Salem bin Laden

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." -- Tom Clancy
I used this quote when talking about the speculation involving the Knights Templar. I'm not a great believer in coincidences... but they do happen. Most butterflies don't affect the whether. Still, in the sweep of history, Occam's Razor is often a useful tool: The simplist explanation that covers the known facts is likely to be the true one. (Note weasel words "known facts" and "likely".)

In recent times, the surge of Muslim extremism became evident when the Shah of Iran was deposed. Jimmy Carter read the situation well, and didn't confront the Ayatolla directly. Under Carter, no hostages were killed, we seized billions of dollars (which weren't fully returned until the Poppy Bush administration) and the religious rage of the extremists was directed away from the US.

Ronald Reagan screwed up. He and his McCarthy-era leftovers viewed the world in stark us-vs.-them terms, with the Soviet Union as The Big Them. To be sure, the Soviet Union was the single biggest threat to world peace (not to mention its own citizens) but it wasn't the only one. The miserable failure of the Reagan/Bush administration to see beyond the hammer and sickle led directly to 9/11 and continue to haunt us today.

Osama bin Laden was trained by the US and what became the al Queda terrorist network was partially financed by the US. He was on our side, such as it was; one of our agents fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan since we didn't want to confront them directly. While Osama never really was our friend, regarding any non-Muslim Westernized government as the Great Satan (which included Iraq and Saudi Arabia), he was nomininally on our side and worked for US interests.

What changed? Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorists were blowing blowing up US soldiers in Lebannon.

Let's take a closer look at Salem bin Laden. One of 17 brothers of Osama, Salem was George W. Bush's "angel", a hidden business partner. This has never been proven conclusively, though it should have been easy to demonstrate one way or the other. George W's first instinct is always to lie and his second instinct is always to run away, and the conservatives news media lets him get away with the most astonishing discrepancies. Arbusto became Harken Energy and was related to Iran-Contra financiers BCCI.

Salem bin Laden himself is not around to answer questions, having died in an accident that is still something of a mystery as George HW Bush was running for president in May of 1988. (It's hard not to think of similar light-plane crashes of other thorns in the side of the Bush's, including Mel Carnahan, running against John Ashcroft in 2000 and Paul Wellstone, who was going to keep the Senate in Democrat hands in 2002. It seems unlikely that they are related, but it's a bit of a coincidence that such crashes happen when they do and that they always favor the Bush family.)

While the bin Laden family has publicly disavowed Osama, they are one of the major benificiaries of 9/11, as this archive of a Wall Street Journal report from Sept. 27, 2001 shows. Many Republicans, from Poppy Bush to James Baker and beyond have ties to the Carlyle Group and other related interests. (The article also mentioned that Salem and W. met in the Texas National Guard in 1976. We know Bush Lite deserted his post, perhaps he hung out with the billionaire family who had better drugs. In any event, the ties between the families go back at least that far.

Days after 9/11, two dozen members of the bin Laden family left the US in a Saudi-chartered plane after cursory interviews. This is very unusual, say other law-enforcement experts. Letting bin Laden family members flee the country could be the proper response so innocents escape the anger of the US populace, or it could be payback for all the money that the bin Ladens have shuffled to the Bushes and their cronies. Or both. We don't know, and the questions have never been asked publicly. (Moral relativism at work: The Republicans put Monica Lewinski's mother on the witness stand and made her cry with personal questions. The US suffers its biggest terrorist attack on US soil and family members are allowed to leave quietly.)

Salem bin Laden figures into another uninvestigated Bush scandal: In 1980, running for Vice President, George Bush went to Paris to meet with representatives of the Ayatolla Khomeni to urge him to keep the hostages to make President Carter look bad. There has been one trial, which proved nothing about the basic facts of the case (it's simply not illegal for a US citizen to fly to another country). The plane used was of a Saudi friend of the Bushes, and Salem may have been one of the pilots or merely "involved" in Paris.

A PBS article covering some of the same ground concludes, "Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been 'eliminated' as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were never divulged." We may never know what happened, but this crash fails the smell test. It's one of a series of small but potentially damaging cover-ups.

So, here's what we know: A few months before the election, a witness potentially damaging to the Republican candidate, George HW Bush, dies. This witness, Salem bin Laden, is one of the connections between the Bush family and BCCI, the bank that figured into the Iran-Contra scandal of which we still don't know much about. It should be noted that Salem's (and Osama's) father also died in a small plane crash in Texas 20 years earlier.

Salem bin Laden's uninvestigated death is roughly the point in time that Muslim extremists start planning terrorist attacks on US territory. The CCR article mentioned above makes the same point. Of course, it's also roughly the time the Soviet Union dissolved and so the Great Satan, The Big Them, was now the US, The Big Us. We were the logical target. We also know that Osama bin Laden had contacts in the US (since we set them up) and that, like most fanatics, he believes what he wants to and won't be dissuaded by mere facts.

Three other points: 1) Politics trumps religion. Just ask George W or Jeb, who flip-flopped on their religion. I'm sure they're sincere in their faith, or at least as since as a Bush can get. If there is political advantage to be had, religious considerations are shoved aside. 2) Money talks, and in the Middle East the big money is in oil. It would be to the best interests of the bin Laden family (among many others) to keep the US hated (so that we don't take over the countries as the Western powers did after WWI) but militarily powerful (so the oil keeps flowing). This has been perhaps the most significant after effect of 9/11. The terrorists have won. So have the Middle East oil potentates. 3) Terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and al Queda are not merely religious fanatics, they hold personal grudges. For a long time.

Okay, here's my speculation: The death of his brother turned Osama bin Laden's attention away from local issues to attacking the US. Whether or not Salem bin Laden was killed for political reasons, it seems likely that Osama blames the Bushes for his death. I don't think it's much of a coincidence that the first attack on the World Trade Center was planned and set-up during the first Bush administration, or that the second attack was planned and set-up during the second Bush administration. (The Clinton administration had done an enviable job keeping terrorist attacks off US soil. To the Taliban Wing of the GOP, "success" = "failure". Ah, doublespeak.)

Further, since the terrorist attacks on the US (not to mention terrorist attacks in Israel, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc etc etc) play into the hands of Middle East oil interests, terrorism will be hard to stop. Most Muslims are aghast at terrorism and would stop attacks if they could. But it doesn't take too many billionaires to finance nutcases. And if such nutcases make them richer, all the better. Just ask Richard Mellon Sciafe or Rupert Murdock...

Other odd facts dug up while researching this article:

• Iran's first foreign bond sale was May 7, 2002. After 9/11, "Death to America" was dropped from Iranian prayers (gosh, thanks guys!) but despite their designation as part of the Axis of Evil, "Nobody in Germany or Continental Europe agrees with Bush."
• Bush hasn't learned the lesson of the disaterous Reagan/Bush administration. They funded terrorists because the terrorists were fighting the Soviet Union. According to Pravda, Russia's answer to Fox News, Shrub was funding Iranian terrorists in 2002. (I also heard on BBC radio that after the most recent Iraq war the US was funding a group on our terrorism list; a militant Shiite group of Iraqi expatriates based in Iran, because they were against Saddam. How stupid is W?)
• What will likely be the latest apology for lying about the reasons for going to war: Bush's lies had nothing to do with WMD or Axes of Evil or the suffering of the people of Iraq or stuff like that. No, the real reason was that (are you ready) Iraq was considering a switch to Euros. So the war was NOT fought for oil... it was fought for the currency used to buy oil. Did anyone check how much of the bin Laden fortune (and Osama's backing) is in Euros vs. dollars? Hmmm....
• It appears that the lesson learned by the Bushes from the Iranian hostage crisis is that you can buy back hostages if you spend sufficient time blaming your political opponents and/or make a lot of money on the sly. Here's one rather over-the-top report comparing the Iranian hostage situation with the Chinese hostage situation (after they shot down our plane in international waters in 2001).

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