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As the author of House of Bush, House of Saud, I am not sure if it is appropriate to respond here, but I did not want erroneous right wing criticism of my book to stand without a rebuttal. "Seeker of Truth" claims my figure of $860 billion invested by the Saudis in the US is "a factoid" which I invented. The source was Allan Gerson, an attorney representing the families of 9/11 victims. (...) Likewise, Seeker of Truth takes issue with the fact that I found more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts going from the Saudis to companies with ties to the Bushes. He writes, "The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn't join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998-five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm." My critic uncritically accepts the explanation of Carlyle's publicist, leaving the reader with the impression that the Bush family and its allies had little or no relationship with the Carlyle Group until 1998. If that were true, he might have a point. But in fact, the Bush-Carlyle relationship began eight years earlier when the Carlyle Group put George W. Bush on the board of one of its subsidiaries, Caterair, in 1990. In 1993, after the Bush-Quayle administration left office and George H. W. Bush and James Baker were free to join the private sector, the Bush family's relationship with the Carlyle Group began to become substantive. By the end of that year, key figures at the Carlyle Group included such powerful Bush colleagues as James Baker, Frank Carlucci, and Richard Darman. Because George W. Bush's role at Carlyle had been marginal, the $1.4 billion figure includes no contracts that predated the arrival of Baker, Carlucci and Darman at Carlyle. (These figures are itemized in the appendix of House of Bush.) With former Secretary of Defense Carlucci guiding the acquisition of defense companies, Carlyle finally began making real money from the Saudis, both through investments from the royal family, the bin Ladens and other members of the Saudi elite, and through lucrative defense investments. Craig Unger