The mysteries of U.S. policy

By Jesús Arboleya Cervera

HAVANA – Throughout history, it has been quite common for the American security and intelligence services to demonstrate an “absolute incapacity” to investigate those events that directly affect that country’s policy.

In the case of Cuba, one such example is the “mystery” that still surrounds the convenient explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898, which served as an excuse for U.S. intervention in the war against Spain and the subsequent occupation of the island.

The best known of all those “mysteries” is the one connected with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although the crime was committed in the light of day, amid a gathering of people, and filmed by an amateur cameraman who happened to be in the site, and although the alleged assassin was immediately arrested and surprisingly murdered hours later by a mafioso who was allegedly “overcome” by the crime, the extensive investigations carried out by the FBI, Congress and a number of people interested in the affair have never explained how the regicide was committed, much less identify the individuals truly responsible for it.

The same has happened with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. At first, the security services demonstrated an impressive efficiency, perhaps much too impressive to be credible.

The investigators quickly identified the perpetrators, determined their membership in the Al Qaeda organization directed by Osama bin Laden and began a worldwide offensive that, before culminating in the also mysterious assassination of its leader – whose corpse was inexplicably not exhibited as a trophy but buried at sea – derived into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a high-technology antiterrorist crusade that includes the use of satellites and drones designed to kill anyone anywhere.

Today, many people ask questions as basic as whether the Muslim fanatics, who could barely fly an old Cessna, were capable of piloting enormous passenger airliners; whether Osama was capable of organizing such a sophisticated operation from the Afghan cave where U.S. authorities said he was hiding; whether the impact of an airliner could bring down the World Trade Center as it did; whether a plane really crashed into the Pentagon, and who piloted the third plane, if that suicide crash really occurred.

Adding to the doubts, former U.S. senator Bob Graham, a member of the Joint Congressional investigation of those events, has accused the FBI of obstructing the investigation by concealing information about a possible connection in Florida with the attacks.

The news, first reported in 2011 in Broward Bulldog.org, includes a recently declassified FBI report that identifies a Saudi family living in Sarasota with “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks in 2001.”

According to Graham, “the fact that the FBI did not present [to the Joint Investigation] documents that included ‘many connections’ between Saudis living in the United States and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks […] hindered the ability of the Investigation to complete its mission.”

Graham also said that the heads of the Investigation, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, as well as its executive director, Philip Zelikow, were not aware of the FBI investigation in Sarasota. Graham claimed that the FBI’s deputy director, Sean Joyce, kept him from talking with the special agent in charge of the Sarasota investigation.

Graham is demanding to see the files on an FBI investigation of Esam Ghazzawi, former aide to a high-ranking Saudi prince. Now, if the former senator really wants to investigate in depth the events of Sept. 11, there are other, more compromising leads involving not a Sarasota family gone missing but the Bush clan, whose ties to the Bin Laden family are public knowledge.

According to investigators Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin (“George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,” www.tarpley.net), the oil company Zapata Offshore, presided by George H.W. Bush and funded by Eugene Meyer and his son-in-law, Philip Graham, then owners of The Washington Post, was a CIA front for the training in Cay Sal Bank of the terrorist groups organized by the CIA, within the context of the anti-Cuban Operation Mongoose in 1962.

When Tarpley and Chaitkin tried to investigate that connection in 1981, they learned that the Zapata Offshore documents for 1960-66 had been destroyed “by mistake” in the archives of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That company also enjoyed, from the mid-1960s, the use of capital from the Bin Laden family and those contacts extended to the former president’s son, George W. Bush, when the latter created the oil company Arbusto, in Texas. The sources state that it was George H.W. Bush who facilitated the CIA’s contacts with Osama bin Laden, in order to augment the Taliban operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

George H.W. Bush’s history is itself a “mystery.” Because of his involvement in the CIA activities against Cuba, he was included in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, which did not prevent his later appointment as director of the agency.

As Vice President to Ronald Reagan, Bush Sr. was investigated without any consequences in the Iran-Contra scandal. As President of the United States, he decreed a pardon for the infamous Cuban-born terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had been responsible, along with Luis Posada Carriles, of blowing up a Cuban passenger plane over Barbados in 1976, precisely when Bush Sr. worked as espionage czar.

The Bush family relationship with the Bin Ladens did not end with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. On the contrary, according to a report based on U.S. sources written by Chilean journalist Christian Buscaglia and published in the newspaper El Mirador on May 2, 2011, the joint interests of the Bush clan and the Bin Ladens, as well as those of other important personages linked to the Republican Party, the Pentagon and high U.S. finance, still lead to the Carlyle Group consortium.

Among the companies that form the powerful corporation are The Bin Laden Group, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. companies United Defense Industries, Raytheon and Arbusto Energy Oil Co., owned by the Bush clan.

The consortium’s business include control of petroleum, the production of arms and the reconstruction of what arms destroy, so it is a major beneficiary of the wars in the Middle East, before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Evidently, the FBI has more than enough reasons to investigate these connections, but no one in U.S. politics will call it to task for not doing it. The major information media will surely silence what should be the disclosure of the “mystery” of the century, leaving us all among the paranoids and ill-intentioned inventors of constant conspiracy theories who are interested in questioning the democratic and ethical virtues of the system.

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