracy? Well, as coincidences go it is a pretty extraordinary one. Yes, the Bush and the Bin Laden families are both involved in the oil business, but is their relationship purely commercial with no link to the events of 9/11? Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of people who believe that the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are politically, as well as financially, linked. Among them is the film-maker Michael Moore, whose film
Fahrenheit 9/11
made much of the links between the two families. Craig Unger did the same with his best-selling book,
House of Bush, House of Saud
.

So let us examine the case for conspiracy, starting with a history of the links between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. The connection begins in Houston, Texas, during the seventies, when George W. Bush was just starting out in his family's two businesses of politics and oil. The Bin Laden family helped fund his first venture into oil. The connection came through a man named Jim Bath, a friend of George W. Bush since his days with the Texas Air National Guard, the position that kept him out of the Vietnam War.

T
HE
S
AUDI INVESTORS
By the late seventies Bath was an entrepreneur with links to the CIA, an organization headed by George Bush Senr. from 1976 onwards. At around that time, Bath entered into a trust agreement with Salem Bin Laden, older brother of Osama, whereby Bath would act as the Bin Laden family's representative in North America, investing money in various business ventures. In turn this led to Bath becoming the business representative of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a member of the family who owned the National Commercial Bank, the principal bank of the Saudi royal family.

In 1978 Bath took on a partner, a former navy pilot called Charles W. White, who would run his real estate company. Both the Bin Laden and the bin Mahfouz families invested in this company and on their behalf Bath bought an airport, as well as office and apartment buildings. Later on, he purchased a mansion in River Oaks, Houston. That same year, George W. Bush started up an oil company called Arbusto 78. Thanks to his connection with Bath, initial investors in this new company included Salem Bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz.

Despite the Saudi investment (at least $1 million according to White), Bush's ventures into the oil industry were not a success and by 1987 his various oil companies had been taken over by another company, Harken Energy. That year Harken had a $25-million stock offering underwritten by financiers connected to the soon-to-be-infamous BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), a Middle Eastern banking concern.

Over the next few years the BCCI was exposed as a massively corrupt criminal enterprise which had been stealing from its own investors in addition to being involved in money laundering and the Iran contra scandal. The bank also helped finance a whole range of the most unsavoury figures of recent history including Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and terrorist leader Abu Nidal. One of the men who were caught up in the scandal was none other than bin Mahfouz, who was discovered to have withdrawn substantial investments from the bank just before its assets were seized. The charges against him were only dropped when he made a huge payment of $225 million into a Federal Reserve settlement account followed by one of $245 million to BCCI's court-appointed liquidators.

The first Gulf War, led by US President George Bush Snr., took place while the BCCI scandal was rumbling on. Many saw this as a war for oil, in which a president with a background in the oil business made sure that Iraq did not gain a stranglehold on world oil markets.

T
HE FUNDAMENTALIST
Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden had emerged as an important figure in Saudi Arabia. While his family had concentrated on their business interests, he had become a firebrand who had led Islamic fighters in the CIA-backed campaign against the Russians in Afghanistan. However, while his brothers were happy to maintain commercial links with the United States, Osama believed that the Islamic states should control their own destinies. He therefore urged the Saudis to fight Saddam Hussein themselves rather than leave the job to the Americans. When the United States left 20,000 troops behind in Saudi Arabia after the war, Bin Laden was enraged. Soon afterwards, he left Saudi Arabia for Sudan, where he built up a terrorist organization which shortly became known as Al-Qaeda. The group was dedicated to eradicating the United States presence in the Islamic Holy Lands.

Over the next decade Al-Qaeda launched a whole series of operations against the United States. In 1993 the organization made a spectacular attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, which caused considerable loss of life and only narrowly failed to destroy the entire building. In 1995 five American soldiers were killed in a car bomb in Saudi Arabia.

In 1996 the Sudanese Government decided that they did not want Osama to remain in their country and so they asked him to leave, together with his organization. At this time, the United States had the opportunity to arrest him but made no effort to do so. In 1998, Al-Qaeda blew up the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, resulting in the deaths of 224 people.

In January 2000, intelligence sources discovered that a meeting of Al-Qaeda leaders was taking place in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Attending the meeting was Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, the number three man in Al-Qaeda and the mastermind behind the 1998 attacks on United States embassies. (He is also presumed to be the man responsible for the attack on the USS
Cole
and, above all, the 9/11 attacks.) Also present at the meeting were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two Saudi citizens who ended up as hijackers on Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11.

W
ARNING SIGNS IGNORED
The CIA knew of the meeting and asked the Malaysian secret police to place it under surveillance. Video footage was taken, as well as photographs of the dozen men in attendance. Nevertheless, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar flew to the United States on their own passports after the meeting broke up, landing in Los Angeles. There they were met by Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who worked for the Saudi civil aviation authority. Al-Bayoumi took al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi to San Diego, where he put them up in an apartment, enrolled them in flight school and gave them money. Later, the FBI concluded that it was most likely that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent. Al-Bayoumi also passed on thousands of dollars to the hijackers. The money came from Princess Haifa, wife of Prince Bandar Saudi, ambassador to the United States.

That September, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar moved into the home of a local imam in San Diego, Abdussattar Shaikh. The imam was an FBI informant who held meetings with his FBI handler while al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar sat in a room next door. Shaikh would later claim that he was never told what mission the hijackers were on. His FBI handler, meanwhile, was never informed by his superiors to look out for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

During the following months, Al-Qaeda launched an attack, killing seventeen sailors, on the USS
Cole
, which was sitting in a harbour off the coast of Yemen. Throughout 2001, in the months leading up to September 11, the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency received intelligence that a terrorist attack of some magnitude was going to be launched by Al-Qaeda. However, in May of that year Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 atrocities and Al-Qaeda's other attacks, was able to travel freely into the United States. Then, in August 2001, President Bush received a detailed and lengthy daily briefing from the CIA in which Al-Qaeda's aim of launching an attack against the United States was mentioned, together with the name of Osama Bin Laden. To this day, the Bush White House refuses to release the contents of this briefing to Congressional inquiries into the events of 9/11. Did loyalty to his old Saudi friends cloud Bush's judgment? If so, he paid a terrible price, because in the following month, on September 11, 2001, the long-feared attack was finally made.

And that, of course, is where we came in, with the fact that on the morning of the attack George Bush Snr. was at a meeting of members of the Carlyle Group in Washington, along with Bin Laden's own brother. To compound the irony – if irony it was – members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to leave the United States without questioning two days later.

There are two possible explanations. One is that the Bush family and the Bin Laden family are essentially businessmen with oil interests. The fact that various Bushes may have become presidents of the United States or that one of the huge Bin Laden clan should have become a terrorist leader is essentially irrelevant. The Bushes therefore understood that the Bin Laden family in general could not be held responsible for the actions of the black sheep Osama, and simply helped them leave the country before they could become the victims of ill-informed speculation.

On the other hand, there are the conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most compelling of these is the suggestion that the closeness of the connection between the Bush family and Saudi oil interests actually influenced the President's attitude to Saudi Arabia. The followers of these theories suspect that because of the involvement of Saudi Arabia the evidence pointing to a pending attack was not followed up as thoroughly as it might have been. The importance of Saudi oil – not just to the Bush family, but to wider American interests – has meant that the country has not been asked hard questions about human rights or about its support for Islamic terrorism. The simpler fact is that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. So why was Saudi Arabia not the focus of American anger? Why was all the military attention turned first on Afghanistan and then on the aggressively secular and one-time American ally Iraq?