JIMMY CARTER’S SAUDI SPONSORS: Benefactors of the Carter Center Have Included King Fahd and the Bin Laden Family

“I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false.” So said former President Jimmy Carter at a press conference last Saturday at the Baptist World Alliance centenary conference in Birmingham, England. He also said, “What has happened at Guantanamo Bay … does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think it’s wrong.”

Anyone who finds Carter’s anti-American hyperbole puzzling should read The Real Jimmy Carter by Steven F. Hayward. It contains this revealing information about the ex-president’s foreign sponsors:

“…Carter’s main post-presidential occupation has been founding and promoting the Carter Center… Carter spoke oddly of applying `new theories of conflict resolution’ to perennial conflicts around the world. The Carter Center, [Carter biographer] Peter Bourne explained, “was not to be a think tank in the traditional sense, turning out position papers or learned treatises. It was to be an action center, where its direct intervention would influence events.’ Or, as former secretary of state Dean Rusk put it, `Carter wanted to create a mini-United Nations in downtown Atlanta.’… [page 198]

“The Carter Center’s current annual budget is more than $35 million, and has accumulated an endowment of more than $200 million. …

“Much of the Carter Center’s early major funding, however, came from foreign sources – some of them questionable at best. … Carter also raised prodigious sums from Arabs and wealthy Palestinians. Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd supplied $1 million, and the notorious Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi underwrote a fund-raising auction. Another major funder was Hasib Sabbagh, a prominent businessman close to Yasir Arafat… The complete list of major foreign donors to the Carter Center includes the Sultan of Oman, the government of the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi bin Laden Group (yes, that bin Laden Group), the Saudi Fund for Development, the OPEC Fund for International Development, and Prince Abdallah of Morocco.

“But by far the donor who raised the most eyebrows was [Pakistani banker] Aga Hassen Abedi, the head of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). Abedi initially donated $4 million to the Carter Center in 1985, and gave an additional $17 million in 1988. … Carter traveled several times to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia aboard what [Carter biographer] Douglas Brinkley described as `BCCI’s palatial airplane.’ Carter’s prestige likely assisted BCCI’s efforts to establish substantial banking centers in the same countries Carter and Abedi visited together.” [pages 198-200]

The now-defunct BCCI was a major financier of terrorist activity worldwide. Regulators in sixty-two countries shut down the Pakistani bank in July 1991, when its corrupt dealings with drug lords, terrorists, mercenaries, arms dealers, money launderers and black-budget spooks could no longer be contained.

Steven Hayward informs us that the Carter Center has also received substantial funding from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Hollywood leftists Norman Lear and Paul Newman; as well as Georgia-based corporations such as Home Depot, United Parcel Service, Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola.

by Richard Poe
August 2, 2005 07:43 AM ET

Cross-posted from MoonbatCentral.com 08.02.05