House of Bush, House of Saud Quotes

“True, as villains go, Saddam was straight out of central casting. He had killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, thousands of his own citizens, used chemical weapons, and committed atrocity after atrocity. But because Saddam had long been an ally of the Reagan and Bush administrations, such heinous crimes had gotten little attention in the media and few Americans thought of him as a dangerous enemy.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“London”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Bush’s”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“In the New York Times, Seymour Hersh later reported that "Israel and American Intelligence officials acknowledged that weapons, ammunition, and spare parts worth several billion dollars flowed into Iran each year during the early 1980's”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“But if arming Iran to support Israel was insane, the flip side of the policy, in the long run at least, was truly demented: Weinberger and Shultz favored defending Saudi Arabia and the enormous U.S. oil interests there by secretly bolstering the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As a result of their efforts, billions of dollars in aid and weapons were funneled to Saddam's regime.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Secret agreements between the Saudis and various U.S. presidents dated back to the early postwar era and continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a pact between President Harry Truman and King Ibn Saud in 1947, the United States vowed to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it was attacked. Likewise, in 1963, President Kennedy sent a squadron of fighter jets to protect Saudi Arabia when Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to kill members of the Saudi royal family.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Widely hailed as the most popular director of Central Intelligence since Allen Dulles, Bush had enormous support within the Agency. As the campaign got under way, Reagan-Bush posters appeared all over CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, many cut in the middle with only the right side, the Bush side, on display.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Bush had been warned about using Noriega as an asset by the legendary head of French Intelligence, Count Alexandre de Marenches, who warned him with regard to Noriega, "My own philosophy has always been that when you have something particularly dirty to do, you hire a gentleman to do it. If the gentleman is persuaded that what we are contemplating is an act of war, and by extension an act of patriotism, then we will find some very good people to work for us. By contrast, if we hire a thug, then eventually we will be compelled to kill the thug in one way or another because eventually we would be blackmailed by him.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“The Bohemian Grove has held secret meetings for the global elite since 1873 in a redwood forest of northern California. In addition to Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, members have included James Baker, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Rockefeller, William Casey, and Henry Kissinger. Each year, the members don red, black, and silver robes and conduct a ritual in which they worship a giant stone owl.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“It was often said that he was in the CIA, but [James] Bath denied that to Time. Later, he equivocated. "There's all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA]," he says. "It runs the whole spectrum, maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve- I don't think your're going to find them talking about it.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“BCCI's ascendancy was also due to business practices that were highly unusual in the staid world of banking. Other banks gave toaster ovens to new depositors; BCCI provided prostitutes... The report says that the woman was reputed to have first won the attention of the royal family "by arranging to get virgin women from the villages from the ages of 16 to 20... According to one U.S. investigator with substantial knowledge of BCCI's activities, some BCCI officials have acknowledged that some of the females provided some members of the Al-Nahyan family were young girls who had not yet reached puberty, and in certain cases, were physically injured by the experience. The official said that former BCCI officials had told him that BBCI also provided males to homosexual VIPs.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Oil, they had discovered, could be used as a weapon. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia took on the position Texas itself had once had and became the swing oil producer for the great industrial nations of the world. The biggest transfer of wealth in human history was under way. Hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues poured into the Saudi Kingdom. The Saudis were drowning in petrodollars.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Finally, one would have to put all this information together to shape a continuum, a narrative in which the House of Bush and the House of Saud dominated the world stage together in one era after another.
Having done so, one would come to a singular inescapable conclusion: namely, that, horrifying as it sounds, the secret relationship between these two great families helped to trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of 9/11.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“IN 1993, after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put an end to smoking in the White House, Bill Clinton would sometimes retreat there to smoke a cigar in a celebratory moment, as he did after the United States rescued a soldier in Bosnia.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“A senior member of the Washington diplomatic corps, Bandar has played racquetball with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the late seventies. He had run covert operations for the late CIA director Bill Casey that were so hush-hush they were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was the man who stashed away thirty locked attache cases that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. And for two decades, Bandar built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“According to Mustafa Elhussein, secretary of a center for Muslim intellectuals known as the Ibn Khaldun Society, “There is a great deal of bitterness that such groups have tarnished the reputation of mainstream Muslims” because “self-appointed leaders . . . spew hatred toward America and the West and yet claim to be the legitimate”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties