thebeat

I was having a conversation earlier with a friend of mine who I consider an extreme liberal. I’m not extremely political savvy, and I was curious if there is any validity to this following statement, taken from an internet conversation talking about the reason for the Iraqi war.


"Bush Sr owns a corporation called the Carlyle Corporation, which was given a SIGNIFICANT portion of the war contracts
The Saudis own the other portion of the Carlyle Corp.
Bin Laden is a Saudi, not an Iraqi or Afghan, our government has never denied this because people don't poke their noses in far enough. Post9/11 the world was forced to freeze all alQueada assets except the Saudis, who refused
They have repeatedly killed American soldiered and harbored al Queda (and don't deny it) BUT there's the Carlyle Corp and the longstanding relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi prince, Bandhar. The Bush family even calls him Bandhar Bush. Go see F9/11, its all there, and its undeniable
there's no way Moore faked it and if he did, Bush has never even attempted to prove it, because he can't. It explains this so much more than I ever could also the pictures of the so called WMD labs were taken during the original UN inspection and Iraq later disassembled things. For example, one of the planes that the Administration told the US was practicing spraying anthrax was destroyed in 1991, just after the USSR collapsed"


Thoughts???

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nanofever

The reasons for war in Iraq are pretty simple.

1. A base for US power in the Middle East, neo-imperalism is the phrase I believe.

2. Strategic resources in Iraq.

3. Saddam has a bad history with the Bush clan, and Iraq would be one of the easier Middle Eastern countrys to topple.

As for your friend, I have no idea what he was trying to prove with those statements (war for oil?). If you could state his greater point in your discussion, I might be able to answer what you are asking.

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Originally Posted by Norseman on another forum:
"Yeah, the problem with the world is the stupid people are all cocksure of themselves and the intellectuals are full of doubt."

thebeat

"I can't live under a man (Bush) who would kill poor white boys for money and lie about it repeatedly"

was her premise I suppose, after she had asked me who I was voting for in the 2004 election, i stated "Bush"

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KMA-628

1. Bush Sr. does not own the Carlyle Group. He is a figurehead on the board. i.e. doesn't do much but show his pretty face.

2. Bin Laden is a Saudi exile, not welcome back to Saudi Arabia under any circumstances.

3. Many presidents have had relationships with the Saudi royal family. I really don't find it odd that our government has contacts with other governments, I perceive this as normal. Many presidents have accepted money from the Saudi gov't. To make this statement, you have to bring in past-presidents as well (yes, I mean Clinton as well).

I didn't understand this one at all. Can it be re-phrased.


The bottom line is that we must all do the research on our own. Everything mentioned here can be researched rather easily, so.....

I am suspecting a little trolling here which I probably got suckered into.

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thebeat

I just copied the converstation from my AIM logs...so thats the best I can come up with D; sry!

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Kadath

Your friend's statements were lifted wholesale from F9/11, as s/he admitted. I would caution him/her from believing any one source without checking others, and Moore has what could be generously characterized as a tendency for arranging truths to suit him -- it's like believing everything a politician says while he's running for office.

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Peetster

Didn't the US just hand power back to an interim Iraqi government?
You mean oil? As in we'd mine it and ship it straight to the US? I don't see that happening.
Iraq was not toppled. Saddam was.

nanofever

1. The US still has its troops in Iraq and is sending more. That build-up equals a base of power in the middle east. Iraq is not truly sovereign until it has ousted the US from its borders.

2. "United States officials who ran Iraq until last month used a system open to fraud and error to track about $US20 billion in Iraqi funds spent during the occupation, accounting firm KPMG said in a report made public on Friday.

The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) underlying record-keeping "greatly diminishes the transparency of the expenditures made," the interim study said.

It also left the Development Fund for Iraq, a United Nations-established means of shepherding Iraqi oil revenues during the US occupation, "open to fraudulent acts," the report said.

KPMG said it had been unable to get information about Halliburton and other firms that received non-competitive contracts from President George W Bush's Administration funded by Iraqi oil proceeds.

Halliburton, the Texas oil services firm headed by Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000 before he became Vice President, has been awarded about $US1.5 billion from the development fund, the single largest payout to date, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

"To date, KPMG has not been given access to special audit reports by the CPA that have been undertaken on these contracts," said the report released by Henry Waxman, a California Democrat seeking to subpoena records of what he called possible US mismanagement of the fund.

The audit was carried out at the request of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, a UN-mandated watchdog.

One reason for delays in handing over information, the US Defence Department said in reply, was confidential contractor financial information, including pricing data that the Government is barred from releasing without permission from the companies involved.

"And to date, the companies have declined to permit release," said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Rose-Ann Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Halliburton did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Although the CPA disbanded last month, the US Government was making sure auditors had access to its records, she added.

The accounting framework at issue was maintained by a single accountant, KPMG said, without entry of credits and debits that makes tracing transactions easier.

"This lack of a double-entry system makes the accounting records much more prone to error," said KPMG.

A final KPMG audit is due to be made public at the oversight board's next meeting on Wednesday and Thursday in Washington.

The UN Security Council set up the monitoring board in May 2003 to make sure Iraq's funds were spent properly.

Since the US-led invasion in March 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein, $US10.8 billion in Iraqi oil money has been deposited in the development fund, more than half of the total deposits of $US20.2 billion for the period.

The rest was left over from the defunct UN "oil-for-food" program meant to provide for Iraqis' basic needs while UN sanctions were in effect.

Other sources include repatriated funds and foreign donations."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...7/s1150864.htm

I believe those actions by Halliburton would be a text book example of funneling oil money to US companies.


3. The chaos in Iraq for the last 2 years, and the destruction of infrastructure by US forces suggest that Iraq was toppled.



If these reasons didn't matter in Iraq, why did we invade Iraq instead of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea or Sudan ?

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I'm leaving for the University of California: Santa Barbara in 5 hours, give me your best college advice - things I need, good ideas, bad ideas, nooky, ect.

Originally Posted by Norseman on another forum:
"Yeah, the problem with the world is the stupid people are all cocksure of themselves and the intellectuals are full of doubt."

KMA-628

I just finished a rather lengthy disection of F 9/11 that was done by a local Think Tank .

Very different from anything else I have read on the subject and quite informative. It seems to try to portray both the "truths" and the "lies/deceit" at the same time. In other words, you will find criticism of Bush in this White Paper. You will even see evidence of two lies made by the Bush administration that were not included in the movie.

All in all, it was very impressive and eye-opening. It pretty much goes through the entire movie on a point-to-point basis. Every little detail is backed up and substantiated. It even includes a response by Moore if he has issued one.

Warning! It is well worth the time, but is is a long read.

LINKY-POO

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kutulu

A lot of those "deciets" are pretty weak.

It's a suburb of Flint, for the most part suburbs of a city are pretty much the same as the city itself. Most people don't spend all their time in their little suburb. Talk about splitting hairs.

Locobot

Your friend is right, you should listen to her.

MSD

Some Carlyle Group investors:
The Bin Laden family (after the 9/11 attacks, this investment was withdrawn. )
George HW Bush
George Soros, invested $100M.
James Baker III
Frank Carlucci, former U.S. Secretary of Defense
Arthur Levitt, former SEC chairman
Louis V. Gerstner, ex-CEO IBM, Chairman of the Carlyle Group
John Major, ex-PM of Britain
Fidel Ramos, ex-President, Philippines
Saudi Royal Family


It's a private investment firm, last time I checked they were the 11th biggest defense contractor in the US (the group supposedly owns 25% of the Area 51 aerospace research and testing facility,) and they get really big returns on investments. Bush isn't the owner, he's a partner, and they have enough prior defense contracts that they would have a good shot at getting Iraq contracts without connections to Bush. I would consider calling the Bush connection a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't say there's a conspiracy behind it.

pinkie

What is the role of oil and the Bush family's "Saudi Connection"?

Fahrenheit 9/11 documents the close and highly profitable connection between the U.S. government and the Saudi royal family. And, in particular, it shows the direct personal role that George Bush Senior has played (at times) negotiating with the Saudi ruling class for the monopoly capitalist Carlyle Group.
And, on the one hand, this is all true and revealing. It shows how the presidents and officials of the U.S. are entwined with global capitalist investments in many intimate and complex ways. It reminds viewers that the Persian Gulf is, after all, a highly strategic center of global oil production.
But while showing all that, the movie then rushes into a series of speculations that give a series of false impressions--both about how global capitalism actually works, and about why the U.S. government ultimately decided to conquer Iraq.
Essentially Moore speculates that the Saudi ruling family may have been connected to 9/11, and that the Bush White House wanted to shield them (and its own financial dealings) from scrutiny by shifting attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
First of all, it has to be said, it is impossible to know for sure who, exactly, did the 9/11 attacks--or who may have known about them and allowed them to happen.
While many of the alleged hijackers were Saudi, it is also true that Osama bin Laden has had deep ties to the American CIA--going back to the CIA's massive covert war in Afganistan during the 1980s when the CIA helped organize, train, fund and arm the extreme reactionary Islamist forces that later emerged as both the Taliban and al- Qaida.
The argument that Saudi money may have bought the most basic loyalties of the Bush family essentially turns reality upside down. The dog wags the tail, the tail doesn't wag the dog. U.S. imperialism controls Saudi Arabia and its decadent princes, not the other way around.
At one point, Michael Moore even accuses the Bush family of betraying U.S. so-called national interests, supposedly by putting their private ties with Saudis above their responsibilities as U.S. representatives. This too is upside down. The Bush family are prominent representatives of the interests of the U.S. ruling class--and they have overall acted in that capacity in their dealing with Saudi princes and other foreign governments. And more important, those interests (which are often called the "U.S. national interests") are fundamentaly the interests of the monopoly capitalist ruling class of the U.S. These interests are against the interests of the people of the world (including most people in the U.S.)--they are nothing to uphold, or unite with.
The U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia have never centered on just the personal business interests of the Bushes--or any other U.S. family (however rich or influential). U.S. government policy in that region (whether Republicans or Democrats are in the White House) is about the functioning and power of their global empire. It is about dominating and exploiting the lives and labor of huge parts of humanity:
As the Revolutionary Worker pointed out:
"Oil is vital to the running of capitalist economies and modern armies and is a source of enormous profit and strategic power. Saudi Arabia sits on the world's largest pool of oil--some 260 billion barrels, or a fourth of the entire world total. Saudi Arabia pumps more oil than any other country, and it can quickly increase or decrease output to drive oil prices up or down. This gives the U.S. great leverage over the world oil market. Adding to its strategic significance is Saudi Arabia's location--at the center of the region's oil fields, along the petroleum transit routes of the Persian Gulf, and next door to Iraq (which has the world's second largest oil reserves).
"
(from "Toxic Relationship")
In fact, the war on Iraq was not a "diversion" from the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia -- but part of a larger strategic plan to consolidate U.S. control over the whole Persian Gulf.
The conquest of Iraq is intended to increase U.S. control over this strategic region (including Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) and make it more permanent. And then to exploit that control to further dominate countries throughout the world who depend on Persian Gulf oil for their most basic economic functioning.
Bob Avakian writes:
"It is important to understand that it is not just a matter of U.S. corporations being `oil-hungry,' or simply that the U.S. economy is `dependent on fossil fuels.' The more fundamental truth is that the monopoly capitalists who rule the U.S. must control huge supplies of oil and other fuels, worldwide, in order to keep production costs for U.S.-based corporations as low as possible (particularly through super-exploitation of labor in many oil-producing countries), to strengthen their competitive position vis-a-vis other imperialist corporations and countries, and overall to control vital lifelines of the global economy. And these monopoly capitalists use the government apparatus--in particular the military--of the U.S. to enforce this control. This is an expression of the essential nature of the imperialist system we are confronting."
(from "The New Situation")
Bob Avakian talks about the post 9/11 U.S. response and motives this way:
"Clearly this [invasion of Afghanistan] is more than retaliating for September 11. Certainly it has nothing to do with bringing justice for the people who were killed on September 11. It has to do with their own needs and interests and designs as an imperialist power, which is seeking to follow up on its political victory in the Cold War to further recast the world under its domination....
"Who is Osama bin Laden? Historically, he was tied with the U.S., and now they say he's turned against the U.S. Maybe that's so but it's not clear what all the different arrangements are and what all the different links and ties are between different intelligence agencies--U.S., Israeli or whatever--but let's assume that there was actually an attack that went down from forces not directly connected to these intelligence sources that killed thousands of civilians in the U.S.
"Well, whatever the U.S. knew about it in advance or whatever different forces linked up with U.S. institutions may or may not have known about it, the fact is they did have to respond. Again, like Mafia monsters on a worldwide scale, they can't let something like that go on and appear vulnerable. They don't give a damn about the people who died there. The only thing they care about is that they can't have it seem as though they can't maintain order in their own country.
"So they don't give a damn about the people that died and they're doing monstrous things in the name of the people that died. But clearly the main thing that's going on is that they had a program that they were already moving to implement on a certain level, and now they've seized on this situation that was created by September 11 to pull out the throttle full scale and try to ram this through, in a big way."
(from "Bob Avakian Speaks

This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
http://rwor.org
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Offler

Thanks for the link. Still reading, but much appreciated. =)

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wonderwench

I am going to start a dotcom to sell tinfoil hats.

Offler

Out of curiosity, is there a reason Soros is the only one whose investment is listed?

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