Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. archive

  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.socialEnglish
    91·
    6 months ago

    I haven’t forgotten that George H.W. Bush (the President’s father) was literally in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family when the attacks occurred. The Bush and the bin Laden families were highly entangled in oil business dealings. I remember, too, that the only airplanes allowed to fly in U.S. airspace in the days after 9/11—all other traffic everywhere being grounded, stranding Americans far from home—were the flights taking members of the bin Laden family out of the United States, and back to Saudi Arabia.

    I wonder why that attack on Saudi Arabia never happened?

    • DolphinMath@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I haven’t forgotten that George H.W. Bush (the President’s father) was literally in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family when the attacks occurred.

      Got a source for that?

      Best I can find/remember, it is a distortion of this passage from Dan Briody’s book The Iron Triangle, or at the very least it is an unproven claim.

      A Chance Meeting

      That same morning, in the plush setting of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, DC, the Carlyle Group was holding its annual international investor conference. Frank Carlucci, James Baker III, David Rubenstein, William Conway, and Dan D’Aniello were together, along with a host of former world leaders, former defense experts, wealthy Arabs from the Middle East, and major international investors as the terror played out on television. There with them, looking after the investments of his family was Shafiq bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s estranged half-brother. George Bush Sr. was also at the conference, but Carlyle’s spokesperson says the former president left before the terror attacks, and was on an airplane over the Midwest when flights across the country were grounded on the morning of September 11. In any circumstance, a confluence of such politically complex and globally connected people would have been curious, even newsworthy. But in the context of the terrorist attacks being waged against the United States by a group of Saudi nationals led by Osama bin Laden, the group assembled at the Ritz-Carlton that day was a disconcerting and freakish coincidence.

      • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        I do not, so I’ll take that back. It was widely discussed at the time, so I remembered it as Bush being there when the attack occurred, not that he left shortly before. I will say that I think it’s close enough for the point to stand that the Bush and bin Laden families had business interests in common, and had had personal dealings prior.

        Thanks for the correction.