Kerry Allies Focus on Bush-Saudi Connection 
By Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com

EDITOR'S NOTE:

This article originally appeared on NewsMax.com on October 18, 2004 and is reprinted here with permission.

It's been a frequent theme of the anti-Bush forces for months now -- President Bush sold out to the Saudis.

But, as the campaign enters its final inning, accusations are reaching a fever pitch.

Already, Michael Moore in his "Fahrenheit 9/11" made the charge claiming that Bush even allowed possible Saudi terrorist supporters to exit the U.S. in the days after 9/11. But, that didn't stick when it was discovered that National Security aide Richard Clarke, who has been a Bush critic since he left government, made the decision to let the Saudis leave. Bush was not even informed of the decision. 

Still, during presidential debates, Kerry made several references to the Saudis and what he claimed was a go-easy policy by the Bush White House. 

Now, Kerry allies and his allies are hitting hard in a wave of TV and radio commercials in key swing states. 

Kerry and the Democratic Party recently introduced two advertisements alleging that President George W. Bush's administration has been giving the Saudi royal family special favors and has become overly reliant on Saudi Arabia for the nations oil supplies. 

The Media Fund, a Democratic group, unleashed the harshest ads yet, spending $6.5 million to run ads highlighting the Saudi theme in battleground Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin. 

One ad suggests the President forced Congress to hide evidence linking the Saudi government to the Sept. 11 hijackers. It also noted the Bush family's long ties to the Saudi royal family.

The ads suggest that ties between the president and the Saudis have caused Bush to take a slack line against the Saudis on oil prices.

'Special Favors' 

"The Saudi royal family gets special favors, while our gas prices skyrocket," a voice announces in one spot as the image of Crown Prince Abdullah appears. In another, Kerry says, "I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family." 

At one point, Bush is shown holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah. Mug shots of the Saudi Sept. 11 hijackers then appear above a shot of the destruction wrought by the attacks. 

On the stump, Kerry typically lambastes Saudi Arabia's monarchy for supporting terrorism and refers to increasing prices of crude oil as "the Saudi-George Bush gasoline tax."

"If we are serious about energy independence, then we can finally be serious about confronting the role of Saudi Arabia in financing and providing ideological support for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," Kerry said in one recent stump speech.

He vowed to impose "tough sanctions" and to "name and shame" those behind financing terrorists.

"To put it simply," he pronounced, "we will not do business as usual with Saudi Arabia."

The Saudis have been fighting back, pointing out in their own PR salient that the 9/11 commission investigated several charges of official Saudi connections to the 9/11 attacks and found them baseless. Although al-Qaeda raised funds in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis note, the 9/11 commission concluded that it found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded al-Qaeda." 

The theme of Bush and his relationship with the Saudi royals is nothing new in the media. 

For his part, President Bush has been consistently unabashed and unapologetic about his "good relationship" with Crown Prince Abdullah, telling Barbara Walters on "20/20" recently:�

"I've got a very good relationship with the Crown Prince Abdullah. I believe he is as we say, the 'genuine article.' He is a good, honest man. And, and in my discussions with the crown prince, he has assured me that the Saudi government will do everything they can to disrupt finances headed toward terrorists. I explained to the crown prince that obviously there is an issue in America when, you know, 16, I guess, of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and therefore, the American people are skeptical.�

"So we're continuing to work with the Saudis to do everything we can to cut off money. They are on occasion, like other friends in the area, arresting people that we have highlighted as al-Qaeda-type menace. They themselves are worried about al-Qaeda. I mean, the government itself is worried about bin Laden that could try to harm the Saudi people through terrorist attacks. We're making progress in the relationship to join together to fight off the terrorist activities."�

Just as President Bush has deflected the Moore barbs re the Bush-Saudi connection, the media has been playing fact-check catch-up -- debunking the most sinister of his film's claims. 

For instance, a central theme of Michael Moore's controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a charge that Saudi Arabian interests provided $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush. 

However, as a recent special Newsweek investigative report noted: 

• Nearly 90 percent of that claimed amount, $1.18 billion, comes from contracts in the early to mid-1990s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country's military and National Guard. The Bush connection: The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board once included the president's father, George H.W. Bush.

• Newsweek further pointed out that former president Bush didn't join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998 -- five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm.

• As to George W.'s own Carlyle link, his service on the board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor -- a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded.

• The Carlyle Group is hardly a "Bush Inc.," disclosed Newsweek, but rather features a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. "Its founding and still managing partner is Howard Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm's senior advisors is Thomas McLarty, Bill Clinton's former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton's former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Cannard, Clinton's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission."

• According to the report, the movie neglects to offer any evidence that the Bush White House intervened in any way to bolster the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company's interest was the cancellation of an $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October 2001. Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld canceled the Crusader program the following year.

• As to Moore's dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks, the 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them "detailed questions." "Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country," the commission stated.

• The entity in the White House that approved the flights wasn't the president, or the vice president -- it was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar, who was a holdover from the Clinton administration. Clarke has testified that he gave the approval conditioned on FBI clearance.  

Regardless of the ongoing debunking, the Bush-Saudi conspiracy urban legend will inevitably survive through Nov. 2 and most probably beyond.