Reply #129: Here's part of Hatfields last letter written in July 2001

[happydreams]

Jim Hatfield on bin Laden, Bush and attacks with highjacked airplanes -- July 2001
Linda Starr of Online Journal reminds us that in his last column for Online Journal before his death J.H. Hatfield, author of the controversial George W. Bush biography Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President, discussed oil business connections between George W. Bush and the bin Laden family and also talked about a possible attack on Bush by Osama bin Laden using highjacked airliners at the G8 summit in Italy that month.
Hatfield said, "According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives. Why would Osama bi Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?"

About a month and a half before his death, Hatfield said to me, "I don't know what it is about this book , but something really makes them crazy. They really just don't want this book out there."

Hatfield said he had received death threats from Bush friends and threats that named his wife and baby daughter. That was only the most chilling aspect of a vicious campaign to discredit the book by discrediting the author.

The charge that Bush had been arrested on a cocaine charge was brought out in an afterword to the book at the last minute at the urging of St. Martin's press, who hoped it would boost the book's sales. (It zoomed to the bestseller list immediately.) But that detail had eluded Hatfield until it started cropping up in other places, such as Salon. Then, he said, he went back to his sources and got confirmation off the record. Hatfield said the pieces were there in the text but he had not previously been able to put them together. "The piece about the community service just didn't fit," he said. "Why did this rich young playboy alcoholic pleasure seeker suddenly go do community service in a center for inner city kids." When the drug bust surfaced, it made the piece fit.