Owner of UAE port company went falcon hunting with bin Laden!

paulthompson

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Sun Feb-26-06 08:40 PM
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Owner of UAE port company went falcon hunting with bin Laden!

Edited on Sun Feb-26-06 08:42 PM by paulthompson

This is important. Please read the whole thing. As Wikipedia points out:

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is currently the Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates, as well as the leader of Dubai.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Rashid_Al_Maktoum

In fact, he just became ruler of the emirate of Dubai a month ago.

As I pointed out in one of my 9/11 Timeline entries, this same al Maktoum liked to go falcon hunting with bin Laden in Afghanistan:

"For years, Persian Gulf state elites hunted rare birds of prey, houbara bustards, in the bleak hills surrounding Kandahar. In the late 1990s, according to former U.S. and Afghan officials, a number of prominent Persian Gulf state officials and businessmen flew into Kandahar on state and private jets for secret hunting expeditions.

"For days at a time, the hunters would roam the hills, releasing falcons trained to catch the bustards. Some satisfied hunters heaped donations on their Taliban hosts, officials said--and on Al Qaeda leaders who occasionally joined them.

"Among the reported visitors were high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers. According to U.S. and former Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He headed that nation's intelligence service until late August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister."

(I made a slight error in my timeline entry, the source is the Los Angeles Times instead of MSNBC)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030618094400/http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-111801osamair,0,7388562.story

As a recent Washington Post article points out, the emirate of Dubai owns Dubai Ports World, the company in the center of this controversy, which means that al Maktum, as the royal ruler of the emirate, is the owner of the company. The article even has a picture of him with Kofi Annan:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/23/AR2006022301898.html

It turns out that in early 1999, after the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa that made bin Laden the most well known and wanted terrorist in the world, UAE royals were still falcon hunting with bin Laden. Here's my timeline entry on the matter:

February 1999: Bin Laden Missile Strike Called Off for Fear of Hitting Persian Gulf Royalty

Intelligence reports foresee the presence of bin Laden at a desert hunting camp in Afghanistan for about a week. Information on his presence appears reliable, so preparations are made to target his location with cruise missiles. However, intelligence also puts an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and members of the royal family from that country in the same location. Bin Laden is hunting with the Emirati royals, as he did with leaders from the UAE and Saudi Arabia on other occasions (see 1995-2001). Policy makers are concerned that a strike might kill a prince or other senior officials, so the strike never happens. A top UAE official at the time denies that high-level officials are there, but evidence subsequently confirms their presence. (9/11 Commission Report, 3/24/04 (B))

CIA Director George Tenet later said this in explaining why the US did not go through with the missile strike:

"The third complicating factor here is you might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20349-2004Mar24.html

In the book Ghost Wars on page 448, there is a similar quote: "In the American military, recalled one person involved, 'Nobody wanted to say, "Well, you blew up a camp full of U.A.E. princes and half of the royal family of the U.A.E.'s dead - and you guys didn't get him."'"

So, while the exact names of the UAE royals who were with bin Laden on this occasion have not been publicly released, it is highly likely al Maktum and his friends and family continued to personally associate with bin Laden after the embassy bombings (not the mention the early 1998 fatwa where bin Laden gave his blessings to any attack on US civilians anywhere in the world).

It has been claimed in recent days that the Dubai royal family has no connections with the port company except owning it, which sounds a bit strange on its face. In any case, according to this recent New York Times article, the chairman of the port company works directly for al Maktoum:

"We're pleased by this development and remain encouraged by the P&O board's unanimous recommendation to its shareholders of our offer," said the DP World chairman, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who works directly for the crown prince of Dubai, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. "It would be inappropriate for us to say anything more ahead of the shareholder vote."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/10/business/port.php

For those who search my timeline for other entries on the UAE and read other articles, such as this one:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051205/5terror.b1.htm

the past connection between al Maktoum and bin Laden is just one of many reasons why this port deal should be of great concern.