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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
President Bush and his lawyer, the former U.S. ambassador in Riyadh, wasted a golden opportunity to pressure the Saudis to crack down on terrorism.
Jul 23, 2004 | Now that the 9/11 commission report has been released, it is essential to take a closer look at the dark side of the Bush administration's dealings with Saudi Arabia since it declared a war on terror. President Bush sent his personal lawyer, Robert Jordan, to Riyadh as ambassador in 2001-03. Although Jordan was successful in obtaining superficial and grudging support from Saudi leaders for the invasion of Iraq, the administration gave up too much in return for support so weak that it mattered little to the course of the invasion. The White House's horse-trading with the Saudis ultimately served to reduce America's security against terror from the land with so much involvement in Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attack. What's more, the rush to war itself, resulting in subsequent terrorist attacks on the kingdom's own soil, undermined a potential pro-U.S. tilt in Saudi Arabia and may have slowed political reforms in Saudi Arabia that would have made America safer from terrorism. For all the Bush administration's attempts at concealing these disadvantageous deals, their outlines are becoming clearer.
Jordan became Bush's attorney long before Bush became president. As a corporate defense lawyer in the Houston law firm of Baker Botts ("Baker" as in James Baker, George H.W. Bush's close friend and secretary of state), Jordan personally represented the younger Bush in 1991-93. The Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Bush on insider-trading violations involving stock of his company, Harken Energy. Jordan's obstructive tactics in that case are noteworthy. One key Harken memo in Jordan's hands would have gone far toward establishing Bush's guilty intent. Disobeying rightful SEC demands for documents, however, Jordan withheld this memo from the SEC until the week after the SEC sent its 1993 letter suspending the case, asserting that he had just then decided that a claim of privilege he had previously thought shielded the memo no longer applied.
Jordan's privilege claim appears bogus, and his supposedly belated awakening to the need to drop the claim appears staged. Stripped of the cute veiling, it looks more like an elaborate maneuver for keeping a hot potato out of the SEC's hands until the finagling of Bush's dicey reprieve.
Clearly, Bush had found in Jordan a lawyer he could trust to work solely for his own interests -- just the man to send as deal-maker to Saudi Arabia, whose rulers were longtime friends of the Bush family unmatched in the exchange of favors. Saudi leaders -- particularly Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington nicknamed "Bandar Bush" within the Bush family for being so close -- welcomed the 2001 change from President Clinton to President Bush. They hoped it meant they would get some relief from U.S. pressure on the most sensitive of issues, the threat to the United States posed by al-Qaida, the terrorist group led by bin Laden, scion of the billionaire family that runs the royal Saudi construction firm.
American pressure on the kingdom to rein in a potential violent jihad had caused strains between two key Saudi factions. Crown Prince Abdullah led the American- and Western-tolerating faction that was seemingly in charge, but he had to reckon with the extremely powerful faction partial to religious extremists, championed by Interior Minister Prince bin Abdul Aziz Nayef. That faction not only supported al-Qaida's antagonism toward the infidel superpower but was also by no means uniformly opposed to the use of terrorist methods.
A series of early favors the Bush administration did for the Saudis helped set the tone for what was to come. The Clinton administration had pushed specific initiatives against al-Qaida and the Taliban, some of which were successful, including sending an American delegation to the kingdom to discuss terrorist financing. As described in the 9/11 commission's staff report, "In Saudi Arabia the team concentrated on tracing bin Laden's assets and access to his family's money, exchanges that led to further, fruitful work." In contrast, the report continues, "the Bush administration did not develop any diplomatic initiatives on al Qaeda with the Saudi government before the 9/11 attack," a serious mistake considering the belief of counterterrorism experts that the real possibility of a huge strike against the United States required pressing the Saudis hard.
Other favors included the infamous Visa Express program (started in spring 2001) used by five of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers (15 were Saudi) to enter the United States, and the decision to let scores of bin Laden family members and other top Saudis fly out of the United States right after 9/11 without meaningful questioning. The flights were handled by Prince Bandar.
Soon thereafter, Bush and Jordan were effectively working with Saudi leaders to divert the American public from obtaining a clarification of Saudi policies on Islamic extremism. After 9/11 and the war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Americans felt growing outrage at the Saudi extremist faction that had spawned Osama bin Laden and effectively installed him in his Taliban base of operations, providing recruits, training and funding for 9/11 (though without all the extremists having to know the ultimate details of the plot). Conversely, a substantial portion of the disaffected Saudi population, encouraged as much as possible by Riyadh to direct its feelings at external rather than internal grievances, regarded bin Laden and the Taliban as heroes.
Jordan mostly kept a low public profile in the U.S. media during the period from 9/11 to the Iraq invasion. This fit Bush's general strategy of minimizing attention to the obvious ties among bin Laden, Saudis and terror and instead inducing the public to (mis-)associate 9/11 with Iraq. But Jordan contrived one clever exception, an extremely revealing one for understanding the nature of Bush administration deal-making with the Saudis.
On June 3, 2002, columnist Michael Barone published in U.S. News & World Report a frank piece titled "Our Enemies the Saudis." It summarized what the press corps had learned from Bush's own Treasury Department, among other sources: "Al Qaeda was supported by large contributions from Saudis, including members of the Saudi royal family. The Saudis' cooperation with our efforts to track down the financing of al Qaeda appears to be somewhere between minimal and zero."
A Dallas lawyer, Jordan chose the Dallas Morning News for a reply to Barone about the Saudis, titled "Our Reliable Allies," on June 25, 2002, perhaps having calculated that the fanciful line he had to take to promote deals with the Saudis, a line both unpopular and unconvincing in America, would draw the least critical attention there.
"Our Reliable Allies" unsubtly pitched to the interests of his Texas audience that "tens of thousands of Americans, a large percentage from Texas, have ... worked in Saudi Arabia." Then Jordan got to his real signal that Riyadh need not feel unappreciated (at least by America's Texan leaders): "In the months since September [11], the Saudis have offered very substantial cooperation to the United States," he asserted. "Groups from the FBI, the Treasury Department and the like have been to Saudi Arabia to gather and share information. The Saudis have assisted us every step of the way. Saudi Arabia has provided vital diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement and political support to our efforts. The Bush administration is pleased with that cooperation."
