Hatfield on bin Laden, Bush and attacks by highjacked aircraft

May 18, 2002

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 [Fortunate Son], 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.

Hatfield felt that other information damaging to the Bushes must lurk in the pages of the book, hidden between the lines, things that would become evident when a missing piece surfaced. An organization like the Bush machine with so much illegal activity in its history has any number of potential scandals that could emerge at any time. Damage control is an ongoing part of their operations. To someone who knew the facts, those scandals must stick out of the text of Fortunate Son like so many sore thumbs. Hatfield thought that must have been why the Bush machine took such a personal interest in keeping the book off the shelves. And time only seems to enhance the credibility of the theory.

Since Hatfield's death, I have often wondered what those other hidden scandals were. We may be on the verge of finding out some big ones.

Linda Starr has this to add, "I'd like to remind everyone how vilified Jim Hatfield was by the Bush Machine and how often Jim has been completely correct about Dumbyass and company. I am also proud to once again say that Jim Hatfield was my friend and deserves vindication for his hard work on Bush. They destroyed him as surely as if they murdered him. As my daddy always said, even a chicken can eventually peck you to death. The Bush Machine pecked Jim Hatfield to death."

For the whole article, go to Online Journal.



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