Monday, November 19, 2001 

US efforts to make peace summed up by 'oil' 
 

A new book alleges years of attempts to arrest Osama bin Laden being blocked by the US, one of the authors tells Lara Marlowe 
 

ANALYSIS: The fate of John O'Neill, the Irish-American FBI agent who for years led US investigations into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, is the most chilling revelation in the book Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth, published in Paris this week.O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year.Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's finances for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of Hidden Truth, met O'Neill several times last summer. 

He complained bitterly that the US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt.The US ambassador to Yemen, Ms Barbara Bodine, forbade O'Neill and his team of so- called Rambos (as the Yemeni authorities called them) from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill resigned in frustration and took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the September 11th attack.
 

Brisard and his co-author Guillaume Dasquié, the editor of Intelligence Online, say their book is a tribute to O'Neill. The FBI agent had told Brisard: "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organisation, can be found in Saudi Arabia."But US diplomats shrank from offending the Saudi royal family. O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after 19 US servicemen died in the bombing of a military installation in Dhahran in June 1996. Saudi officials interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty and executed them - without letting the FBI talk to them. "They were reduced to the role of forensic scientists, collecting material evidence on the bomb site," Brisard says. O'Neill said there was clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's guilt in the bombing of the USS Cole \in which 17 US servicemen died\, but that the State Department prevented him from getting it." Brisard and Dasquié discovered that the first country to issue an international arrest warrant against bin Laden was not the US, but Moamar Gadafy's Libya, in March 1998. 
 

The confidential notice, published for the first time in their book, was sent by the Libyan interior ministry to Interpol on March 16th, 1998, and accuses bin Laden of murdering two German intelligence agents, Silvan Becker and his wife, in Libya in 1994.Bin Laden supported a fundamentalist group called al-Muqatila, made up of Libyans who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan.Al-Muqatila wanted to assassinate Gadafy, whom it considered an infidel. According to the former MI5 agent David Shayler, British intelligence - also in league with al-Muqatila - tried to assassinate Gadafy in November 1996.It was because of British collaboration with al-Muqatila that the Interpol warrant was ignored, Brisard says. Since September 11th, al-Muqatila has been placed on President Bush's list of "terrorist groups".The central thesis of Brisard and Dasquié's book is sure to join the annals of 21st century conspiracy theories. 
 

The writers document negotiations between the Bush administration and the Taliban between February and August of this year. Less convincingly, they conjecture that the September 11th suicide attacks were the result of the failure of those negotiations.The chief motivation behind US attempts to make peace with the Taliban can be summed up in one word: oil. The former Soviet republics of Central Asia - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and especially "the new Kuwait", Kazakhstan - have vast oil and gas reserves. But Russia has refused to allow the US to extract it through Russian pipelines and Iran is considered a dangerous route. That left Afghanistan.The US oil company Chevron - where Mr Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a director throughout the 1990s - is deeply involved in Kazakhstan. 
 

In 1995, another US company, Unocal (formerly Union Oil Company of California) signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline which would go from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan.The authors recall how the State Department applauded the Taliban takeover in September 1996, five months after a US assistant secretary of state warned "economic opportunities will be missed" if political stability was not restored in Afghanistan.Laila Helms, the part Afghan niece of the former CIA director and former US ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms, is described as the Mata-Hari of US-Taliban negotiations.Ms Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to Mullah Omar, to Washington for five days in March 2001 - after the Taliban had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.
 

In negotiations which continued until July, the US then took a more discreet position, letting the UN envoy Francesc Vendrell do most of the work and appointing a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Thomas Simons, to represent the US at informal meetings in Berlin.The last direct US contact with the Taliban was on August 2nd, 2001, when Christina Rocca, the director of Asian affairs at the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Ms Rocca was previously in charge of contacts with Islamist guerrilla groups at the CIA, where in the 1980s, she oversaw the delivery of Stinger missiles to Afghan mujaheddin. Last February, the Taliban had indicated it might be willing to hand over bin Laden, but by June, according to Brisard and Dasquié, the US began considering military action. 
 

"The US thought they could 'decouple' Osama bin Laden from the Taliban," Brisard says. "What they did not understand was that without bin Laden, the Taliban regime wouldn't have existed."By dispatching Francesc Vendrell to see the exiled King Zaher Shah in Rome and raising the threat of military action, Washington "backed the Taliban into a corner", the authors say. For the Taliban - assuming its leadership had advance knowledge of the suicide attacks - September 11th was a sort of pre-emptive strike.Brisard and Dasquié claim a significant part of the Saudi royal family supports bin Laden. "Saudi Arabia has always protected bin Laden - or protected itself from him," says Brisard. 
 

He points out that attacks inside the kingdom targeted US interests, never the Saudis. Khalid bin Mahfouz is the former chairman of the kingdom's biggest bank, the National Commercial Bank, who, with 10 family members received Irish citizenship in December 1990. Brisard and Dasquié call him "the banker of terror". The 73-year-old Mahfouz is now under house arrest in the Saudi resort of Taif, accused by the FBI and CIA of having diverted $2 billion to Islamic charities that helped bin Laden. 

Published on Thursday, November 15, 2001 by the Inter Press Service 

U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Authors 

by Julio Godoy 
 

PARIS - Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim. In the book ''Bin Laden, la verite interdite'' (''Bin Laden, the forbidden truth''), that appeared in Paris on Wednesday, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction. Brisard claim O'Neill told them that ''the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. Oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it''. 

The two claim the U.S. government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. They affirm that until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ''as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia'', from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, ''the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that''. But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept U.S. conditions, ''this rationale of energy security changed into a military one'', the authors claim. 

''At one moment during the negotiations, the U.S. representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs','' Brisard said in an interview in Paris. According to the book, the government of Bush began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power in February. U.S. and Taliban diplomatic representatives met several times in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad. To polish their image in the United States, the Taliban even employed a U.S. expert on public relations, Laila Helms. 

The authors claim that Helms is also an expert in the works of U.S. Secret services, for her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The last meeting between U.S. And Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. Government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad. Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, a French company. He also worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al Qaeda network, headed by bin Laden. 
 

Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet. Brisard and Dasquie draw a portrait of closest aides to President Bush, linking them to oil business. Bush's family has a strong oil background. So are some of his top aides. From the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of the National Security Council Condoleeza Rice, to the Ministers of Commerce and Energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for U.S. Oil companies. Cheney was until the end of last year president of Halliburton, a company that provides services for oil industry; 
 

Rice was between 1991 and 2000 manager for Chevron; Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant. Besides the secret negotiations held between Washington and Kabul and the importance of the oil industry, the book takes issue with the role played by Saudi Arabia in fostering Islamic fundamentalism, in the personality of bin Laden, and with the networks that the Saudi dissident built to finance his activities. Brisard and Dasquie contend the U.S. Government's claim that it had been prosecuting bin Laden since 1998. ''Actually,'' Dasquie says, ''the first state to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on the charges of terrorism.'' ''Bin Laden wanted settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered by the government of Muammar Qaddafi,'' Dasquie claims.
 

''Enraged by Libya's refusal, bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qaddafi.'' Dasquie singles out one group, the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), reputedly the most powerful Libyan dissident organization, based in London, and directly linked with bin Laden. ''Qaddafi even demanded Western police institutions, such as Interpol, to pursue the IFG and bin Laden, but never obtained co- operation,'' Dasquie says. ''Until today, members of IFG openly live in London.'' The book confirms earlier reports that the U.S. Government worked closely with the United Nations during the negotiations with the Taliban. ''Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN secretary general Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan,'' says the book. 

''Representatives of the U.S. Government and Russia, and the six countries that border with Afghanistan were present at these meetings,'' it says. ''Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.'' These meetings, also called ''6+2'' because of the number of states (six neighbors plus U.S. And Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs. In a French television news program two weeks ago, Naik said during a ''6+2'' meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions turned around ''the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid.'' ''And the pipe lines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,'' he added. Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the U.S. representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. ''Simons said, 'either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option'. The words Simons used were 'a military operation','' Naik claimed.
 

Copyright © 2001 IPS-Inter Press Service

America's Pipe Dream
A Pro-Western Regime in Kabul Should Give the US an Afghan Route for Caspian Oil 

by George Monbiot
 

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" 

In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long. The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. 

Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East. Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbors, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. 

The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan. Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. 

In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe. As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". 

UNOCAL invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered. For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." 

US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both UNOCAL's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul. Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, UNOCAL failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognized by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. 

Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did UNOCAL drop its plans. But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. 

As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern. American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defense white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". 

In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organization". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarization", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance. If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia. 

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is doing.

Published on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 in the  Guardian of London

Put the Planet on a War Footing
This is the Time for Environmentalists to Challenge the Actions of our Leaders and Press Their Demands

by Ros Coward

I sat in the summer sun a few months ago with Blake Lee Harwood from Greenpeace, idly discussing whether Bush had inadvertently done environmentalists a favor. Kyboshing the Kyoto accord meant people who had never heard of climate change were suddenly discussing carbon trading and greenhouse gases. 

In Britain, there were hopeful signs. Tony Blair was promising to go to Johannesburg for next year's earth summit and making speeches about putting environment at the government's heart. Even his technofix vision was better than nothing. Stephen Byers was unexpectedly promising and seemed to be insisting on proper public funding for transport. 

The foot and mouth disaster presented an opportunity to push for more sustainable use of the countryside. Environmentalists were rolling up their sleeves for a big push. That was then and this is now. 

After September 11, all other political agendas have been shoved aside. It's frustrating for anyone in domestic politics, galling to see lavish spending on military activity when the relatively modest amounts we sought for domestic improvements had been refused. For environmentalists, the current situation is disturbing. Blair has been using environmental rhetoric to justify the global alliance with Bush. 

At the Labour conference, he said the war's silver lining would be a new world order of binding multilateral agreements on things such as climate change; the unspoken agenda was that America would toe the line. We have to take him at his word. Bush has said no such thing. According to him, the war's explicit goals are freedom, democracy, justice. Indeed, the war's implicit goals look radically at odds with environmental objectives. Mayor Giuliani implied that defending the American way of life was the war's true ethic. The victims in the twin towers, he said, were innocent people pursuing the American dream. 

The world must defend their right to it. From the point of view of the planet's future, though, that dream is hardly defensible: a gas-guzzling, unsustainable culture, consuming more than its share of global resources. Bush's departure from Kyoto said it all. American wealth takes precedence over the planet. Perhaps the planet would stand a better chance in the hands of the Taliban, were it not for the increasing Afghan population. Sadly, the clock can't be turned back. Some of us may even support decisive action against fundamentalist terrorism. But that doesn't mean keeping quiet. 

More than any group, environmentalists warned about America's devil-may-care attitude towards the planet and its ruthless promotion of American interests under the guise of global free trade. It was environmentalists, too, who insisted that while global political agreements could be good, current global trade agreements were damaging. Leaving aside actual damage to local habitats and communities, the transport involved in this global trade consumes one-eighth of world oil production, with serious implications for climate. 

If Blair is going to use environmental rhetoric he's going to have to cut a deal. He can have our support if we get the society we want. Now is the moment to challenge and make demands rather than keep quiet. This war has woken the whole world up to the issues at the heart of environmental campaigning; in particular the injustice and instability of free trade agreements and the foolish over-dependence on fossil-based fuel. A crypto-war could affect relations with Middle Eastern oil producers for our lifetimes. So it makes sense on every level to reduce oil dependency, instead investing properly in renewables. 

The UK still lags behind other Europeans in terms of grants to individuals and companies to invest in renewables. Most companies still charge the consumer more to "choose" green electricity, and this is inexcusable either in terms of climate or national security. Now is also the right time to discuss the role of nuclear power in future energy policies. The energy review is in progress and, headed by the pro-nuclear Brian Wilson, there are signs nuclear energy may be pushed as a "green" alternative to fossil fuels. Yet the all too real risks of accident and terrorism mean this should be robustly challenged. 

The same vigilance must be applied to food and agriculture. The horror of the twin towers supplanted images of burning cattle but we should not forget them. The big farmers refused to vaccinate because of their export market. As it turned out, the severity of the infection destroyed that anyway. In the meantime, more valuable rural industries were brought to their knees. 

It was a lesson we didn't need again: the global food market is a disaster for the environment, health, animal welfare and the small producers. For all its fine words, the government's performance on the environment has been half-hearted. Now that has to change. In an unstable world, we need sustainable local production along with global agreements in order to secure peace. The last thing we need to do is give uncritical support to a nation which thinks it is its right to consume, come what may.

Ran in the OcRegister and NY Times
U.S. pays political price for Saudi oil 

The terrorist attacks test the decades-old alliance between Washington and the petroleum-rich desert kingdom. 

October 21, 2001

By NEELA BANERJEE

The New York Times During his presidential campaign, George W. Bush warned that the nation faced an oil crisis. He was right, but not in the way he foresaw. The crisis that came has nothing to do with prices at the gas pump, or environmental obstacles to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Rather, it has to do with the political and military price the United States must pay for its dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf. 

The terms of that dependence have been glaringly obvious since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Immediately after Sept. 11, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, assured the United States that it would keep oil supplies stable. In turn, the Bush administration has refrained from criticizing Saudi silence over the U.S.-led counterattacks against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, nor has it spoken out about evidence that Saudi citizens finance Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and other radical Islamic organizations.

Moreover, although the FBI identified most of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks as Saudis, Saudi Arabia has refused to provide passenger lists of flights to the United States, an act the Bush administration has been unwilling to criticize. "The stark truth is that we're dependent on this country that directly or indirectly finances people who are a direct threat to you and me," said Edward L. Morse, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international energy policy under President Reagan. "They won't give us information, won't help track people down, and won't let us use our bases that are there to protect them," Morse added. A major reason for that reticence is oil. 

Five percent of the world's population lives in the United States, but it burns about 19 million barrels of oil a day, or 25 percent of the global daily consumption of 76 million barrels. American cars and sport-utility vehicles alone consume 10 percent of that. The United States has been angling for influence in the Arabian Peninsula since oil was discovered there 70 years ago. U.S. oil companies helped create Saudi Aramco, the state oil company. They were kicked out during the 1973 Arab oil embargo, but the United States and Saudi Arabia quickly reconciled. Several groups of Western oil companies, led by Exxon Mobil, will soon develop Saudi Arabia's huge natural- gas fields. 

Saudi Arabia has all along made certain it was the largest supplier of oil to the United States, oil traders, diplomats and economists said. Saudi Arabia could make more money selling oil to East Asia but has preferred to sell oil to the United States at lower prices in order to retain its coveted role. Over the decades, the Saudis' pursuit of U.S. money and military protection melded perfectly with America's ever-growing oil appetite to turn the two nations into reflexive allies. Saudi Arabia and the United States worked together for years to shape the balance of power in the Middle East and Central Asia. From 1980 to 1988, the United States and Saudi Arabia armed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudis were part of an alliance formed by the United States to drive them out. 

"We collaborated in the war in Afghanistan: the Saudis, the U.S. and Pakistan," said Gregory Gause, director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Vermont. "The Saudis had the money, the Pakistanis had the bases, and we had the political oomph to get it together." Because its interests were so densely intertwined with Saudi Arabia's, the United States turned a blind eye to its ally's unsavory foreign liaisons and brewing domestic trouble. The United States looked the other way, for instance, as the Saudi government and individuals sent money to the Taliban. Starting in 1999 and extending at least into mid-2000, Saudi Arabia exported 150,000 barrels of oil a day, gratis, to Pakistan and Afghanistan as foreign aid, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication. 

Among oil traders, it is widely believed that the shipments exceeded war-ravaged Afghanistan's needs, and that oil may have been resold to arm the Taliban. Saudi Arabia's aid to the Taliban points up the balancing act the ruling al-Saud family has to perform between its foreign and domestic interests. The Saudis consider themselves allies of the United States. But the glue that holds their kingdom together is a puritanical strain of Islam called Wahhabism. By supporting the Taliban and other Muslim groups, the al-Saud dynasty is able to retain the good will of the country's clerics. Already, in response to the tacit Saudi backing of the U.S. anti- terrorism campaign, a powerful mainstream mullah in Saudi Arabia has issued a fatwa excommunicating the royal family. Fearful of protests, the Saudis have not tried to arrest him. 

By MARCY GORDON, Associated Press 

WASHINGTON (October 26, 2001 3:47 p.m. EDT) - Osama bin Laden's wealthy family in Saudi Arabia is severing its financial ties with the Carlyle Group, a politically-connected U.S. private investment firm, by mutual agreement, a source familiar with the relationship said Friday. 

The bin Laden family decided to sell its investment worth $2.02 million back to the firm mainly because of public controversy over its stake in a Carlyle fund that invests in buyouts of military and aerospace companies, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The source was confirming a report in Friday's editions of The New York Times. 

There had been criticism in Saudi Arabia after the Sept. 11 terror attacks that the family, which disowned exiled Islamic militant Osama bin Laden years ago, might profit from increased military spending in the U.S. war against terrorism. 

The family, whose construction company is one of the largest in the Middle East, also has invested with a number of other investment funds and financial institutions around the world, reportedly including U.S. financial services giant Citigroup, Deutsche Bank of Germany and the Dutch bank ABN Amro. 

Carlyle has some $14 billion in assets under management. Its chairman is Frank Carlucci, a former U.S. defense secretary. Former President George Bush, former secretary of state James Baker and Arthur Levitt, who had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission through most of the Clinton administration, are senior advisers to the firm. 

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