Reply #7: Adnan Khashoggi [View All]

Democracy for sale
Greg Palast


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Who owned Barrick Gold Mining - where did it come from? Have you ever heard of Barrick? I'd never heard of Barrick in my life. I looked it up, and who put up the money to create this corporation? A guy named Adnan Khashoggi. Now Adnan Khashoggi was the arms dealer who traded the arms for hostages in the Iran Contra game. "Poppy" Bush claimed he didn't know about that; he said he was out of the loop. So this is the guy who gave arms to the Ayatollah. It's a little odd because George Bush is working for the guy who armed the Axis of Evil.

By the way, it's interesting that "Poppy" Bush's last act in office, before he went on to Khashoggi's corporation, was to pardon Adnan Khashoggi, who had been charged with a felony - no connections please!

But by the end of 1996 it looks like Khashoggi was getting out of Barrick, and what was he doing? Well, when you try to track arms dealers, the people who deal with them and who know where they are any more are not necessarily Nobel Peace Prize winners, except for Henry Kissinger. But according to some really creepy sources, in May 1986 there was a meeting in place called Hotel Monceau in Paris between Khashoggi and representatives of a family named Bin Laden. Now don't misunderstand about the Bin Ladens. These are good people: they're business partners of the Bush family through a corporation called Carlyle and various Saudi royals. And they and a financier from Switzerland, who is handling the money for an organisation called Al Qa'eda, were dividing up which salaries should pay how much, and provide what arms to this organisation.

So there was this meeting, and this is what concerned me: if I know about it, then do you think that American and British Intelligence might know about it? I was interested in this for good reasons: my office had been on the 52nd floor of World Trade Center Tower One, and I wanted to know what happened. And I want to know who knew what, and when did they know it? The US had spent a trillion bucks on the CIA, and the British Government had spent God knows how much on MI6 and MI5, while people were meeting in the Hotel Monceau figuring out how much to give to Al Qa'eda. So the question was, how did the US and European Intelligence not know about the greatest, the most devastating, brutal, bloody attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour? And what I learned is that the intelligence agencies didn't see it coming because they were told not to look.
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http://www.think-twice.org.uk/2002/palast/