Bush dynasty weaves tangled Mideast web (MAJOR HIT PIECE)

San Antonio Express News ^ | Feb. 15, 2004 | Kevin Phillips

[Alissa]

Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons, and we're certainly seeing it with the Bushes. Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links.

As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells.

Over the four decades since then, the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.

How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9-11 and then distorted the U.S. response to Islamic terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty.

The first family member lured by the Middle East's petroleum wealth was George W. Bush's great-grandfather, George H. Walker, a buccaneer who was president of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. In the 1920s, Walker and his firm participated in rebuilding the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of current-day Iraq.

As senior director of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), Walker's son-in-law Prescott Bush (George W. Bush's grandfather) became involved with the Middle East in the years after World War II.

But it was George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, who forged the dynasty's strongest ties to the region. George H.W. Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. He went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to have either an oil or CIA background.

This helps to explain his persistent bent toward the Middle East, covert operations and rogue banks like the Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which came to be known by the nickname "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International."

In each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world's primary destination for arms shipments.

Links to scandals

Taking the CIA helm in January 1976, Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider.

After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book "False Profits," Bush "traveled on the bank's behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions."

Once in the White House, first as vice president to Ronald Reagan and later as president, George H.W. Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered scandals.

It's never been entirely clear what Bush's connection was to the Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran, some BCCI-financed, helped illegally fund the operations of the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But in 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh asserted that Bush, despite his protestations, had indeed been "in the loop" on multiple illegal acts.

Much clearer was Bush's pivotal role, both as vice president and president, in "Iraqgate," the hidden aid provided by the United States and its military to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran during the 1980s. The United States is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons.

As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 "Nightline" program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George (H.W.) Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

Brothers fall in step

During these years, Bush's four sons — George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin — were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot.

Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) — billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using bin Laden-bin Mahfouz funds.

In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy.

The Wall Street Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken — all since George W. Bush came on board — likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."

Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank," concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in steering the oil-drilling contract to the president's son." The web entangling the Bush presidencies was already being spun.

Second son Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida, spent most of his time in the early and mid-1980s hobnobbing with ex-Cuban intelligence officers, Nicaraguan Contras and others plugged into the lucrative orbit of Miami-area front groups for the CIA.

But he too had some Middle East connections. Two of his business associates, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and Camilo Padreda, both indicted for financial dealings, were longtime associates of Middle Eastern arms dealer, BCCI investor and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Prosecutors dropped the case against the two, and a federal judge ordered Padreda's name expunged from the record.

But a few years later Padreda, a former Miami-Dade County GOP treasurer, was convicted of fraud over a federally insured housing development that Jeb Bush had helped to facilitate. Jeb Bush also socialized with Adbur Sakhia, the Miami BCCI branch chief and later its top U.S. official.

Neil Bush, most famous for the scandal surrounding the corrupt practices of Colorado's Silverado Savings & Loan, where he served as a director during the 1980s, also picked plums from Persian Gulf orchards. In 1993, after his father left the White House, Neil went to Kuwait with his parents, brother Marvin and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

When his father left, Neil stayed to lobby for business contracts, and after returning home evolved a set of lucrative relationships with Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel. One of their ventures, Ignite!, an educational software company, also included representatives of at least three ruling Persian Gulf families.

The Bush family's Middle Eastern commercial focus is further exemplified by Marvin, the youngest brother of the current president. From 1993 to 2000 he was a major shareholder, along with Mishal Youssef Saud al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, in the Kuwait-American Corp., which had holdings in several U.S. defense, aviation and industrial security companies.

Ex-president's ties

George H.W. Bush's own Persian Gulf relationships kept expanding. While serving in the Reagan White House during the 1980s, he was known in the Middle East as "the Saudi vice president," and a New Yorker article last year described the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. as "almost a member of the (Bush) family."

Indeed, many saw the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait as an outgrowth of Bush's close ties to the oil industry and to Persian Gulf royal families, who felt threatened by Saddam's expansionism.

After losing his bid for a second term as president, Bush joined up in 1993 with the Washington-based Carlyle Group. Under the leadership of ex-officials like Baker and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, Carlyle developed a specialty in buying defense companies and doubling or quadrupling their value.

The ex-president not only became an investor in Carlyle, but a member of the company's Asia Advisory Board and a rainmaker who drummed up investors. Twelve rich Saudi families, including the bin Ladens, were among them.

In 2002, the Washington Post reported, "Saudis close to Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, were encouraged to put money into Carlyle as a favor to the elder Bush."

Bush retired from the company last October, and Baker, who lobbied U.S. allies recently to forgive Iraq's debt, remains a Carlyle senior counselor.

Ripe for debate

If the 1991 war with Iraq and its aftermath cemented the Bush ties with oil elites and royalty in the Middle East, it angered Islamic true believers and radicals. By the late 1990s, many of the Islamic insurgents who had been mobilized by the CIA and others to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan were becoming increasingly anti-American. They found a kinship with Osama bin Laden, the renegade of his billionaire Saudi family, who was outraged at the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia.

When the United States launched a second war against Iraq in 2003 but failed to find weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was purported to have, international polls, especially those by the Washington-based Pew Center, charted a massive growth in anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment in Muslim parts of the world — an obvious boon to terrorist recruitment.

Even before the war, some cynics had argued that Iraq was targeted to divert attention from the administration's failure to catch Osama bin Laden and stop al-Qaida terrorism. Bolder critics hinted that George W. Bush had sought to shift attention away from how his family's ties to the bin Ladens and rogue elements in the Middle East had crippled U.S. investigations in the months leading up to 9-11.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., complained that even when Congress released the mid-2003 intelligence reports on the origins of the 9-11 attack, the Bush administration heavily redacted a 28-page section dealing with the Saudis and other foreign governments, leading him to conclude, "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis."

There is no evidence to suggest that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, could have been prevented or discovered ahead of time had someone other than a Bush been president. But there is certainly enough to suggest that the Bush dynasty's many decades of entanglement and money-hunting in the Middle East have created a major conflict of interest that deserves to be part of the 2004 political debate.

No previous presidency has had anything remotely similar. Not one.

Kevin Phillips is best known as the father of the Republican Party's "southern strategy" during the Nixon administration. His new book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," has just been published by Viking Penguin.

[Alissa]

This hit-piece got a very prominent, almost entire front and back covers with one-inch high bold headline, in today's editorial section of the Sunday paper. There are lots of pictures with the article to lure people to read it.

[raloxk]

Kevin Phillips has turned into a crank. In 1992 he predicted the end of the GOP. OOPS

[battlegearboat]

Remember the Alamo, it could happen again!

[Coroner]

This guy was on C span yesterday. A caller asked if Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln bedroom. His reply I dont know but Bin Laden George Bush...Bin Laden George Bush....

[BenLurkin]

Philips needs to look up the definition of "dynasty". Typical of the left - utter disrespect for the language. If words aren't in the service of their agenda, the left will redefine them.

[visualops]

I guess under the guise of an "editorial" you can weave and assume and guess and insinuate with impunity.

[cripplecreek]

Typical of the "enlightened" left.

Anybody happen to see From the heartland last night? The leftis pundit threw out the typical conspiracy theory about the "bush crime family". When he was cut off he ripped off his mic and left in the middle of the interview.

Not one adult in the lot.

[Sender]

It sounds like phase 2 of the Democrats' smear and doubt campaign to me. Paint the 'Bush dynasty' as some kind of multigenerational evil empire. As if the BFEE hasn't been one of their foci all along since 2000.

Will this bring about a proportional response from the Republican camp? The more we delve into John Kerry's past, it seems to be a target-rich environment for a conspiracy theory.

Will the 2004 campaign end up in the media as a Skeletor-vs-Darth Vader kind of clash of the evil empires? Or will they eventually get down to business and focus on the real issues, the principal one being who best to lead this country through the next four dangerous years?

[beckett]

Phillips is an odious scoundrel enamored with himself and his own "big ideas about the way things ought to be."

All you have to do is listen to the guy speak for a few seconds to realize he's a jerk who couldn't get elected dogcatcher.

[Cowboy Bob]

...we may well see it with the Clintons,

That will be the day!

[deport]

They really can't help themselves it seems. They continue to rehash the same info over and over. Much of this was run through the ringers in 1999-2000..... Guess it's time for a new round of books to hit the stores.....

Example they mention the Bin Ladens investing in Carlye, but they never mention the amount or percentage of the investment which was very minor in the accurred money totals in the various Caryle fundings.

Invest in tin foil producers:
Hoard Spam:
It's all about Oil:

[Howlin]

A caller asked if Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln bedroom.

Yes, he did.

With Bill and Hillary Clinton.

He also went to Camp David with them.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

When you see "Kevin Philips" in the "author" slot -- just move on. Sort of like seeing Charlie Rangel appearing on Meet The Press. Just turn the channel.

[Coroner]

Kevin phillips knew it too but claimed not to know. Typical!!

[rmgatto]

Yeah--the San Antonio Express News is a major opinion maker. I'm sure this article (which reads like a high school social studies paper) will make big waves around central Texas.

[KYAmishMafia]

I've already got a tin foil hat made, but I never could stand the taste of Spam!

[Alissa]

I've never heard of him before. Thanks for the update.

[Alissa]

Unfortunately, the Express News gave this piece such a prominant lay-out that it gives legitimacy to the author.

[inkling]

They've been dissing Kevin Phillips in National Review's The Corner this week.

KEVIN PHILLIPS [Rick Brookhiser]
Always remember that Phillips, like Pat Buchanan, is a Nixon man. His whole vision of the future was pinned on the Trickster; his ideal of American politicking and governance was Chuck Colson (once-born), plus wage and price controls. He has been wandering in the wilderness ever since Nixon's helicopter took off from the White House lawn in 1974...
Posted at 09:33 PM

Phillips also suggested that the person Bush should put on the Iraq Intelligence failure commission is Scott Ritter, of all people. That is, if they can keep Scott out of the high school parking lots.

[deport]

Do a little search on Kevin Phillips...... He's been hammering the Bush Dynasty theme over and over for years.... Here's his conclusion published on 1-29-01 after President Bush was elected...... note how wrong he was about the 2002 elections.... And as for the House it appears after some additional redistricting his predictions will be even farther off base. For some reason he's a Bush hater.

If history is any guide, the Democrats, buoyed by these Bush weaknesses, will likely take back the Senate and House in 2002 and then in 2004 regain the White House they should not have lost in 2000. Recent evidence also suggests, however, that they will be timid and uncertain enough to keep that outcome in doubt down to the wire.

[Howlin]

I'll be insane and/or in prison by November; I just know it.

[section9]

Phillips is "respected" by the Left because he is a "crank" Republican who has made it his business to dump on Republicans.

Idiot.

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[texasbluebell]

I wonder why I never saw such an in-depth amount of reporting about the clintons, him and her, in any sort of mainstream paper? Never did anything like this see the light of day, not that I can recall.

[Fedora]

> Will this bring about a proportional response from the Republican camp? The more we delve into John Kerry's past, it seems to be a target-rich environment for a conspiracy theory.

Here's my contribution towards a "counter-conspiracy theory":

Kerry's past includes hiring BCCI suspect David Paul (associate of Saudi Ghaith Pharaon) as his Senate campaign treasurer and protecting Democrat Clark Clifford (associate of Jimmy Carter's budget manager Bert Lance) during the BCCI investigation. There's a summary of how one Jack Blum got Kerry involved in BCCI which mentions these individuals here:

http://www.geocities.com/saudhouse_p/roadbloc.htm

I'm sure there's a lot there that a little digging will turn up. Kerry's role in the BCCI investigation was evidently not that of a disinterested inquirer.

As for the rest of this hit piece, this is based on the Lyndon LaRouche organization's extrapolation from a conspiracy theory that FDR's trust-busters concocted during WWII. I've yet to see a source which sums up the whole development of this--been piecing it together from various sources with the intent of writing my own analysis--but basically, to be very brief: A number of Communists and fellow travellers in Congress and the Senate had been attacking the oil companies and their financial allies (esp. J.P. Morgan) since the 1890s, with renewed attacks in the 1930s. During WWII Harry Dexter White (recently exposed as a Soviet agent), Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes, with help from the law firm of Thurman Arnold (Arnold and Porter), focused the attack on Standard Oil and any company remotely associated with it, which is how the Dresser-Harriman-Farish-Prescott Bush thing got mixed up with it. The attack on these companies was part and parcel of the Soviets' plan to confiscate German assets and reduce postwar Germany to a pre-industrial state so that the Soviet Army could easily roll in, which was the purpose behind the so-called "Morgenthau Plan" (that Harry Dexter White actually conceived while in contact with Stalin's agents who had the same idea). Ever since then left-wing conspiracy theorists have built on White and Morgenthau's original conspiracy theory by updating it periodically. LaRouche's organization revived the theory and modified it to its current form during the first Bush administration by throwing BCCI into the mix (while downplaying/ignoring the Democrats' role in BCCI mentioned above with respect to Clark Clifford and Bert Lance). The theory is largely constructed of innuendoes based on guilt-by-association, and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you dig into the details. For instance if you'll read a biography of Averell Harriman you'll find that his relation to the Bush family was not particularly close, and nowhere near as close as his relationship to key Democrats in the FDR and LBJ administrations. As mentioned I'm summing up a lot briefly here, but that's a broad outline of how I'd suggest going about constructing a counter to this line of propaganda.

[linn37]

He is one cranky old SOB I wonder who peed in his cheerios.

[beckett]

I agree the piece is noteworthy, and, truth be told, the overall argument, i.e., that Bush ties in the Middle East are a legitimate campaign issue, is correct.

[beckett]

Also I was a little hard on Phillips in a sort of knee-jerk reaction. In some quarters he is considered something of a "deep thinker," not entirely without justification.

[freeangel]

It is time to expose the terrorist organizations that are donatin to f******kerry.

[hobson]

I'm going to be right there with you. I told my husband to just go ahead and knock me out. He refused.

[Howlin]

Perhaps we should go ahead and just get a Valium IV in place right now......LOL.

[Destro]

Help me out-whta part of this article got the facts wrong? Or is it the tone that is wrong?

[Destro]

He went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to have either an oil or CIA background.

Not fully true-LBJ was linked to Texas oil if not the CIA.

[daybreakcoming]

I'll save you a seat in either place......:o(

[daybreakcoming]

Fascinating. Back in our school days, who would have ever thought history could get so convoluted, Thanks for this closer look.

[Fedora]

> He went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to have either an oil or CIA background.
>
> Not fully true-LBJ was linked to Texas oil if not the CIA.

Yes, to Brown & Root, the part of the "Halliburton" thing the Democrats never mention. The Roosevelts, the Kennedys (Mokeen Oil, Kenoil, Sutton Producing Corporation, Forest Oil Corporation of Bedford=Ted Kennedy), Jimmy Carter (Bert Lance), Lloyd Bentsen, and Al Gore (Armand Hammer) also had their oil interests.

[Fedora]

> Help me out-whta part of this article got the facts wrong? Or is it the tone that is wrong?

Well, for instance, look at this part as a good example:

> the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of current-day Iraq

Now notice the selective innuendo here. The writer could've just as easily mentioned that the Baku oil fields are "only a few hundred miles" south of Moscow, west of Mongolia, east of Greece, northeast of Cyprus, etc. But they chose to associate Baku with Iraq, for the sake of misleadingly implying that Bush's great-grandfather had some interest in Iraq underlying the administration's current Iraq policy. The whole article is written like that.

[CyberAnt]

"As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells"

This is the liberal's main problem. They take a statement from another liberal, and purport to make it a sinister truth. Just because an "incumbent Democrat" LIED ABOUT George H.W. Bush, doesn't make it some kind of truth of a DYNASTY. How ignorant.

This is the same thing they have done with the "awol" statement.

[Destro]

Well you and I did more then Alissa did in pointing out some errors in this article. I pretty much hate posts like Alissa's that claim "hit-piece" without telling us what she thinks is in error. Beyond claiming Bush was the first VP with oil interests (what about Nelson A. Rockefeller sworn in as the 41st vice president on Dec. 19, 1974??) I don't see what else is in error? Maybe everything? Maybe most of it? Maybe most of it is right? Maybe ALissa is a Democrat and wants people to read this while pretending to be outraged?

[Destro]

So the tone is wrong - but the fact was correct. The spin is the bad part?

[Fedora]

In that example, the tone would be the problem. In other examples, the facts could be challenged. But the fact/tone problems are interrelated. For instance, let's take this example:

> As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells.

Now the word "hireling" here both asserts a fact and conveys a certain tone, i.e., implying that the Sheikh of Kuwait dictated to "Bush's company" (as if no one else but Bush participated in the company) as a boss dictates to a "hireling". No mention is made of the fact that there were numerous investors in "Bush's company" (including associates of leading Democrats Joseph Kennedy and Katherine Graham), nor is there consideration of the role they played in managing the company or how Bush's participation functioned in that context. What was Bush's position and function within the company? Did he make managerial decisions by himself, or did others have input? Were company policies dictated solely by the Sheikh of Kuwait or were there other variables involved? Phillips considers none of these questions. The entire dynamic of the company is reduced to labelling Bush a "hireling". BTW, Phillips is getting his information for this statement--probably indirectly--from Chapters 8 and 9 of Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin's (i.e., Lyndon LaRouche's) "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography", which are largely rehashing dirt dug up against Bush by Ralph Yarborough during the 1964 campaign. Phillips is not breaking any news here, just repeating an old hit piece, here and elsewhere in the article.

[Fedora]

You're welcome, and thank you. It is convoluted, isn't it? It makes my head spin sometimes :)

[Fedora]

I appreciated Alissa posting the article--I like to know what the opposition is saying. I think the term "hit piece" describes the intent of an article rather than necessarily asserting error, so the label is accurate even without going through the lengthy process of pointing out individual errors. There are errors, but to identify and refute each one would take an extended commentary on virtually every sentence of the article--I have already spent an hour or more just commenting on two sentences so far-- and I don't think Alissa is obligated to do that just to post the article. And yes, Nelson Rockefeller would be another example of a VP with oil interests. Every administration since the 1870s has had oil interests. But oil interests are not intrinsically evil, unless one begins from the premise that capitalism is intrinsically evil, as Phillips seems to. However if one does not accept the premise that oil interests are intrinsically evil, the real issue is when such interests become a conflict of interests, which is what Phillips would need to establish to make this article's allegations stick. But the article doesn't do that, it just makes silly statements like "In each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world's primary destination for arms shipments."--what does Phillips expect, that Bush should've discouraged the CIA from gathering intelligence in the Middle East while the Soviets were busying overthrowing the government of Iran and invading Afghanistan?

[Luis Gonzalez]

This guy is a moron.

Here's what intelligent people have to say about George W. Bush, and the Bush Doctrine.

A Grand Strategy of Transformation

[Luis Gonzalez]

Al Gore would be yet another VP with oil interests.

[Fedora]

Thank you! :) Yes, Al Gore would be another one. Somewhere in my archives I have some stuff on Occidental's role in the Clinton administration's Middle East policy--here's one I happen to have handy without too much digging:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/590960/posts

Also, here's some old stuff I clipped on the Taliban, Clinton State Department official Robin Raphel, and an oil company called Unocal:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3bb505324c51.htm
(Terrorists had a friend in Clinton White House called Robin)

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3bb52b6e0d48.htm
(Rep. ROHRABACHER (1999) -- How the Clinton Administration brought the Taliban to power)

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/afghan.html
(Regional Pipeline Plans)

I only scratched the surface of this when I was looking into it back then--been meaning to do some follow-up on this, if anyone else has anything to add I'd be interested.

[Fedora]

From that first link, here's the part I was calling attention to: > http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/590960/posts > Arab-Americans-Making a Difference, by Casey Kasem > Among business leaders is the founder of an international, billion dollar engineering firm, Jacobs Engineering Group, Dr. Joseph Jacobs. A former chemist with dozens of patents became Armand Hammer’s successor as Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Occidental Petroleum – Dr. Ray Irani.

[Alissa]

I've been a member since 1998 and I also contribute money to maintain this site.

I've been gone almost all day, so MAYBE you should stop assuming things you don't know anything about!

[Destro]

I know-I was making a point.

[endthematrix]

Great posts on this thread. Please post articles on the topic given an opportunity.

My2cents: Instead of a listing the article as a Hit Piece, I would have wrote NO BushBots post here! I think the article is great. When it comes to rulers of industry, finance and government the guilt-by-association is a good standard to follow. Elitistism doesn't congregate in any political ideology, nation or creed. Corruption is the facilitator and power is the goal. Both Bush and Clinton interests are very good at it.