<http://www.nypress.com/15/29/news&columns/beans.cfm>
New York Press - July 17-23, 2002
Hill of Beans Christopher Caldwell
[...]
There is nothing protecting the President from electoral vulnerability except the fact that we're at war. And this is where Bush's sale of Harken stock takes an interesting twist. The important issue might not be when he sold it but who bought it. This is information that Senate Democrats are seeking desperately; Bush refuses to reveal it, and it is not even clear if the Securities and Exchange Commission knows the buyer's identity from its insider trading investigation. If they know, they haven't released it.
But let's speculate. An editorial on Harken in last week's Wall Street Journal noted "interesting Saudi connections on the finance side." One of Bush's early investors in Arbusto was James Bath, agent of Salem bin Laden (Osama's half-brother) in the United States. (This is not proof, as certain left-wing publications have implied, that Bath's money was the bin Ladens' to begin with.) In the months after Bush came onto the Harken board, according to a 1999 Journal report, a Saudi financier named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought a 17 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh's American representative Talat Othman was given a seat on the board and met with then-President Bush at the White House. And the "good news" into which now-President Bush claimed to be selling his Harken shares was an oil-exploration deal with the government of Bahrain-a total (but lucrative) flop that was arranged despite Harken's never having done any foreign oil exploration before. In fact, the ex-president's ne'er-do-well son appears to have been used by the Harken board as "Arab bait," much as Democrats sold the promise of photographs with Clinton family nobodies for cash from Asian businessmen. ("Rook! That's me with Lodger Crinton!")
To be fair (if only for a moment), back in the early 1990s, Saudi Arabia was known as our unsavory but solid longtime ally against communism, not as the gang of rich fascists who spawned Al Qaeda and are now obstructing our war against it. But until the identity of the Harken purchaser is revealed, probing the issue will be a no-lose situation for the Democrats. They can ask whether George Bush's fortune has its roots in Arab oil money. They can ask whether the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International was involved. They can ask why it was that the entire bin Laden clan was allowed to be flown out of the country in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They won't accuse Bush of intentionally bungling the war on terror to please the Saudis. But they may note that it was tragic that, at a time when thousands of Americans were murdered by extremists whose only ultimate means of support was oil, we had an oil man in the White House.