WHO AUTHORIZED THE BIN LADEN EVACUATION?

Two days after the attacks, Bush emphatically pledged, “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priorityand we willnot rest until we find him.”
Yet as the weeks passed, this position grew more ambivalent. Towards the end of December, speaking at his Crawford, Texas ranch, Bush ruminated, “…he [bin Laden] is not escaping us. This is a guy, who, three months ago, was in control of a county [sic]. Now he's maybe in control of a cave. He's on the run. Listen, a while ago I said to the American people, our objective is more than bin Laden. But one of the things for certain is we're going to get him running and keep him running, and bring him to justice. And that's what's happening. He's on the run, if he's running at all. So we don't know whether he's in cave with the door shut, or a cave with the door open—we just don't know.…”
By March 2002, Bush admitted, “I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority.” In response to a question from newsmen about bin Laden's whereabouts, Bush responded, “I am truly not that concerned about him.” This same indifferent attitude apparently did not extend to the bin Laden family.
While hundreds of people around the world were rounded up and arrested by national authorities in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the public denied the right to fly, about 140 Saudis—including two dozen members of Osama bin Laden's own family—were allowed to fly by private jet to a reunion in Washington and then on to Boston. According to The New Yorker, the bin Ladens grouped in Boston, from where they eventually were flown out of the country once the FAA reinstated overseas flights. And this curious operation was carried out even as Osama bin Laden was being fingered as the undoubted perpetrator of the attacks.
Initially dismissed as an Internet rumor or an urban legend, the reports of the bin Laden family flight were confirmed in an October 2003 Vanity Fair interview with Richard A. Clarke, who had resigned earlier that year as chief of the Counterterrorism Security Group of the NSC. Clarke said that he did not recall who requested approval for the flight, but thought it was either the FBI or the State Department. “Someone brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,” he said. “So I said, ‘Fine, let it happen.’”
Although both the Tampa Tribune and the New York Times reported that the Saudis were shepherded to their flights by FBI agents, bureau officials denied such reports. The Saudi flights, which came from ten American cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston, ended up in Boston where two jumbo jets flew the group to Saudi Arabia in mid-September 2001.
None of the Saudis were seriously interrogated by anyone. “We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history and here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens…” groused Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Boston's Logan International Airport. “I wanted to go to the highest levels in Washington,” he told Vanity Fair but realized that the operation had the blessing of top federal officials.
Equally disturbing was the accusation of Senator Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who in 2004 accused the Bush White House of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers. This charge came following FBI officials refusal to allow investigators for the congressional 9/11 inquiry and the 9/11 Commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, an FBI informant who was landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers. Graham termed the letter from an FBI official stating “the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source [Shaikh],” a “smoking gun” which proved “The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.” Republicans unsurprisingly termed such accusation “bizarre conspiracy theories,” and Saudi officials said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.
“How was it possible that, just as President Bush declared a no-holds-barred global war on terrorism that would send hundreds of thousands of US troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and just as Osama bin Laden became Public Enemy No. 1 and the target of a worldwide manhunt, the White House would expedite the departure of so many potential witnesses, including two dozen relatives of the man behind the attack itself?” mused Vanity Fair writer Craig Unger.
Numerous bin Laden family members flew out of the US from Logan International on September 18, 2001. The very next day, White House speech writers were formulating President Bush's stirring call for a war on terrorism while at the Pentagon plans were being drawn up for this war to include Iraq. No one yet has pinpointed the authority behind this incredible evacuation, although it is clear this authority must have had control over both the FBI and the FAA.
The sheer fact that someone with authority over the FBI and FAA allowed the family of the chief suspect in the 9/11 attacks to fly with impunity, when the rest of America was grounded, failed to set off alarm bells in both the media and the public.