House of Bush, House of Saud
Craig Unger
New York: Scribner, 2004, h/back, $26.00
I bought this because it was reported in the UK that the book couldn’t be published here due to our ‘stricter’ libel laws. Naturally, I wondered who among the Bushes and the Saudis might consider themselves libelled. The book is based mostly on newspaper articles, footnoted, and a few interviews – one with James R. Bath, who brought bin Laden and Saudi money into Texas; one with Richard Clarke, the discontented ‘counter-terrorism czar’. Unger is a Clinton fan and can’t fault Bill on anything. He dislikes Bush II and the gang currently in the White House. He isn’t sure how to deal with Bush 1. Sometimes he seems to view him as a kingly figure, at other times a minor courtier reduced to tears by minor acts of kindness on the part of the mega-rich Sauds. But he certainly views Bush II as an idiot. The term ‘House of Bush’ suggests some degree of equality between these Americans and the Saudis. But the ‘House of Bush’ contains the likes of James A Baker, Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney – very rich men, to be sure, but not Mellons or Rockefellers or Fords or Pews – the real power-families of the US. The notion of a ‘House of Bush’ is stretching it, I think; though you never know with such a scrofulous and power-mad lot.
In its detail the book is a bit sloppy: the term ‘knots per hour’ is used; ‘British jets’ on page 73 become ‘Mirages’ on page 75; we’re told 13,000 people died on 11 Sept. 2001. But the information is generally worth having, and adds to the shelves of material on what crooks and liars these House of Nixon remnants are.
But where is the offensive material, likely to provoke a lawsuit in the UK? It doesn’t seem very obvious. The only individual libelled in the book (as far as I can tell) is Saleh Idriss, the owner of the Sudanese asprin factory destroyed by Clinton’s cruise missiles in the midst of Monicagate. Unger is desperate to exonerate Clinton, and accuses Idriss of being a terrorist. But so did Clinton and much of the US and UK media at the time. Is ‘Prince Achmed Bin Salman Bin Abdul Aziz, well known … in publishing circles in London’ the likely litigant? Not really, since Unger reports that this alleged Al Quaeda contact man and financier died of a heart attack in 2002. The smoking gun that points at the late Prince Achmed comes from Gerald Posner, who apparently wrote a book relying on ‘exclusive secret information’ regarding this terrorist group, extracted under torture. Unger, from his description of Posner, clearly knows that there is something dubious about him. But, lacking any other concrete evidence that Saudi royals sponsor terrorism, he repeats Posner’s claim. Unger also refers to Edward James Epstein’s website, but sadly doesn’t repeat my favourite Bush I conspiracy anecdote – the one about the FBI memo in which ‘Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency’ denounced a Republican (!) political rival, for JFK-assassination-related activities, in 1963.
In the end, maybe the pressing reason to keep the book out of Britain was the section about BCCI. Unger adds to the drug-dealing, money-laundering, and torturer-hiring history of BCCI, and right now the Bank of Crooks and Cocaine International’s creditors are suing the Bank of England for its total failure to regulate the gangsters’ bank. It could be that something in this BCCI section rang an alarm.