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HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD -- THE SECRET RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD'S TWO MOST POWERFUL DYNASTIES

CHAPTER TWELVE:  The Arabian Candidate

In the presidential race of 2000, George W. Bush had the advantage of instant name recognition across the land. His birthright included a spectacular Republican fundraising apparatus. [i] And, as heir to an extraordinary brain trust, he had the ultimate Washington insiders and oil industry executives at his side -- his father, a former president; James Baker, one of the most powerful nonelected officials in American history; Donald Rumsfeld, a former secretary of defense; Condoleezza Rice, who had served on the elder Bush's National Security Council and was a director of Chevron; [ii] and Dick Cheney, the former  secretary of defense who had become CEO of Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

But for all its advantages, the Bush political legacy was also a mixed blessing. It carried the liability of being a nationally known political brand that had failed. Among the senior Bush's chief contributions to the American political lexicon was a solemn declaration that had come to be synonymous with broken political promises -- "Read my lips -- no new taxes." Who else had been derided on the cover of national magazines as a "wimp"?

To make George W. Bush's task more complicated, the 2000 campaign was taking place at the end of a prosperous eight-year Democratic reign. The Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, as embarrassing and damaging as it was for Clinton, had played out during a mood of national economic euphoria. It was an era of dot-com millionaires, bulging 401Ks, frenzied online day traders, and SUVs driven by soccer moms. Twenty-two million new jobs had been created during the Clinton years. Unemployment had fallen to its lowest levels in decades. The Dow Jones average was flirting with 12,000. Nasdaq had  broken 5,000. It was a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity.  America seemingly ruled the world as never before. With Vice President Al Gore the uncontested Democratic nominee, the challenge for the GOP was clear. Bush had to make the case, as one Republican media consultant joked, that because things had never been better, it was time for a change. [1]

The task of reinventing and marketing this flawed brand fell to Karl Rove, Bush's longtime friend, confidant, and handler who had earned the sobriquet Bush's Brain. His solution was to create a Rorschach test candidate so that moderates, conservatives, and independents would see in Bush exactly what they wanted to see. Bush's theme of "compassionate conservatism" meant whatever one wanted it to mean. To Wall Street Republicans, who couldn't care less about social issues crucial to the antiabortion, antigay, pro gun Christian right, Bush was his father's son, a genial and appealing moderate who would be good for business. To the powerful cadres of the radical Christian right, Bush's vow to restore honor and integrity to the White House, his promise that his deepest commitment was to his faith and his family, meant that he was unmistakably one of them.

But few voters realized, for example, how dissimilar the Texas governor was from his father. Not content merely to bring back the ancien regime of the Reagan-Bush era, George W. wooed key conservative constituencies that the elder Bush had failed to bring into his camp. One was the powerful Christian right. [2] Given his difficulties winning the trust of born-again evangelicals during the 1988 presidential campaign, the elder Bush had given his son the task of working with the campaign's liaison to the Christian right, an Assemblies of  God evangelist named Doug Wead. [3] When evangelists asked Vice President Bush trick questions designed to reveal whether he was really one of the flock, he almost always stumbled. But his son was a natural. According to Wead, if asked what argument George W. would give to gain entry to heaven, he would say, "I know we're all sinners, but I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior." [4]

Bush had become so attuned to all the nuances of the evangelical subcultures that virtually no one questioned the sincerity of his acceptance of Christ. But even if one did, as author Joan Didion has noted, it did not matter. [5] The larger point was that Bush had replaced his father's visionless pragmatism with the Manichaean certitudes of Good and Evil. Where the elder Bush was, as one colleague put it, "utterly devoid of conviction" on almost any subject, [6] his son was forging a neo Reaganite vision that jibed with an evangelical sense of destiny. Dubya's bond with the Christian right was a crucial part of what distinguished him from his father.

As Bush contemplated his candidacy, he repeatedly met with evangelical leaders, and in October 1999, he addressed the powerful but secretive Council for National Policy, a body that had attracted the who's who of the evangelical movement. [7] [iii] The organization's founding president was Dr. Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, prophetic military-religious thrillers that extol the Rapture, the moment when true believers in Christ will be "raptured" into heaven.

At the time, the Christian right had focused largely on domestic issues concerning values and morality -- abortion, homosexuality, gun control, prayer in the schools, and so on. But LaHaye and his millions of followers -- the eleven books in his series have sold 55 million copies -- added a new foreign policy dimension to its agenda, specifically with regard to the Middle East. According to LaHaye, the armies of the Antichrist would soon have their final battle with Christ and "witness the end of history" after a series of conflicts in the Middle East -- not unlike those taking place today. [8] This belief that the events in the Middle East were part of God's plan, that Christ would return only after Israel truly controlled the Holy Land, put the Christian right on course for a low-profile liaison with a highly unlikely political ally: hardline, pro Israeli, neoconservative defense policy intellectuals.

***

The neocons, who had also bedeviled his father, were the other constituency with whom Bush quietly mended fences. In the late eighties and early nineties, one may recall, defense policy makers Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who had close ties to the Israeli right, had criticized George H. W. Bush first for his pro-Saddam policies and later for not ousting Saddam after the Gulf War. In 1992, the notorious Defense Planning Guidance paper written by Wolfowitz argued for military action in the Middle East as part of a larger plan to rid the world of rogue states -- but the Bush White House had rejected it as too militaristic.

In 1998, Perle and Wolfowitz, along with sixteen other prominent neoconservatives from a group called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), lobbied President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. [9] But rather than overthrow Saddam, Clinton continued a policy of containment through periodic air strikes.

By the time George W. Bush put together his team of advisers in 1999, however, several of its key members, including his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Perle and Wolfowitz, had signed on to the Project for a New American Century. Untutored as he was in foreign policy, Bush's own positions on crucial issues in the Middle East were not yet fully formed. But now the hard-line neocons had his ear, and picking up from Wolfowitz's Defense Planning Guidance paper, they put forth a grandiose vision for American foreign policy of the next century.  The language used in their reports was the language of world domination. One such PNAC report referred admiringly to Wolfowitz's  infamous work as a "blueprint for maintaining global U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests," [10] and asserted that its judgments were still sound.

That Bush was amenable to some of the same Middle East policies that his father had rejected was not widely known to the public -- but it was not entirely secret either. In November 1999, Perle, by then an adviser to Bush, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the candidate was drafting a speech calling for Saddam Hussein's removal from power. He added that Bush's speech would be critical of Clinton and would say, "it's time to finish the job. It's time for Saddam Hussein to go." [11] According to Perle, Bush also planned to say that it was understandable that his father's administration had underestimated the Iraqi leader's ability to stay powerful. When the presidential race got under way in 2000, however, no such statements about Iraq were forthcoming.

***

For all the firepower behind Bush's candidacy, his nomination was not a foregone conclusion. On February 1, 2000, insurgent Arizona senator John McCain won the crucial opening primary in New Hampshire, beating Bush by an astonishing 19 percentage points. An authentic Vietnam war hero who had been a longtime prisoner of war, McCain had cast himself as a crusading pied piper leading his horde of McCainiacs around the country on a bus he called the Straight Talk Express.

McCain's challenge brought out Bush's true colors. The next major primary state was South Carolina, one of the most conservative in the Union, and Bush retaliated aggressively by painting the conservative McCain as a liberal. He blitzed the state with brutal attack ads on TV, on radio, in print, and by telephone. He appeared before thousands of evangelicals at Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist college that had banned interracial dating. He declined to endorse the Republican  governor's opposition to flying the Confederate flag above the statehouse. [12] 

Thousands of voters got phone calls asserting that McCain's wife had mob ties, that McCain had illegitimate children, that he had a "black" child, that there had been an abortion in the McCain family. [13]  A group of Bush supporters called Republicans for Clean Air spent $2.5 million on commercials attacking McCain and distorting his record on the environment. Ads went out saying McCain opposed breast cancer research even though his sister was fighting the disease. [iv]

Astonished by the ferocity of the attacks, McCain told a reporter, "They know no depths, do they? They know no depths." [14] But Bush's tactics proved successful. On February 19, he trounced McCain 53 percent to 42 percent in South Carolina. Three weeks later, on the March 7 "Super Tuesday" primaries, Bush won California, Ohio, Georgia, Missouri, and Maryland to all but lock up the Republican nomination.

If the vitriol from the Bush campaign did not poison the body politic across the United States, it was because when it came to the care and feeding of the press, no candidate that season surpassed George W. Bush. As he traveled about the country by bus, plane, and train, Bush joshed with reporters about their romances, handed out nicknames to pet journalists, put his arm around them, slapped them on the back, and passed out cookies and treats. In a documentary she did for HBO, Journeys with George, NBC television producer Alexandra Pelosi said that after the Bush staff bought her four birthday cakes, and her network bought her none, "I started to wonder, who am I working for?"

She wasn't the only journalist who was being wooed. "We were writing about trivial stuff because he charmed the pants off us," explained Richard Wolffe, who covered the campaign for London's Financial Times. [15] Whenever Bush journeyed to the back of the press bus, explaining earnestly how much he loved a good bologna sandwich, making corny jokes, giving a young woman an orange and telling her, "You are the orange of my eye," reporters "went weak in the knees," Wolffe added. Thanks to such warm relations with the media, Bush repeatedly turned his liabilities into assets. A poor public speaker who made one verbal gaffe after another, Bush played the self-deprecating common man under fire by the know-it-all intellectuals. [16] [v] Intimate with the Wise Men of Washington since childhood, scion to one of the greatest political dynasties in American history, Bush was even able to sell himself as an outsider to power. "My zip code is 78701," Bush said on Face the Nation, referring to his Austin, Texas, address. "It's not Washington, D.C. If you were to call me on the telephone, it would be area code 512, not 202." [17]

At one campaign stop after another, Bush delivered the same canned speeches asserting that his priorities were his faith and his family -- and reporters dutifully did his bidding. "I have not learned one single thing about his policies or him," said Wayne Salter, a Dallas Morning News reporter who had covered Bush for years in Texas and followed him during the primaries. "We are lemmings. We follow [the Bush campaign] like lemmings and do exactly what they say." [18]

On the rare occasion that they did not obey and dared to probe beneath the surface, reporters learned the hard way the high price to be paid: they would be denied access to the candidate -- access that was the lifeblood of a Washington journalist's career. When Alexandra Pelosi asked Bush if he was certain that every prisoner executed on his watch as Texas governor was guilty, Bush, who had coyly flirted with her throughout the campaign, suddenly became brusque, gave a terse answer, and later chastised her for violating the rules of engagement.  "I'm not answering your questions," he told her afterward. "You  came after me the other day. You went below the belt." [19] 

And so Pelosi backed off. "All of our careers are tied to George Bush," she said. Like the rest of the press corps, she had realized that tangling with him was bad for business. "If I throw him a hardball, he'll push me into the outfield. And it's my job to maintain my network's relationship to the candidate." [20]

As a result, the scripted, fabricated reality put together by Rove and his team was disseminated by the media virtually unchallenged.  In the bright lights of the mass media, tens and tens of millions of Americans saw Bush as the candidate of the common man, a Washington outsider, a moderate, a centrist, a compassionate conservative.  The more complex reality wasn't part of the picture. Few saw him as he was, a candidate of Big Oil, the ultimate insider, and a radical conservative who was closely tied both to the evangelical right and to hawkish neoconservative defense policy makers. In Harper's, Joe Conasoh raised compelling questions about Bush's rise to riches and his ties to the oil industry. A handful of small liberal publications followed suit. And the Intelligence Newsletter, a tiny publication with a keen eye on the intelligence community but a weaker grasp of what animates American politics, reported on Bush's close ties to the Saudis. [21] [vi]

But those were rare exceptions. Even the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania had not put terrorism on the radar screen of the American electorate. No major media outlet asked about Bush's ties to the Saudis or the Carlyle Group [vii] and how that might affect dealing with the forces of terror.

***

If the Saudis had been happy with the presidency of George H. W. Bush -- and they were -- they must have been truly ecstatic that his son was the Republican candidate for president. Indeed, the relationship between the two dynasties had come a long way since the seventies when Khalid bin Mahfouz and Salem bin Laden had flown halfway around the world to buy a secondhand airplane from James Bath, George W. Bush's old friend from decades before. Even bin Mahfouz's subsequent financing of the Houston skyscraper for James Baker's family bank or the Saudi bailout of Harken Energy that helped George W. Bush make his fortune were small potatoes compared with what had happened since. 

The Bushes and their allies controlled, influenced, or possessed substantial positions in a vast array of companies that dominated the energy and defense sectors. Put it all together, and there were myriad ways for the House of Bush to engage in lucrative business deals with the House of Saud and the Saudi merchant elite.

The Saudis could give donations to Bush-related charities. They could invest in the Carlyle Group's funds or contract with one of the many companies owned by Carlyle in the defense sector or other industries.

James Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, represented both the giant oil companies who did business with the Saudis as well as the defense contractors who sold weapons to them. Its clients also included Saudi insurance companies and the Saudi American Bank. It negotiated huge natural gas projects in Saudi Arabia. It even represented members of the House of Saud itself. And the firm's role was not limited to merely negotiating contracts. When global energy companies needed to devise policies for the future, when government bodies required attention, Baker Botts was there.

And the Saudis were also linked to Dick Cheney through Halliburton, the giant Texas oil exploration company that had huge interests in the kingdom. [22] [viii]

How much did it all come to? What was the number? Where did the money go? With the understanding that the sums were paid by both individuals and entities to both individual and entities, for diverse purposes at different times, it is nonetheless possible to arrive at a reckoning that is undoubtedly incomplete but which by its very size suggests the degree and complexity of the House of Bush-House of Saud relationship.

In charitable contributions alone, the Saudis gave at least $3.5 million to Bush charities -- $1 million by Prince Bandar to the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, $1 million by King Fahd to Barbara Bush's campaign against illiteracy, $500,000 by Prince Al Waleed to Philips Academy, Andover, to finance a newly created George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship Fund, and a $1-million painting from Prince Bandar to George W. Bush's White House. [23] 

Then, there were the corporate transactions. As mentioned earlier, in 1987, a Swiss bank linked to BCCI and a Saudi investor bailed out Harken Energy, where George W. Bush was a director, with $25 million in financing. At the Carlyle Group, investors from the House of Saud and their allies put at least $80 million into Carlyle funds. While  it was owned by Carlyle, BDM, and its subsidiary Vinnell, received at  least $1.188 billion in contracts from the Saudis. Finally, Halliburton inked at least $180 million in deals with the Saudis in November 2000, just after Dick Cheney began collecting a lucrative severance  package there.

In all, at least $1.476 billion had made its way from the Saudis to the House of Bush and its allied companies and institutions. [ix] It could safely be said that never before in history had a presidential candidate -- much less a presidential candidate and his father, a former president been so closely tied financially and personally to the ruling family of another foreign power. Never before had a president's personal fortunes and public policies been so deeply entwined with another nation. 

And what were the implications of that? In the case of George H. W. Bush, close relations with the Saudis had at times actually paid dividends for America -- certainly in terms of the Saudi cooperation during the Gulf War, for example. But that carried with it a high price. The Bushes had religiously observed one of the basic tenets of Saudi-American relations, that the United States would not poke its nose into Saudi Arabia's internal affairs. That might have been fine if the kingdom was another Western democracy like, say, Great Britain or Germany or Spain. By the late nineties, it was clear that Saudi Arabia, as much as any other country in the world, was responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Now that Islamists were killing Americans in the Khobar Towers bombing and in Kenya and Tanzania, America's national security was at stake. What had previously been considered a purely domestic issue for the Saudis -- the  House of Saud's relationship to Islamist extremists -- was now a matter of America's national security. Hundreds had already been killed by Saudi-funded terrorists, yet former president Bush and James Baker continued their lucrative business deals with the Saudis apparently without asking the most fundamental questions.

Now, of course, George W. Bush was closing in on the White House. It remained to be seen how, if elected, he would deal with the Saudis and the global terrorist threat. Federal election laws prohibit foreign nationals from funding American political candidates. But the Saudis were not like last-minute holiday shoppers. They had begun buying their American politicians years in advance.

***

The close relationship between the two great dynasties was not the only factor that might interfere with Bush's acting against the growing terrorist threat. Republicans had just woken up to the fact that there were roughly 7 million Muslims in America [24] [x] -- a huge pool of voters who had largely been ignored by both political parties. To remedy that, Bush campaign strategist Grover Norquist came up with an aggressive plan to win them over by making alliances with groups run by Islamic fundamentalists. He invented the notion of a Muslim-American electoral bloc.

A bearded, stocky, Harvard-educated intellectual who described himself as a "winger" of the radical right, Norquist gained notoriety in  the nineties as the right-hand man of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich when Gingrich's power was at its zenith. When Gingrich's star fell, Norquist moved on and hitched his wagon to two of the most powerful conservatives in Washington, Tom DeLay, the House majority whip, and Dick Armey, the majority leader. Norquist's secret was that he had managed to link the moneymen of the big lobbying groups on K Street in Washington to the hard-core ideological right.

As the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist was a founding member of the Islamic Institute, a nonprofit foundation promoting Muslim political movements. His Muslim partner, Khaled Saffuri, was deputy director for the American Muslim Council (AMC) and had an extensive network of contacts with other Muslim-American leaders.

On the surface, Norquist's stratagem to win the Muslim-American vote had a powerful political appeal. Muslims had voted two to one for Clinton in 1996, [25] but Norquist argued that they could easily be won over to the Republican side. It is axiomatic that come election time, every American presidential candidate rallies wholeheartedly behind Israel. But the Republicans could make the case that Bush's ties to the oil lobby made him more receptive to Arab and Muslim concerns. In  addition, his father had been relatively tough on Israel and had in 1991 threatened to suspend loans to Israel in an effort to stop ongoing Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. [26] "That was a sense the Bush people played up: 'I'm my father's son,' and people liked that," said James Zogby, the head of the Arab American Institute, who served as a Gore adviser during the campaign. Finally, and perhaps most important, when Al Gore picked a Jewish running mate, Joe Lieberman, Muslims became much more receptive to Republicans.

One problem with Norquist's strategy, however, was that Muslim Americans are not a homogeneous ethnic group. Many are African Americans who converted to Islam. Many are immigrants from Pakistan, India, Iran, Africa, and the Middle East. Less than 20 percent of American Muslims are of Arab descent. Among Arab Americans there are Arabs who immigrated before the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and who are usually moderate, and there are Muslims who came recently and are more likely to be Islamic fundamentalists. There are many different Islamic sects, and each has a different agenda. Finally,  even though the vast majority of Muslim Americans are moderates who are well integrated into American society, many of the biggest and most powerful Muslim organizations in the United States are run by Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalists.

The inordinate influence of Wahhabi Islam in the American Muslim community dates back to the eighties, when the Saudis saw an opportunity to gain sway over the burgeoning new Islamic community in the United States by establishing what author Steven Schwartz calls the "Wahhabi lobby." In many ways, Schwartz says, to win political power in America, the Saudis chose to replicate the model created by influential Jewish and Israeli lobbying groups. With Saudi backing, American Muslims started organizations like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was similar to the Anti- Defamation League; the American Muslim Council (AMC), which was modeled on the American Jewish Committee; the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which was similar to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and so on. [27]

As Schwartz pointed out in congressional testimony, the generous Saudi support of Islam in the United States could easily be documented on the official website of the Saudi embassy. [28] [xi] In 1995, the Saudi government reported $4 million in donations to construct a mosque complex in Los Angeles, named after Ibn Taymiyyah, one of the forefathers of Wahhabism. The same year, the website reported a $6-million donation for a mosque in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1999, the Saudis helped CAIR buy land for its Washington, D.C., headquarters. In 2000, the kingdom contributed to Islamic centers and mosques in Washington, Los Angeles, Fresno, Denver, and Harrison, New York. In all, Schwartz estimated that over many years the Saudis have given at least $324 million to mosques and Islamic groups in the United States. As a result, out of thousands of mosques in the United States -- estimates range from twelve hundred to as high as six thousand -- as many as 80 percent have come under Wahhabi control. [29] According to Schwartz, that means having authority over property, buildings, appointment and training of imams, the content of preaching, the distribution of Friday sermons from Riyadh, and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores.

Innocent as such charitable contributions may sound, in fact they were effectively a continuation of the same global apparatus that had created and funded Al Qaeda. Far from being confined to the Middle East, such charitable funding went to Muslims all over the world -- including the United States. This was money that went not just to fund terrorist activities but to support thousands of mosques, schools, and Islamic centers that were dedicated to the jihad movement in non-Muslim countries.

Just how rigorous Schwartz was in arriving at his figure of $324 million in Saudi funding is unclear, but other sources suggest his estimate is not an exaggeration. According to U.S. News and World Report, since 1975, the Saudis have allocated a total of $70 billion to this international campaign. [30] That makes the Saudi program, according to Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think tank, the biggest worldwide propaganda campaign in history -- far bigger than Soviet propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War.

As Schwartz noted, even in the United States the money went to charities "many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism." [31] Al-Kifah Refugee Center, the Brooklyn branch of which was the locus of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy, was effectively such a U.S. outpost for Al Qaeda. Even events sponsored by supposedly mainstream national Muslim groups could be overtly anti-Semitic. At a 1998 rally sponsored by CAIR and the American Muslim Council, for example, five hundred people sang a song with the lyrics "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes."

As a result, Norquist's Muslim strategy was sometimes criticized -- usually from the right -- for giving credibility to Muslim groups that seemed harmless, but were in fact supporting extremist interests. [xii] Outspoken critics of the policy included conservative writers and commentators such as Frank Gaffney, Cal Thomas, Michelle Malkin, Kenneth Timmerman, and David Keene. [32] According to Mona Charen, "The names of the Saudi fronts are benign, but a cursory examination of the leaders reveals their radicalism. Eric Vickers, executive director of the American Muslim Council, has refused to denounce any terror group practicing suicide bombing in the Middle East and has even declined to denounce Al Qaeda, calling it a 'resistance movement.'" [33]  If there were any doubt, AMC's website made its position about  Islamist terrorism quite clear, warning its Muslim readers that when the Feds came to investigate terrorism, "Don't talk to the FBI." [34]

According to Mustafa Elhussein, secretary of a center for Muslim intellectuals known as the Ibn Khaldun Society, "There is a great deal of bitterness that such groups have tarnished the reputation of mainstream Muslims" because "self-appointed leaders ... spew hatred toward America and the West and yet claim to be the legitimate spokespersons for the American Muslim community." [35] Elhussein believes not only that they should "be kept at arm's length from the political process, but that they should be actively opposed as extremists."

Nevertheless, with Norquist working behind the scenes, Bush aggressively pursued the Islamists in hopes of winning their endorsements. In appearances on TV, Bush and fellow campaign staffers referred not just to churches and synagogues as places of worship, but to mosques as well. Again and again, Governor Bush sought out meetings with Muslim leaders -- often without looking into their backgrounds. He invited the founder of the American Muslim Council, Abdurahman Alamoudi, to the governor's mansion in Austin. In the mid-1990s, Alamoudi had played an important role in recruiting as many as a hundred "Islamic lay leaders" for the U.S. military. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had arranged for "an arm of the Saudi government" called the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences to train "soldiers and civilians to provide spiritual guidance when paid Muslim chaplains aren't available." The Journal added that there were indications that "the school ... disseminates the intolerant and anti Western strain of Islam espoused by the [Saudi] kingdom's religious establishment." A self-proclaimed supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, Alamoudi reportedly attended a terrorist summit in Beirut later in 2000 with leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda. [36] [xiii] But such a militant background did not keep Alamoudi away from Norquist and Bush. According to an article by Frank Gaffney, Alamoudi wrote two checks for $10,000 each, one an apparent loan, to help found Norquist's Islamic Institute. [37] [xiv]

***

On March 12, 2000, Bush and his wife, Laura, met with more Muslim leaders at a local mosque in Tampa, Florida. [38] Among them was Sami Al Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian who was an associate professor of engineering at the University of South Florida. George and Laura Bush had their photo taken with him at the Florida Strawberry Festival. Laura Bush made a point of complimenting Al-Arian's wife, Nahla, on her traditional head scarf and asked to meet the family.  Nahla told the candidate, "The Muslim people support you." Bush met their lanky son, Abdullah Al Arian, and, in a typically winning gesture, even nicknamed him Big Dude. [39] In return, Big Dude's father, Sami Al-Arian, vowed to campaign for Bush and he soon made good on his promise in mosques all over Florida.

But Al-Arian had unusual credentials for a Bush campaigner. Since 1995, as the founder and chairman of the board of World and Islam Enterprise (WISE), a Muslim think tank, Al-Arian had been under investigation by the FBI for his associations with Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terrorist group. [40] Al-Arian brought in Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the number-two leader in Islamic Jihad, to be the director of WISE. A strong advocate of suicide bombings against Israel, Shallah was allegedly responsible for killing scores of Israelis in such attacks. [41]

Al-Arian also brought to Tampa as a guest speaker for WISE none other than Hassan Turabi, the powerful Islamic ruler of Sudan who had welcomed Osama bin Laden and helped nurture Al Qaeda in the early nineties. 

Al-Arian has repeatedly denied that he had any links to Islamic terrorism. But terrorism experts have a different view. "Anybody who brings in Hassan Turabi is supporting terrorists," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's former top counterterrorist official, now retired and working as a security consultant. [42]

Nor were those Al-Arian's only ties to terrorists. According to American Jihad by Steven Emerson, in May 1998 a WISE board member named Tarik Hamdi personally traveled to Afghanistan to deliver a satellite telephone and battery to Osama bin Laden. [43] In addition, Newsweek reported that Al-Arian had ties to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Among his claims to fame, the magazine said, Al-Arian had "made many phone calls to two New York-area Arabs who figured in the World Trade Center bombing investigation." [44]

There were also Al Arian's own statements. In 1998, he appeared as a guest speaker before the American Muslim Council. [45] According to conservative author Kenneth Timmerman, Al-Arian referred to Jews as "monkeys and pigs" and added, "Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution! Revolution! Until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!"

That speech was part of a dossier compiled on Al-Arian by federal agents who have had him under surveillance for many years because of suspected ties to terrorist organizations. In a videotape in that file, Al Arian was more explicit. When he appeared at a fundraising event, Timmerman says, he "begged for $500 to kill a Jew." [46] [xv]

Finally -- a fact that Bush could not have known at the time -- Al-Arian would be arrested in Florida in February 2003 on dozens of charges, among them conspiracy to finance terrorist attacks that killed more than one hundred people -- including two Americans. The indictment alleged that "he directed the audit of all moneys and property of the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] throughout the world and was the leader of the PIJ in the United States." [47] The charges refer to the Islamic Jihad as "a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in acts of violence including murder, extortion, money  laundering, fraud, and misuse of visas, and operated worldwide including in the Middle District of Florida." Al-Arian was still facing prosecution in December 2003. [xvi]

Astonishingly enough, the fact that dangerous militant Islamists like Al-Arian were campaigning for Bush went almost entirely unnoticed. Noting the absence of criticism from Democrats, Bush speechwriter David Frum later wrote, "There is one way that we Republicans are very lucky -- we face political opponents too crippled by political correctness to make an issue of these kinds of security lapses." [48]

Those who were most outraged were staunch Bush supporters and staffers like Frum. "Not only were the al-Arians not avoided by the Bush White House, they were actively courted," Frum wrote in the National Review more than two years later. "Candidate Bush allowed  himself to be photographed with the Al-Arian family while campaigning in Florida. ... The Al-Arian case was not a solitary lapse. ... That outreach campaign opened relationships between the Bush campaign and some very disturbing persons in the Muslim-American community." [49]

Nevertheless, Norquist continued to build a coalition of Islamist groups to support Bush. On July 31, 2000, the Republican National Convention opened in Philadelphia with a prayer by a Muslim, Talat Othman, in which Othman offered a duaa, a Muslim benediction. [50] It was the first time a Muslim had addressed any major U.S. political gathering. A third-generation American and a businessman from Chicago of Muslim-Arab descent, Othman was chairman of the Islamic Institute. He had also been the board member of Harken Energy representing the interests of Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi investor who had helped Bush make his fortune by bailing out Harken in the late eighties.

When the convention ended on August 3, after George W. Bush had formally been nominated for president, between his family's extended personal and financial ties to the House of Saud and his campaign's ties to Islamists, it could be said that he was truly the Arabian Candidate.

***

Not that Bush was alone in pursuing Muslim voters. Gore occasionally mentioned Muslims as well and met with Muslim leaders at least three times. But because of their unshakable ties to Israel, the Democrats rarely got more than a mixed reception. Hillary Clinton, who was then running for Senate, had won goodwill for endorsing a Palestinian state in 1998. But when she returned a $50,000 donation from the American Muslim Alliance, saying their web site had offensive material, Muslims saw her as pandering to Jewish voters in New York. [51] Later in the summer, the Democrats invited Maher Hathout, the senior adviser at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, to give a prayer at the Democratic National Convention. But the Gore team was always a step behind. [52]

Meanwhile, Norquist associate Khaled Saffuri had been named national adviser on Arab and Muslim affairs for the Bush campaign. In September, Saffuri joined Karl Rove in his car as Rove was catching a ride to the airport and explained to him that the vote of Arab Americans -- both Muslims and Christians -- was still within Bush's grasp if he just said the right things. [53] Rove, apparently, was happy to listen to Saffuri's suggestions.

As the campaign headed into the homestretch, the two candidates were neck and neck, but Bush, with his disarming, self- deprecating charm, was winning on issues of style. "I've been known to mangle a syll-obble or two," he told reporters. By contrast, Gore was stuffy and self-conscious. Mocked for repeatedly using the term lockbox to suggest that funding for Social Security and Medicare should be untouchable, Gore was caricatured, not without reason, as a finicky policy wonk. But the level of American political discourse was such that the media obsessed over trivial questions such as whether a character in the movie Love Story had been based on Gore and whether he was concealing a bald spot.

On Tuesday, October 3, 2000, the first debate with Gore was a triumph over expectations for Bush, with his reputation for verbal missteps. Next to the vice president, who came off as a stiff, self-conscious, supercilious pedant, Bush appeared charming and at ease with himself.  Afterward, thousands of articles appeared all over the country criticizing Gore for making irritating sighs and winces while Bush was speaking.

Two days after the debate, on October 5, Bush was in Michigan to meet with GOP activist George Salem and several other Arab Americans to help him prepare for the second debate with Gore. [54] Along with Florida, Michigan was one of two crucial swing states with a big Muslim electorate. An attorney at the politically wired law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Salem had played key roles for the 1984 Reagan Bush campaign and the 1988 Bush-Quayle campaign, and helped Bush raise $13 million from Arab Americans for the 2000 presidential campaign. In addition to being active in Arab-American  affairs, Salem was the lawyer for Saleh Idriss, the owner of the El-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, who was suing the U.S. government over the bombing of his factory, which had allegedly made chemical weapons for Al Qaeda. [xvii] Now he was advising the son as he had once advised the father.

Salem made clear to Bush that two issues that would animate Muslim-American voters were the elimination of racial profiling at airports to weed out terrorists and the use of "secret evidence" against Muslims in counterterrorism investigations. The campaign against secret evidence -- i.e., the use of classified information in a court case -- was a pet project of Sami Al-Arian, the Florida Islamist campaigning for Bush, [55] in part because Al-Arian's brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, had been detained on the basis of secret evidence for nearly four years. [xviii]

On Wednesday, October 11, the second presidential debate took place in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The topic was foreign policy, a field in which Gore was thought to have a major advantage over a Texas governor who had rarely ventured abroad. The first questions had to do with when it would be appropriate to use American military force, especially with regard to the Middle East.

One might surmise that Bush's answers would be congruent with policy papers being drawn up by his advisers. Just a few weeks earlier, in September, the Project for a New American Century, with which so many key Bush advisers were associated, [xix] had released a new position paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which dealt with precisely those questions and articulated a bold new policy to establish a more forceful U.S. military presence in the Middle East. The PNAC plan acknowledged that Saddam Hussein's continued presence in Iraq might provide a rationale for U.S. intervention, but it also asserted that it was desirable to have a larger military presence in the Persian Gulf -- whether or not Saddam was still in power and even if he was not a real threat. "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein," [56] the paper said.

The policy was so radical that even its authors realized that it would be impossible to implement "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." [57] In the pre-9/11 world, voters had not exactly been demanding war in the Middle East or any such radical change in foreign policy. As the presidential campaign neared its last stages, such issues had not even been put before the American electorate. Nor was such a policy likely to playwell with the Muslim voters Bush was courting. So when it was Bush's turn to answer, he gave a far more moderate response. He repeatedly asserted that it was essential for the United States to be "a humble nation."  "Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power,"  he said. "And that's why we've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom. ... If we're an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way, but if we're a humble nation, they'll respect us."

More specifically, Bush dismissed the prospect of toppling Saddam because it smacked of what he called "nation building." He chided the Clinton administration for not maintaining the multilateral anti-Saddam coalition that his father had built up in the Gulf War. [58] [xx]

To the tens of millions of voters who had their eyes trained on their televisions, Bush had put forth a moderate foreign policy with regard to the Middle East that was not substantively different from the policy proposed by Al Gore, or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton's.  Only a few people who had read the papers put forth by the Project for a New American Century might have guessed a far more radical policy had been developed.

After the Middle East had been discussed, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the two candidates a follow-up question from the previous presidential debate about whether they would support laws to ban racial profiling by police. The question referred to recent instances of racism directed at African Americans, but Bush saw his opening.  "There is [sic] other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America,"  he said. "Arab Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that."

Bush was apparently somewhat confused. He had conflated two separate issues -- interrogating Arab Americans at airports because people of Middle Eastern descent might be terrorists, and using secret evidence in court in prosecutions against alleged terrorists. But his onstage listeners did not seem to notice, nor did they point out that Bush's newly found civil libertarian stance ran counter to tendencies he had espoused in the past. Bush was renowned for being at odds with the American Civil Liberties Union. But now Bush was stealing a page right out of the ACLU playbook, arguing in effect that the use of secret  evidence violated the constitutional right to due process of law. In fact, the ACLU had said the same thing in different words, asserting, "The incarceration and deportation of legal residents and others on the basis of secret evidence is a practice reserved for totalitarian countries, not the United States." [59]

Bush's sudden about-face left the Democrats dumbfounded. But they were not about to attack him for adopting a civil libertarian position -- even though he was campaigning with people who were later charged with supporting terrorism. Al Gore scurried to adopt the same position against secret evidence but too late. Bush had been the first candidate to utter the code words -- "racial profiling" and "secret evidence" -- that unlocked Muslim-American support. "Within a few seconds I got thirty-one calls on my cell phone," said Usama Siblani, publisher of an Arab-American newspaper in Michigan. "People were  excited." [60] The American Muslim Political Coordination Council  (AMPCC), an umbrella organization of Muslim political groups, said Bush had shown "elevated concern" over the matter. [xxi]

George Salem was elated. "It is unprecedented in U.S. presidential debate history for a candidate for president of the United States to reference such support for Arab-American concerns, and to single out Arab Americans for attention," he said. [61]

***

The day after the debate, however, October 12, as the USS Cole was docked in Aden, Yemen, for refueling, a white fiberglass skiff with two men and five hundred pounds of a powerful plastic explosive approached the navy destroyer and exploded, killing seventeen American sailors. [62] Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had no doubt that bin Laden was behind it and hoped to retaliate even though time was running out for the Clinton administration. [63]

In the presidential campaign, however, even the slaughter of seventeen more Americans did not make terrorism a major issue. Quietly, the Bush campaign was courting a number of Saudi-sponsored organizations and individuals such as the American Muslim Council and Sami Al-Arian that were tied to the very same Islamic fundamentalist charities, such as the Holy Land Foundation and the SAAR network of Islamic charities, that counterterrorism officials were trying to investigate. But American voters would never learn that.

What they heard instead was a response by Bush that suggested he had compassion for those who had lost their lives: "Today, we lost sailors because of what looks like to be a terrorist attack." But as Bush continued, his response clearly showed he did not yet understand the new era of terrorism: "Terror is the enemy. Uncertainty is what the world is going to be about, and the next president must be able to address uncertainty. And that's why I want our nation to develop an antiballistic missile system that will have the capacity to bring certainty into this uncertain world." None of Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks had involved missiles, of course, and Bush's proposal of an antiballistic missile system suggests that he failed to understand that Al Qaeda's terrorism was fundamentally different from conventional warfare.

Meanwhile, in response to the three garbled sentences Bush had uttered about Arab Americans in the second debate, endorsements from Muslim groups rolled in for Bush. On Thursday, October 19, a Michigan umbrella group of more than twenty Arab-American groups came out for Bush. The Detroit Free Press reported, "What turned them to Bush, they said, was that he specifically mentioned Arab Americans in the second presidential debate and their concerns about airport profiling and the use of secret evidence." [64]

Four days later, the American Muslim Political Coordination Council called a press conference in Washington and announced its endorsement of George W. Bush. The head of the group, Agha Saeed, explained why: "Governor Bush took the initiative to meet with local and national representatives of the Muslim community. He also promised to address Muslim concerns on domestic and foreign policy issues." [65]

As an umbrella organization speaking for several major national Muslim groups, its endorsement meant thousands and thousands of votes to Bush on November 7 -- especially in Florida, where Al-Najjar's imprisonment was very much a live issue. The cliche was that every vote counted, and this time it would have fresh meaning in the closest and most controversial election in American history.

***

In the end, the outcome of the election would be decided by Florida's electoral college votes. And in Florida the result was so close, and so riddled with irregularities, that a recount was necessary. The battle over the recount soon worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an election with such a razor-thin margin, any one of dozens of factors can be held responsible. Ralph Nader's third-party candidacy had taken votes from Al Gore. Various efforts had been made to dissuade black voters from getting to the polls. The "butterfly" ballots of Palm Beach County were so confusing that they went uncounted. The "hanging chads" and "dimpled chads" -- rectangular bits of paper that were not completely punched out of the punch-card ballots -- led to counting irregularities.

But in the thousands of postmortems about the election, one factor was largely overlooked. According to an exit poll of Muslims in Florida conducted by the American Muslim Alliance, 91 percent voted for Bush, 8 percent for Ralph Nader, and only 1 percent for Al Gore. Likewise, the Tampa Bay Islamic Center estimated that fifty-five thousand Muslims in Florida voted and that 88 percent of them favored Bush. [66] All of which meant that the margin of victory for Bush among Florida Muslims was many, many times greater than his tiny statewide margin of victory of 537 votes.

With the Bush restoration in full swing, GOP partisans eagerly claimed whatever credit they might reasonably take for the Bush victory, and Grover Norquist was no exception. "George W. Bush was elected President of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote," he wrote in the right-wing American Spectator. "... That's right," he added, "the Muslim vote." [67]

Like every other group that contributed to Bush's victory, the Islamists realized that the tiny margin of victory in Florida had  increased their leverage. Agha Saeed, the AMPCC chairman, said, "It won't be long before political analysts realize that Muslim voters have played a historic role." And Sami Al-Arian, the engineering  professor at the University of South Florida who had referred to Jews as "monkeys and pigs," asserted that the role of the Muslim vote in Florida was "crucial, even decisive." [68]

Even the party regulars agreed. As Tom Davis, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, put it, without the Muslim endorsements "Florida would have been reversed." [69] In other words, without the mobilization of the Saudi-funded Islamic groups, George W. Bush would not be president today.

_______________

[i] Giant energy-industry law firms such as Vinson & Elkins and Baker Botts put in $202,850 and $116,121 respectively; high- flying Enron, the corrupt oil giant, contributed $113,800. The oil and gas industry contributed $1,929,451 to Bush -- thirteen  times as much as it gave to Democratic nominee Al Gore. Altogether, the energy sector contributed $2.9 million to Bush and only $325,000 to Gore.

[ii] During her tenure at Chevron, Rice even had an oil tanker named after her. When Bush appointed her to be national security adviser, Chevron quietly renamed the ship Altair Voyager.

[iii] Members included Senator Jesse Helms; Congressmen Dick Armey and Tom DeLay; the Reverend Jerry Falwell; Oliver North; Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum; the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association; the Reverend Pat Robertson of The 700 Club and the Christian Coalition; Ralph Reed of Century Strategies; and Christian Reconstructionist Rousas John Rushdoony.

[iv] McCain had voted against a cancer research project as part of a larger spending bill that he said contained wasteful spending, but he had supported many other bills funding cancer research.

[v] Bush became something of a laughingstock among East Coast liberals for endless gaffes that became known as Bushisms -- all of which only endeared him further to his constituency. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," he told New Hampshire voters. In South Carolina, he asserted, "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" and "We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself." He referred to Kosovars as Kosovian, Greeks as Grecians, and the East Timorese as East Timorians.

When it came to economics, Bush asserted, "A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness." And in Iowa, he explained to voters the dangers of foreign policy: "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you  knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was.  Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there."

[vi] It said that the Bush campaign could run into trouble because "among the figures Bush dealt with indirectly when he ran oil companies was Saudi banker Khaled Bin Mahfouz who, Intelligence Newsletter has learned, is currently under house arrest in a hospital in Taef at the behest of the American authorities. The latter are looking into contributions Mahfouz is said to have made to welfare associations close to terrorist Ussama [sic] Bin Laden." (Bin Mahfouz's lawyer Cherif Sedky denies that bin Mahfouz was in fact under house arrest.)

[vii] According to a search on the Nexis Lexis database, only three articles in the entire country raised the issue during the whole campaign, one by Gene Lyons in the Little Rock Democrat-Gazette, one by John Judis in the American Prospect, and one by David Corn and Paul Lashmar in the Nation. 

[viii] The Saudis did contribute to George H. W. Bush's presidential library, but on that score they were truly bipartisan, having made donations to every presidential library created over the last thirty years.

[ix] For a more complete breakdown of Saudi investments, contracts, and contributions to companies, foundations, and charities owned by the Bushes and their associates, see Appendix C on page 295. It should be noted that the above number is a conservative estimate of the total business done between the Saudis and companies related to the interests of the Bush family and their associates. The figure does not include undisclosed legal fees for deals with the Saudis done by Baker Botts, nor does it include contracts between large publicly held companies, such as the major oil companies, and the Saudis. The actual total will never be known and may well be substantially greater.

[x] There is considerable disagreement as to how many Muslims there are in the United States. Some estimates place the number as low as 3.5 to 4 million, while others go as high as 12 million. A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other organizations in April 2001 put the number at 7 million, and a Cornell University study also came up with the same figure.

[xi] The information on Saudi funding of mosques in the United States has since been removed.

[xii] Subsequent to 9/11, through Operation Greenquest, an attempt to stop the flow of money to terrorists, the U.S. Treasury Department took action against a number of Islamic charities accused of funneling money to terrorists, including the Global  Relief Foundation, the Benevolence International Foundation, and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

[xiii] In September 2003, Alamoudi was arrested after arriving from a trip to the Middle East in which he allegedly tried to transport $340,000 from a group tied to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Prosecutors also said Alamoudi was at the center  of several northern Virginia-based Islamic charity groups, including the International Relief Organization, under investigation for allegedly financing terrorism.  Finally, in December 2003, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Alamoudi had helped back a program at the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America to train Islamist imams for the U.S. military and that even well after 9/11, in 2002, the Pentagon had hired them. The Journal reported that the institute had a number of troubling ties to terrorism and that, according to congressional investigators, one of its clerics was a spiritual adviser to two of the September 11 hijackers.

[xiv] Alamoudi was welcomed at the White House by both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for his work for Muslim causes.

[xv] In an article in the Tampa Tribune, Al-Arian later explained, "In the heat of the moment, one may not use the best expressions, especially during impromptu presentations. I had such regrettable moments. However, on many occasions, some of my speeches were mistranslated or totally taken out of context."

[xvi] In December 2003, clerks at a federal courthouse in Tampa accidentally destroyed search warrants in the Al-Arian case. The documents contained affidavits from federal agents that supported 1995 searches of Al-Arian's home and offices and were among thousands of documents shredded sometime between 1998 and 2002. As this book went to press, there were serious questions as to whether the destruction of the documents might affect his prosecution.

[xvii] Salem also represented the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a foundation that has been tied to terrorism.

[xviii] INS judge R. Kevin McHugh ultimately ruled in Al-Najjar's favor, asserting, "Although there were allegations that the ICP and WISE [the two organizations in question] were fronts for Palestinian political causes, there is no evidence before the  Court that demonstrates that either organization was a front for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. To the contrary, there is evidence in the record to support the conclusion that WISE was a reputable and scholarly research center and the ICP was highly regarded" (emphasis added). This same ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., and Attorney General Janet Reno, who all had access to the secret evidence.

[xix] PNAC signatories who became key figures in the administration of George W. Bush included Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,  Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad, special presidential envoy for Afghanistan.

[xx] Bush reasserted this point of view in the final presidential debate. "It's going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on [Saddam]," he said.  "There may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not  often. I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'" Cheney echoed Bush's position, saying that the United States should not act as though "we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world." 

[xxi] Among the groups operating under the AMPCC are the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), American Muslim Council (AMC), Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

________________

Notes:

1. Stuart Stevens, The Big Enchilada, p. 146.

2. Bush had gotten religion in 1985 when the Reverend Billy Graham visited the Bushes at their summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. "He planted a seed in my heart and I began to change," he said. "... I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people. To put it in spiritual terms, I accepted Christ"; and Lois Romano and George Lardner Jr., "1986: A Life-Changing Year; Epiphany Fueled Candidate's Climb," Washington Post, July 25, 1999, p. A 1.

3. Joan Didion, "Mr. Bush & the Divine," New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Interview with source who worked with Bush in the Reagan-Bush administration.

7. Didion, "Mr. Bush & the Divine"; and Skipp Porteous, "Bush's Secret Religious Pandering," adapted from Penthouse, November 2000.

8. Didion, "Mr. Bush & the Divine."

9. Letter to President William J. Clinton, January 26, 1998, signed by Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, and Robert B. Zoellick, www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm .

10. "Rebuilding America's Defenses, Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century," Project for a New American Century, www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf  .

11. Ann McFeatters, "Bush Drafting Call for Saddam's Ouster," Pittsburgh Post Gazette, November 24, 1999.

12. Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, p. 721.

13. Ibid.; and Dana Milbank, Smashmouth, p. 197.

14. Mark Sherman and Ken Herman, "McCain Blasts Bush Ad Blitz 'That Knows No Depths,'" Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 5, 2003.

15. Journeys with George, HBO documentary directed by Alexandra Pelosi.

16. Jacob Epstein, "The Complete Bushisms," Slate, slate.msn.com/id/76886/.

17. Stevens, The Big Enchilada, p. 121.

18. Journeys with George.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Intelligence Newsletter, March 2, 2000.

22. Craig Unger, "Saving the Saudis," Vanity Fair, October 2003.

23. Time, September 15, 2003; www.andover.edu/news/bush_scholars.htm;  Chicago Tribune, July 4, 2003; and Associated Press, July 18, 2003, final ed.

24. Alexander Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?" Middle East Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 2001), www.meforum.org/article/13/ ; the U.S. Census does not put together data on Muslims, and estimates of the population of Muslims in the United States range from 6 million to 12 million; and Cornell University study on American Muslims, April 2002, http://www.aljazeerah.info/Special%20Reports/Different%20special%20reports/Snapshot%20of%20Moslims%20in%20America.htm  .

25. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

26. Eric Boehlert, "'Betrayed' by Bush," Salon, Apri1 3, 2002.

27. Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam, p. 233.

28. Testimony of Stephen Schwartz, Director, Islam and Democracy Program, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, June 26, 2003.

29. Ibid.

30. David E. Kaplan, "The Saudi Connection," U.S. News and World Report, December 15, 2003, www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031215/usnews/15terror.htm .

31. Testimony of Stephen Schwartz.

32. Frank Gaffney Jr., "A Troubling Influence," FrontPageMagazine.com, December 2003, www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID==11209.

33. Mona Charen, "Saudi Tendrils," Creators Syndicate, February 18, 2003, www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20030218.shtml .

34. Ibid.

35. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

36. Jeff Jacoby, "The Islamist Connections," Boston Globe, February 27, 2003, p. A 15; and Glenn Simpson, "Muslim School Used by Military Has Troubling Ties," Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2003.

37. Gaffney, "A Troubling Influence."

38. Bob McKeown, Dateline NBC, October 28, 2001.

39. Mike Allen and Richard Leiby, "Alleged Terrorist Met With Bush Adviser, Al Arian Part of Muslim Outreach," Washington Post, February 22, 2003, p. A 10.

40. Ibid.

41. Juan Gonzales, "Call Stirs Fears of Jihad Air Terror," Daily News (New York), July 19, 1996, p. 30.

42. Michael Fechter, "Ties to Terrorists," Tampa Tribune, May 28, 1995, p. 1.

43. Steven Emerson, American Jihad, p. 122.

44. Peter Katel and Mark Hosenball, "Foreign Thugs, U.S. Soil: Did Islamic Jihad Have a Covert Base in Florida?" Newsweek, May 6, 1996, p. 35.

45. Kenneth Timmerman, "Arrested Prof Was Guest at Bush White House," WorldNetDaily, Insight Magazine, February 21, 2003, www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31172 . See also Emerson, American Jihad, p. 225.

Arrested prof was guest of Bush at White House
Al-Arian had photo taken with president despite suspicion of links to terror groups

Posted: February 21, 2003, 5:46 pm Eastern, by Kenneth R. Timmerman
© 2008 News World Communications Inc.

USF Professor Sami Al-Arian

A controversial professor who was arrested by federal agents in Tampa, Fla., yesterday had sufficient political connections to be invited to the White House in late May or early June 2001, three months before the al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and to have a photograph taken with President George W. Bush, Insight has learned.

The professor, Sami Amin Al-Arian, was suspended from the University of South Florida, or USF, following the Sept. 11 carnage because of alleged ties to Palestinian terrorists. He reportedly had been under investigation by federal agents in the summer of 2001 when he was cleared by White House staff and the Secret Service to enter the presidential complex.

Just weeks later, Al-Arian's son, who then worked for former Rep. David Bonier, D-Mich., was dragged by Secret Service agents from a White House meeting on June 28 because of security concerns. The incident caused a flap for Bush, and his aides later apologized to appease Muslim critics.

A Palestinian born in Kuwait, the USF professor arrested in Tampa was taken into custody by the FBI along with three others following their indictment by a federal grand jury on 50 counts of terrorist-related charges involving 14 years of alleged activities on behalf of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, an officially cited terrorist organization. The PIJ has claimed responsibility for numerous suicide murders in Israel, including killings of American citizens.

The "meet and greet" session at the White House with Bush in late May or early June 2001 was not the first time Al-Arian had managed to get close to the president. During the 2000 election campaign, the USF professor and alleged U.S. money man for terrorists attended a Bush fund-raiser in Florida where he was photographed with the presidential candidate despite Secret Service protection for the GOP contender.

"Look, Sami Al-Arian was based in Tampa and probably paid money, like anybody else, to attend a fund-raiser," Khaled Saffuri of the Islamic Institute in Washington tells Insight. "If he did something wrong, he'll get his punishment."

The Justice Department alleges that the elder Al-Arian has been the chief fund-raiser and organizer for the PIJ in the United States since 1988, and used his position at the University of South Florida to gain visas to enter the United States for members of the terrorist organization. James Jarboe, FBI special agent in charge of the Tampa field office, told reporters yesterday that the "arrests underscore the vigilance of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] to dismantle and disrupt those who support terrorism." The arrests "also reflect the continued cooperation among the FBI and other federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies as they work together in the JTTF," he added.

One of Al-Arian's colleagues at the University of South Florida, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, left the U.S. precipitously, according to the indictment, after the head of the PIJ was assassinated by an alleged Israeli hit squad in 1996. Shallah surfaced several days later in Damascus, Syria, to become the new secretary general of the terror group. Shallah was among those indicted along with Al-Arian.

The indictment, unsealed at a news conference by Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleges that Al-Arian and his co-conspirators continued to raise funds and organize support networks for the terrorist attacks of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad even after Sept. 11.

The PIJ killings continued. On Nov. 4, 2001, two American citizens, Shoshana Ben-Yishai,16, and Shlomo Kaye, 15, were among the victims of a PIJ shooting attack on a bus in the French Hill area of Jerusalem, say the indictment documents. Again on June 5, 2002, the indictment documents allege, Al-Arian's co-conspirators "murdered 17 people and wounded approximately 45 in a suicide car bombing of a bus in the vicinity of Megiddo Junction near Afula, Israel."

Al-Arian worked closely with the American Muslim Council, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other groups with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia, home to a majority of the suicide murderers alleged to be responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, skyjackings that killed thousands in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania.

Al-Arian also worked closely, according to Insight sources, with top Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist, the founding chairman of the Washington-based Islamic Institute.

On April 5, 2001, the national Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, a far-left group headed by Al-Arian, gave Norquist an award for his work in opposing the use of secret evidence. Norquist told Insight last year that he was "proud" of the award, even though the Coalition was affiliated with the National Lawyer's Guild, a former Soviet-era front organization.

The Islamic Institute's current president, Khaled Saffuri, tells Insight that he "never, ever, helped Sami Al-Arian get into the White House," nor did his friend and business associate Norquist. "Grover didn't know anything about [such] meetings. We learned about them like everyone else."

An associate of Norquist who requested anonymity told Insight he was aware of Al-Arian's problems with the FBI and had even warned the White House about inviting him. "When I saw his name on the invitation list, I told the White House it was going to cause a problem," he told Insight. "The White House has to stand up for their decision. We [Norquist and his groups] had nothing to do with it."

Al-Arian is notorious for his radical anti-American and anti-Semitic statements, leaving several high-level officials in the Bush administration wondering how he could have been cleared by federal law-enforcement officers to enter the White House. All such guests are screened by the Secret Service in conjunction with other federal agencies for any outstanding criminal warrants, investigations or illegal activities. They may, however, be cleared "on higher authority."

His record, however, should have been a red light to anyone. In 1998, as a guest speaker before the convention of the American Muslim Council, Al-Arian spoke of Jews as "monkeys and pigs," adding: "Muhammad is leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution! Revolution! Until victory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!" That speech, according to Insight sources, is part of a large dossier compiled on Al-Arian by federal agents who have had him under surveillance for many years because of suspected ties to terrorist organizations. In a videotape obtained by the FBI, Insight sources reveal, Al-Arian appeared at a fund-raising event for a "mainstream" U.S. Muslim organization where he "begged for $500 to kill a Jew."

The 150-page indictment released by the Justice Department describes dozens of murders by PIJ terrorists. Al-Arian is alleged in the indictment to have raised money for many of these attacks, wiring money to terrorist cells using accounts in Israel and in the West Bank.

Al-Arian has repeatedly denied he is affiliated with any terrorist organizations, particularly after his suspension at the school following an appearance on the Bill O'Reilly show on Fox New Channel, "The O'Reilly Factor." He also has denied knowing that Shallah and other alleged terrorists with whom he worked were connected to terrorist groups. He has said he only is interested in the free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. "It's all about politics," Al-Arian told reporters as he was led away by FBI agents in Tampa.

A number of American Muslim groups, including CAIR, issued statements following the arrests and news conferences, ignoring specifics of the alleged crimes but claiming Muslims were being singled out unfairly by federal law enforcement during heightened tensions involving the Middle East and a possible war with Iraq.

"We are very concerned that the government would bring charges after investigating an individual for many years without offering any evidence of criminal activity," said Omar Ahmad, the chairman of CAIR, in a statement e-mailed to news organizations.

"This action could leave the impression that Al-Arian's arrest is based on political considerations, not legitimate national-security concerns," Ahmad said, echoing sentiments by other Muslim groups, including the Muslim American Society, which claimed in a statement that the arrest of Al-Arian "conforms to a pattern of political intimidation" by the federal government.

The University of South Florida filed a lawsuit late last summer seeking to terminate Al-Arian following his suspension the year before, based on the belief of the USF administration that the suspended professor had abused his position at the university to "cover improper activities." The university accused Al-Arian of raising funds for terrorist groups and bringing terrorists into the United States under academic cover. USF also has accused Al-Arian of supporting groups that have terrorist ties.

Al-Arian is accused with fellow co-defendants of "concealing their association with the PIJ [while seeking] to obtain support from influential individuals in the United States and under the guise of protecting Arab rights."

White House officials had no immediate comment concerning how Al-Arian gained access to Bush on at least two occasions despite known security concerns.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.

46. Timmerman, "Arrested Prof Was Guest at Bush White House"; and Frank Gaffney, "What's Wrong with This Picture?" Washington Times, February 27,  2003.

47. United States of America v. Sami Al-Arian et al., U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, www.usdoj.gov/usao/flm/prl022003indict.pdf .

48. David Frum, "The Strange Case of Sami Al-Arian," National Review, www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary022103.asp .

49. Ibid.

50. Nora Boustany, "One Man, Making a Difference," Washington Post, August 2, 2000.

51. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

52. Ibid.

53. Gaffney, "A Troubling Influence."

54. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

55. Sami Al-Arian, "A Worthy Struggle," Tampa Tribune, August 18, 2002, p. 1.

56. "Rebuilding America's Defenses," Project for a New American Century.

57. Ibid.

58. Jake Tapper, Salon, March 11, 2003; David Sanger, "A Special Report; Rivals Differ on U.S. Role in the World," New York Times, October 29, 2000, p. A 1;  and Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past; Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set," Washington Post, January 12, 2003.

59. Timothy Edgar, ACLU legislative counsel, "Secret Evidence Measure Resoundingly Defeated," http://archive.aclu.org/news/2001/n110801c.html .

60. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

61. Ibid.

62. Ian Brodie, "US Crew Waved as Suicide Bomb Boat Drew Near," Times (London), October 23, 2000.

63. Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth, and Don Van Natta Jr., written by Ms. Miller, "Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action," New York Times,  December 31, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/national/30TERR.html?pagewanted=l&ei=5070&en=5038154b0e30023d&ex=1070859600 .

64. Detroit Free Press, October 20, 2000.

65. "American Muslim PAC Endorses George W. Bush for President," www.iiie.net/Articles/MPACBushEndors.html .

66. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

67. Grover Norquist, "The Natural Conservatives: Muslims Deliver for the GOP," American Spectator, June 2001.

68. Rose, "How Did the Muslims Vote in 2000?"

69. Ibid.

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