http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/w ... shbin.html
(Sept. 2001):
Money connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden go way back . . .on May 17 (2001) Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. . . but -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift? Until February, Afghanistan had been the world's largest producer of opium/heroin, claiming close to 70% of the world's total production. That opium, consumed largely in Western Europe, smuggled through the Balkans, was a direct source of cash into Western financial institutions and markets. . . The Taliban's actions severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western and Russian banks. Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year.
"We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to American and Pakistan intelligence. Its clients included the Afghan rebels, and the brother of Osama bin Laden, Salem. Salem bin Laden named Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in 1976. By 1977, Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business, Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin Laden would soon become a CIA asset. Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorism, but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya. As FTW described in 1998, the key to understanding U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always been controlled by a cutout, the Pakistani government and its intelligence service the ISI. As such there has been virtually no direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served the dual purpose of maintaining his apparent "purity" with followers and providing plausible deniability for the CIA. The whole underlying pretext for this relationship evaporated with the Taliban's destruction of the opium crop.
"With the Soviet Union's disintegration, a new surge in opium production unfolded. (per UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics -- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons. "The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan." "The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). There is evidence that Mujhideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of the KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia. In Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus the involvement of Pakistan's ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots.
"Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin."
so many deals with the devil...George Bush, Sr. was Vice President and, by virtue of executive Order 12333, in charge of all U.S. intelligence and narcotics operations from 1981 through 1989. As President from 1989 through 1993, he continued and expanded his control in these areas. Thus, it was Bush (the elder) who directly nourished and nurtured bin Laden's evolution. The web site of the Indian Embassy in Washington contains dramatic confirmation for these positions. On September 4, 2000, B. Raman, Director of India's Institute for Topical Studies wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress entitled Pakistan's Noriega's. That eight-page article exposed the depth of Pakistani government involvement in the drug trade. It may be viewed at: http://www.indianembassy.org/int_media/ saag_september_04_2000.html.
