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ADNAN KHASHOGGI LINKED TO 911 TERRORISTS |
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PART 3: WE ROB BANKS by Alex Constantine
In a televised post-911 address, President Bush probed the soul of The Terrorist: "By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism" - a reasonable description of his business circle and its bomb-throwing enforcers (or a Nietzchian slip). On a daily basis, the press, seemingly blind to the domestic financial connections to terrorism, grips the Octopus, scrapes a nerve, and a tentacle buried in the mud trembles and unfurls, as in this recent business wire report on Citigroup: "... links traverse a curious variety of unexamined threads in the U.S. financial community. Online Journal's Larry Chin (2-1- 2002) reminded that Citigroup has repeatedly been charged with money laundering. This, as it's Board of Directors includes John Deutch, former CIA Director, Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and intimate friend of Enron's Ken Lay, but also former CIA Executive Director Nora Slatkin...'" Haunting, unexplained lapses on the part of government officials - "FBI agents in the United States probing relatives [of] Osama Bin Laden before September 11 were told to back off soon after George W Bush became president, the BBC has reported ..." - aren't so anomalous to the eye once it is open. Not, as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Service shrilled in October 2003, so "incredible": "There are many business connections between the Bush family and the elite of Saudi Arabia.... The powerful - and very rich - Bin Laden family helped fund [W.'s] first venture into oil. The cozy friendship continued for decades. After a terrorist attack at a barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans, the bin Laden family received a multi-billion dollar contract to re- build. And incredibly, George Bush Sr. was in a business meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington on the morning of September 11th with one of Osama Bin Laden's brothers..."1 Another "incredible" lapse amused liberal talk show hosts at the newly-chrustened Air America network in the summer of 2004: the quizzing of Condoleeza Rice by the 911 Commission revealed that Bush had received a "detailed and lengthy presidential daily briefing from the CIA in which Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda's aim of launching an attack against the U.S. [was] discussed." The White House refused to release the report.2 Some things were simply no one's business - like the relationship of the Bush clan to Adnan Khashoggi, who was beholden to and cherished by the bin Ladens and Bush's Saudi business partners. Khashoggi surfaced most visibly from the trenches of Iran-Contra affair; here, too, scraps of the pre-history of 911 are scattered like bomb debris. In 1985, Khashoggi turned to the Saudi National Commercial Bank, controlled by Sheikh Mahfouz, to borrow $35-million dollars to buy military hardware for shipment to Iran. Was it such an anomaly, after all, that Mahfouz, the Saudi banker and part-owner of BCCI - later a key suspect in the 911 plot - Adnan, and Bush were tight? W. had been bailed out three times when his business ventures went under. In 1988, the year his father won the presidency, a gaggle of Saudis bought into Harken Oil. Later the same year, Harken drilled for oil in the Persian Gulf, the company's first offshore contract. Two of the investors in Harken were Mahfouz and Osama's brother, Salem bin Laden.3 But reporters continued to be shocked by the continuous stream of "revelations." "In politics, truth is often stranger than fiction," wrote Martin Rivers at the Center for Research on Globalization. "Sheikh Mahfouz's sister is actually one of four wives of Osama bin Laden, making the two men brothers-in-law, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony. Thus, Osama bin Laden is sleeping with the sister of Bush's [and Khashoggi's] business partner. Really." Absolutely, and reporters, tank-thinkers, even prosecutors were "shocked" when they tripped on the miz-maze of illegal financial transactions preceding 911. On May 22, 2002, FBI agents Jeffrey A. Royer and Lynn Wingate were indicted for engaging in securities fraud, racketeering and obstruction of justice. An extortion charge was also filed against Royer. The next morning, the Washington Post printed the remarks of prosecuting U.S. attorney Alan Vinegard: "The allegations reveal a shocking partnership between an experienced stock manipulator and law enforcement agents, undertaken for their illicit personal financial gain." Seems Royer and Wingate dipped into the FBI's case-file database to keep tabs on the investigation and pass confidential information on to perpetrators in the stock scheme. Kenneth Breen, an assistant federal attorney assigned to the case, added that one Amr Ibrahim "Anthony" Elgindy, a financial consultant and co-conspirator named in the indictment, notified his Salomon Smith Barney broker to to sell off $300,000 worth of stocks from his children's trust funds. While chatting with his broker by phone, Anthony Elgindy predicted that a stock market crash was imminent and the index would fall to 3000 (it did).4 The broker contacted the FBI, but Elgindy explained away his apparent foreknowledge of the 911 terrorist assaults with the alibi that he'd been trying to unload the stock shares for several weeks (this explanation didn't rule out the possibility that Elgindy's foreknowledge preceded 911 by the same margin, however). Elgindy had co-conspired lustily for shares in a communications company, GenesisIntermedia (GENI). It was a stock pumping orgy. The proprietors of GENI were Adnan Khashoggi and Ramy El-Batrawi (both career criminals lurking behind their GENI blind would be instrumental in a wide-ranging disinfomation campaign waged to confuse the public after 911). In the sealed indictment, opened in November of the same year, a bit of transcribed dialogue was included in the evidence file that referred to an "Anthony" receiving "$1.8 million" to inflate the price of GENI stock. Elgindy ... didn't that name surface during the Iran-contra investigation? Gary Dobray, in his "Body Politic" Internet column, found another Iran-contra link, this one to Anthony's brother, Khaled: "Recently the White House made this Iran-Contra co-conspirator [Elliot Abrams] a new National Security Council official.... [Abrams] chaired the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and, as fate would have it, [sat] on the DC Human Rights Committee chaired by Abrams was ... Anthony Elgindy's brother, Khaled Elgindy. Khaled is a DC Arab activist who served as a policy analyst on Elliot Abrams' Human Rights Committee. Anthony and Khaled's father, Ibrahim Elgindy, was reported by the press to have founded an umbrella group of Muslim organizations in Chicago and led a 1998 protest on behalf of Muhammad Salah, a man the US government calls a designated global terrorist. Salah confessed to Israeli authorities that he was raising money for Hamas' suicide bombings and training cells in the US to make bombs and explosives."5 There were more ties to Iran-Contra on the GENI payroll: The director of GENI was Michael Roy Fugler. Fugler was a business front organizer for CIA "informant" Barry Seal. Seal, of course, allegedly ran cocaine into the U.S. until 1986, when he turned witness against his Colombian suppliers. He's dead, of course. All of which goes to say that once you map this underworld out, nothing surprises you anymore. _______________ Notes: 1) CBC Broadcast, "CONSPIRACY OR COINCIDENCE?," October 29, 2003. See, http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/conspiracytheories/saudi.html 2) Ibid. 3) See Salon, November 19, 2001 and Intelligence Newsletter, March 2, 2000. 4) Anthony M. DeStefano, "Ex-Agent Had Key Data Stock scam charges have eerie link," Newsday, May 29, 2002 http://prisonplanet.com/Ex_Agent_Had_Key_Data.htm. 5) Gary Dobray, http://www.onthecanvas.com/body_politic.htm
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