This month arch enemies President George Bush and Oscar winner Michael Moore both arrive in Britain. But
while George Bush flies in on November 19 to thank his buddy Tony Blair
for support in Iraq, writer and film maker Moore is here this week
condemning the two leaders' war on terror. A new poll has shown 51 per cent of Americans now disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq. And
perhaps his most impassioned opponent is Moore, who in an exclusive
interview with the Daily Mirror yesterday, branded the deaths of young
soldiers in the war as "disgraceful and disgusting". Now,
in an extract from his provocative new book, Dude, Where's My Country?,
controversial author Moore asks a series of questions which cut to the
heart of US motives in Iraq and demands: 'Mr Bush, what is going on
here?' 1IS IT true that the Bin Laden family has had business relations with you and your family on and off for the past 25 years? MOST
people might be surprised to learn that you and your father have known
them for a long time. What exactly is the extent of this relationship,
Mr Bush? The Bin Ladens
are one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. Their huge
construction firm virtually built the country. They built some of the
airstrips America used in your dad's Gulf War. They
have extensive dealings with Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill
Lynch, Goldman Sachs and the Fremont Group. They have donated $2million
(£1.2million) to your alma mater, Harvard. They own property in Texas,
Florida and Massachusetts. In short, they have their hands deep in our
pants. After leaving
office, your father became a highly paid consultant for the Carlyle
Group, one of the nation's largest defence contractors. One of the
investors in the Carlyle Group - to the tune of at least $2million -
was the Bin Laden family. Until 1994, you headed a company called
CaterAir, owned by the Carlyle Group. It was no secret to the CIA that Osama Bin Laden had access to his family fortune. 2 WHAT is the "special relationship" between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family? THE
entire royal family seems to be indebted to you - or is it the other
way round? A major chunk of the American economy is built on Saudi
money. They have a trillion dollars invested in our stock market and
another trillion dollars in our banks. If
they chose suddenly to remove it, our corporations and financial
institutions would be sent into a tailspin. Couple that with the fact
that the 1.5 million barrels of oil we need daily from the Saudis could
also vanish on a mere royal whim and we begin to see how not only you,
but all of us, are dependent on the House of Saud. George, is this good for our national security? Who is it good for? You? Pops? 3
WHY did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the US in the days
after September 11 and pick up members of the Bin Laden family and fly
them out of the country without a proper investigation by the FBI? MIGHT it have been possible that at least one of the 24 Bin Ladens would have known something? 4 WHO attacked the US on 9/11 - a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friend, Saudi Arabia? YOU
got us all repeating by like parrots that it was Osama who was
responsible. But then I started hearing strange stories about Osama's
kidneys. How could a guy
sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, hooked up to dialysis, have directed
and overseen the actions of 19 terrorists for two years in the US,
plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and guaranteed that
three of them would end up precisely on their targets? Why, when
Congress released its own investigation into September 11, did you, Mr
Bush, censor 28 pages that deal with the Saudis' role in the attack? What
if 9/11 was not a "terrorist" attack but, rather, a military attack
against the United States? George, apparently you were a pilot once.
How hard is it to hit a five-storey building at more than 500 miles an
hour? The Pentagon is only five storeys high. Had the pilots been off by just a hair, they'd have been in the river. You
do not get this skilled at flying jumbo jets by being taught on a video
game machine at some minor flight training school in Arizona. You learn
to do this in the air force. Someone's air force. The Saudi air force? 5 WHY are you protecting the Second Amendment rights [Americans' "right" to bear arms] of potential terrorists? IN
the days after September 11, the FBI began running a check to see if
any of the 186 "suspects" the Feds had rounded up had purchased any
guns in the months leading up to September 11 (two of them had). When your Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, heard about this, he immediately shut down the search. I
truly love how you have rounded up hundreds of people and shipped them
out of the country on immigration charges. You can waive rights, but
when it comes to the right to own an AK-47, oh no! That right they can
have - and you will defend their right to have it. Who is really aiding
the terrorists here? 6 WERE you aware that, while you were governor of Texas, the Taliban travelled there to meet your oil and gas company friends? THEY
came to meet Unocal, the huge oil and energy giant, to discuss Unocal's
desire to build a natural-gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan
through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and into Pakistan.
Representatives of your administration met the Taliban or conveyed
messages to them during the summer of 2001. Were
you discussing their offer to hand over Bin Laden? Were you threatening
them with force? Were you discussing a new pipeline? 7
WHAT exactly was that look on your face in the Florida classroom on the
morning of September 11 when your chief of staff told you: "America is
under attack"? WERE you
thinking you should have taken reports the CIA had given you the month
before more seriously? You had been told al-Qaeda was planning attacks
in the US and planes would possibly be used. Or were you just scared
witless? Or... maybe, just
maybe, you were sitting there thinking about your Saudi friends - the
royals and the Bin Ladens. People you knew all too well that might have
been up to no good. Would questions be asked? Would the Democrats have the guts to dig into your family's past with these people? Would the truth ever come out? ©Michael Moore 2003. Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore is published by Allen Lane, price £17.99. To buy a copy for £16.99, click here. For
details of Michael Moore's November events in London, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Sheffield, Manchester, Cambridge and Bristol, go to
www.penguin.co.uk/events
| 
