Dept Of Connections: The Contractors.

How members of the Bush administration and the Bin Laden family 
profit from the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq.

by Jane Mayer

Issue of 2003-05-05

05/02/03: (New Yorker) Back when Americans were still debating 
whether there was just cause for a predmptive strike against Iraq, 
few arguments were scrutinized more closely than the Bush 
Administration's contention that there were covert links between 
Al Qaeda and Iraq. At the C.I.A., analysts pored over aerial satellite 
photographs. At the Treasury Department, experts sifted through 
financial records. At the National Security Agency, Arab-speaking 
linguists eavesdropped on phone conversations. But, even after 
Secretary of State Colin Powell put his credibility on the line, 
in a damning, dot-connecting speech before the United Nations last 
February, questions persisted about the solidity of the alleged 
links between Saddam and Osama.  

Now there is a new and demonstrable connection, but it is not the kind 
that the Bush Administration had in mind. In fact, it is more likely to 
fuel the speculations of conspiracy theorists than it is to put their 
fears to rest. It turns out that a money trail runs - albeit rather 
circuitously - from the lucrative business of rebuilding Iraq to the 
fortune behind Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden's estranged family, a sprawling, 
extraordinarily wealthy Saudi Arabian dynasty, is a substantial investor 
in a private equity firm founded by the Bechtel Group of San Francisco. 

Bechtel is also the global construction and engineering company to which 
the U.S. government recently awarded the first major multimillion-dollar
contract to reconstruct war-ravaged Iraq. In a closed competitive bidding
process, the United States Agency for International Development chose
Bechtel 
to rebuild the major elements of Iraq's infrastructure, including its roads, 
railroads, airports, hospitals, and schools, and its water and electrical 
systems. In the first phase of the contract, the U.S. government will pay 
Bechtel nearly thirty-five million dollars, but experts say that the cost 
is likely to reach six hundred and eighty million during the next year and 
a half.  

When the contract was awarded, two weeks ago, the Administration did 
not mention that the bin Laden family has an ongoing relationship with 
Bechtel. The bin Ladens have a ten-million-dollar stake in the Fremont 
Group, a San Francisco-based company formerly called Bechtel 
Investments, which was until 1986 a subsidiary of Bechtel. The Fremont 
Group's Web site, which makes no mention of the bin Ladens, notes 
that "though now independent, Fremont enjoys a close relationship with 
Bechtel." A spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Fremont's 
omajority ownership is the Bechtel family. And a list of the corporate 
board of directors shows substantial overlap. Five of Fremont's eight 
directors are also directors of Bechtel. One Fremont director, Riley 
Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive officer of the Bechtel 
Group, and is a member of the Bush Administration: he was appointed 
this year to serve on the President's Export Council. In addition, George 
Shultz, the Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration, serves as 
a director both of Fremont and of the Bechtel Group, where he once was 
president and still is listed as senior counsellor.  

Rick Kopf, the general counsel of the Fremont Group, which manages 
some eleven billion dollars in assets, confirms that the bin Laden 
family invested about ten million dollars in one of Fremont's private 
funds before September 11, 2001. He noted that the bin Laden family has 
not enlarged its stake since then, but he declined to provide additional 
details about its association with the firm. He also chose not to discuss 
the origin or the nature of the relationship between the bin Laden and 
Bechtel families, both of which made fortunes in huge construction 
projects in the Arab world. The Fremont Group evidently does not go in 
for connecting the dots. As Kopf said, "Ownership is private and is not  
disclosed."

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Source: Information Clearinghouse...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3200.htm

Cheers, Steve..

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