June 25 (LPAC)—New revelations that Vice President Dick Cheney has been behind the now-failed effort to cover up an $80-100 billion criminal slush fund, run through the British arms cartel BAE Systems, adds new urgency to Lyndon LaRouche’s longstanding demand that Vice President Dick Cheney be impeached or otherwise removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors.
A late June 2007 fourpart Washington Post frontpage exposé of Vice President Cheney’s role in ripping up the U.S. Constitution in pursuit of an Executive Branch wartime dictatorship—echoing LaRouche’s Jan. 3, 2001 pre-9/11 warnings that Cheney would be the "Hermann Göering" of the Bush Administration and the architect of a future "Reichstag fire" incident, aimed at establishing totalitarian rule—further sets the stage for Cheney’s immediate ouster. Clearly, Cheney’s failure to bury the BAE scandal in both Britain and the United States, as LaRouche observed in his June 21, 2007 webcast, has angered Cheney’s backers, and they may find themselves now in common cause with the vast majority of Americans who want him removed from office, albeit for different motives.
The LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) website, www.larouchepac.com, has assembled a comprehensive dossier on the unfolding BAE scandal, which already represents the "scandal of the century," beyond even the 9/11 story, which has more to do with BAE than most people can imagine. LPAC, along with the investigative staff of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), the weekly magazine and online journal founded by LaRouche, will continue to provide the only comprehensive source of information on the BAE scandal, as it fully unravels. To date, the international media has been either silent, or has avoided the most significant features of the BAE-centred off-budget criminal enterprise.
The following is a brief summary of the BAE scandal. The full background and constant updates to this breaking story are featured on the LaRouche PAC website.
In 1985, the Margaret Thatcher-led British government, signed a long-term agreement with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, under which the British arms cartel, BAE Systems, provided fighter jets and other military equipment and services, in return for vast quantities of Saudi oil. The barter agreement, known as "Al-Yamamah" (the Arabic word for "the dove") has remained in force up to the present day. Under Al-Yamamah, a tightly interlocking consortium of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo- American cartels—including BAE, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Lazard Bank, HSBC (formerly the British East India Company’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), and the Carlyle Group—has amassed an estimated $80-100 billion in off-budget, hidden funds, which have been utilised for covert operations and gun-running on a global scale—totally outside the jurisdiction and oversight of any government. This massive offshore fund is at the centre of the power of the Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy, which has promoted globalisation and perpetual war for the last three decades and longer.
Under the Al-Yamamah agreements, which have been perpetuated by every British government, from Thatcher through John Major, to outgoing "New Labour" Prime Minister Tony Blair, Saudi Arabia has provided 600,000 barrels of crude oil to BAE every day since September 1985. According to the authorised biography of Saudi Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the architect of the Al-Yamamah deal on the Saudi side, and a long-suspected recruit of Britain’s MI6, working through BP and Royal Dutch Shell, BAE has sold this oil on the international retail markets. According to BP’s own data base on world oil prices, the value of the cumulative oil sales, in current U.S. dollars, is an estimated $160 billion. The military equipment and services provided to Saudi Arabia in return for the oil, over the past 22 years of Al-Yamamah, is estimated at $40 billion—before the prices were boosted by a reported 30-40 percent, to provide for "commissions" and other payoffs, including $2 billion to Prince Bandar.
The question to be raised: What happened to the rest of the money? Evidence suggests that tens of billions of dollars went to the black market puchase of weapons, to fuel wars from Afghanistan, to Africa, to Central America. Bandar’s biographer William Simpson described it as "a backdoor method of covertly buying U.S. arms ... military purchases that would not be visible to Congress."
In November 2006, Prince Bandar, the former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, now back in Riyadh as the national security advisor to King Abdullah, orchestrated a secret visit to the Kingdom by Vice President Dick Cheney. The primary topic was Cheney’s promotion of an American military strike against Iran, and a larger Sunni versus Shi’ite perpetual war confrontation within the Muslim world. But the other issue on the table was the BAE scandal, which was again grabbing media attention in Great Britain and was the subject of an ongoing probe by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Cheney vowed to shut down the probe and bury any further interference in the Al-Yamamah deal, according to two subsequent reports in the U.S. media. Within weeks of the Cheney meetings in Riyadh, Prime Minister Blair and his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced the shutdown of the Al-Yamamah probe for "national security" reasons.
However, this time, Cheney’s strongarm tactics backfired, and an international furor was ignited by the British coverup, triggering new investigations by the OECD, the Swiss government, the Hungarian government, and even the U.S. Department of Justice. In that context, the EIR revelations about the "scandal of the century" have delivered a further shock to the system, and have created the conditions where Cheney’s impeachment grows more likely by the day.
Following LaRouche’s June 21 Webcast, the first questioner asked, given the intense factional fight over the BAE in Great Britain, "why is it not reflected in the press in the U.S.?"
LaRouche: I think that the relevant scoundrels in the British Isles will probably do something horrible to Dick Cheney, not because they don’t like what he was trying to do, but because he failed to do it. The very question is a very significant question. Here you have exposure of the fact that the long-standing ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the United States, was a key figure in taking graft to the tune of about $2 billion, among other things, principally while an ambassador. And that he was also a British agent, functioning under the mask of being something else. So, the question is why and how was the secret kept? There was no real secret about this! You see, this has been known.
Let me be very blunt without saying too much. This is the question, as I indicated today, which has been on my mind, and the mind of a great many other people, since before 9/11. As I said earlier today, this was the question in my mind when I made a public statement, a broadcast statement from here in the United States, prior to the actual inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001, that the economic situation, the pattern of the economic situation is such, that we must expect within the reasonably near future, that someone will try to do to the United States, what Hermann Göering did to make Hitler a dictator in Germany. And I saw that happen on September 11, 2001. I saw it. That is not only my thought. That has been the thought of many people.
How was it done to us? It was known, for example, that most of the dead bodies that showed up, as of evidentiary significance, in the wake of 9/11, were of Saudi or related provenance. Somebody set that operation up! Now, al-Qaeda? Does that help us? No, it doesn’t. Al-Qaeda was an asset. Again, Osama bin Laden’s a Saudi. He was an asset of George H.W. Bush and the British, in the operations in organising the Afghanistan war of the 1980s. Osama bin-Laden is a key figure, who was recruited by these guys, out of the Saudis, to lead that operation. Al-Qaeda is a product of that operation! It’s an operation which was British-American sponsored, and Saudi-sponsored. The dead bodies which were draped upon the doorsteps, as evidence in the wake of the bombing of 9/11, were largely of this provenance. And the question has been in the mind of everyone, since that time, knowing how this thing works. Wow! What’s the evidence? Well, you’ve got ten prisoners dead. It’s hard to get ‘em to talk after they’re dead!
So that’s what the issue is here. The issue is that, therefore, don’t you think that there has not been a big effort to put a lid on a story as big as this has been, inside the U.S. press? Do you think that this story was not available, and it’s significance was not apparent— at least to some degree— to every leading press in the United States—-television, print? Why didn’t they report it? It happened! And did this not involve money? Does not everyone know, that to run an operation like 9/11 was run, it takes many billions of dollars. It takes complicity of a government, or one or two governments? That this is a coup, an attempted coup d’etat, in the same way that Hermann Göering set fire to the Reichstag in order to make Hitler a dictator? Wasn’t there an effort on the evening of September 11th, in the evening discussions, to ram through legislation, or ram through orders, which would establish a dictatorship in the United States, that didn’t quite succeed, almost succeeded but not quite? And, have we not been run and dominated by this ever since then, by the apparatus which was put into effect on the pretext of 9/11? Don’t you think that everybody who is cognizant in the United States at every position of power, has not had these thoughts, repeatedly, persistently, over these intervening years? Do you not think that everybody who saw the evidence as it’s come out now, who is in an appropriate position of power to understand how these things are done, has not had these thoughts? Do you not think that they were terrified, to death practically, of being involved in exposing this? ...
Between April 1998 and May 2002, between $51,000 and $73,000 in checks and cashier checks were provided by the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and his wife to two families in southern California, who in turn bankrolled at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. The story was investigated by the 9/11 Commission but never fully resolved, and remains, to this day, one of the key unanswered questions concerning the backing for the worst terrorist attack to ever occur on U.S. soil.
According to numerous news accounts and the records of the 9/11 Commission, in April 1998, a Saudi national named Osama Basnan wrote to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. seeking help for his wife, who needed surgery for a thyroid condition. Prince Bandar bin- Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador, wrote a check for $15,000 to Basnan. Beginning in December 1999, Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, began sending regular monthly cashier checks to Basnan’s wife, in amounts ranging from $2,000 to $3,500. Many of these checks were in turn signed over to the wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi living in the San Diego area.
Around New Year’s 2000, two other Saudi nationals, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, where they were greeted by al-Bayoumi, provided with cash, and outfitted with an apartment, Social Security ID cards and other financial assistance. Al-Bayoumi helped the two Saudi men to enroll in flight schools in Florida. Al-Bayoumi and Basnan were both suspected of working for Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence agency. In addition to the money Al-Bayoumi passed on to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, they were also befriended by Basnan, and at one point the Basnans, the al-Bayoumis, and Alhazmi and Almidhar all lived at the Parkwood Apartments in San Diego. According to U.S. intelligence, the latter two were identified as among the hijackers of the American Airlines Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon.
Both Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa denied they played any role in financing the 9/11 hijackers, and claimed they were merely providing charitable assistance to the Saudi community in the United States. However, the two co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, Robert Graham (D-Fla.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), accused the FBI of failing to fully pursue this "9/11 money trail." Sources told EIR that the FBI refused to allow the committee to interview the FBI investigators who had probed the Basnan and al-Bayoumi links.
— Jeffrey Steinberg