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JohnGelles 07/21/2011 11:28 PM Report
There are conspiracies--and then there are situations. The situation is that Saudi Royals and elites control immense oil wealth and act at home to defend their wealth against their competitors for military, political and/or economic power -- and they can never relax their grip on all that money without concern they will be toppled by the likes of a Saudi bin Laden or an Iraqi Saddam Hussein.
The situation required foreign friends who wanted the oil.
From the perspective of American citizens who pay at the pump for the oil and in blood to assert as much control over oil as possible in a world awash with bombs and guns, we expect our presidents and leaders to be scrupulously honest with no connection to other nations they would not like to read about on page 1 of USA Today.
In the case of the Bush family, we have a mixed bag of shared economic interests with anti-democratic capital that goes back to before WW II. President Bush, the elder, passes all tests. Others in the family leave us with suspicions that they loved money maybe a little bit too much.
Be that as it may, the love of money is not our only Achilles heel. Americans have fallen in love with complexity in our law and culture that is doing insidious damage to our "can do" talents and reputation that are now contested by nations with far greater populations than our own.
The Saudis have some money that they will lose because they lack the potential for great military power. But America may collapse from Mandarin type triumphs of form over substance that we now invite in the teeth of the gale that blows across the law and economics complex that has ruined banking and production as tools of democratic government.
Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex. He had the wrong target in his sights. It is lawmakers, lawyers, gamblers and bankers that have led us to live with codes and laws of thousands of pages of gibberish. Clare Booth Luce called it gobbledygook -- but she also had it wrong. Ambiguity in search nothing or even humor is not the problem. But ambiguity and lack of respectable purpose in search of selfish profit (that Luce favored) is the combination that spells corruption without limit. It is what we see today.
It isn't centered in Saudi Arabia. It is centered in the Congress of the United States of America.
As a life-long optimist I have to add we will get over this disease if we can only find another Lincoln. He will have to find the sentences to resurrect government for the people.
SharkswithfrikingLazers 07/21/2011 03:13 PM Report
The Saudi connection is very, very troubling.
From Fahrenheit 9/11:
Byron Dorgan: We had some airplanes authorized at the highest levels of our government to fly to pick up Osama Bin Laden's family members and others from Saudi Arabia and transport them out of this country.
Narrator: It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets and nearly two dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the Bin Ladens out of the U.S. after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country.
Narrator: Okay, so let's say one group of people, like the American people, pay you $400,000 a year to be president of the United States. But then another group of people invest in you, your friends, and their related businesses, $ 1.4 billion over a number of years. Who are you gonna like? Who's your daddy? Because that's how much the Saudi royals and their associates have given the Bush family, their friends, and their related businesses, in the past three decades.
robdverity 07/21/2011 02:58 PM Report
It's too dehumanizing/depressing to think that despite contriving WMDs to attack Iraq, W wouldn't have resorted to a 9/11 WTC type conspiracy. He does have a penchant for blood, however: Iraqis 100,000nds, US 4,500, Texas death row 100s.
REMant 07/21/2011 11:12 AM Report
Many feel and always have that Pearl Harbor was somehow known in advance, or invited. That seems largely disproved despite some pretty obvious reasons for believing it, and tho I think 9-11 was blown by the authorities as well, as hard to imagine. But I have little doubt that some in Saudi Arabia are/were involved with al-Qaeda just as some in the Pakistani army are involved with the Taliban.