Bin Laden's Entire Family Escorted to "Safety" After 9/11

In his new book, Michael Moore investigates business connections between the Bush and bin Laden families, as well as other powerful Saudis such as the royal family, all of whom have extensive US oil-industry investments and business history together. Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia "supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States,"* even though many maintained close ties to the #1 suspect. The FBI checked passports, but was otherwise prohibited from detaining or questioning the family.

"Imagine, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the 'safety' of the McVeigh family...and then arranged a free trip for them out of the country.... One FBI agent I spoke to told me that the FBI was 'furious' that they were not allowed to keep the bin Ladens to conduct a real investigation--the kind police like to do when they are trying to track down a murderer."**

Moore also questions the idea that bin Laden was able to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks from a cave in Afghanistan--the official administration claim--when the al Qaeda leader is reportedly suffering serious health problems, including possible kidney and liver failure requiring dialysis; that the 9/11 hijackers were flight school students who hijacked and then flew precision attacks into the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings, and not perhaps military pilots trained in the Saudi air force, who represent the anti-western faction of a dissolving Saudi power structure, but that Saudi investments in the American economy are so far reaching, and our dependency on their oil so acute, that the US government regularly forgives them their trespasses--funding and sponsoring terrorism being one of the most widely acknowledged. Consider also the unflagging resistance the White House has displayed to any open inquiry into the 9/11 attacks (yesterday's post).

*Patrick E. Tyler, "Fearing Harm, bin Laden kin fled from US," The New York Times, September 30, 2001.

**Michael Moore, "Dude, Where's My Country?," pp. 20-21