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