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[pynchonoid]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

January 31, 2003

Kean Insight

Bush, bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 Commission
by CHRIS FLOYD

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 Noreiga, 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 (BBCI),
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.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a
regular contributor to CounterPunch. He can be reached
at: cfloyd72 at hotmail.com

-Doug





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