Bush dynasty weaves tangled Mideast web (MAJOR HIT PIECE)

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Hi, endthematrix, (BTW does your screen name mean you didn't like the third movie? :-)

My own two cents: It's certainly true that no ideology or political group has a monopoly on corruption--I agree with you on that general principle. But the specifics of the article are very derivative (from various other sources--LaRouche's unauthorized bio is one, another is Pete Brewton's "The Mafia, the CIA, and George Bush") and superficial, IMO. You can do a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" hit piece on anybody if you try. (Example: My brother once worked at IBM. IBM has been charged with trading with Germany during World War II. Therefore according to this article's logic my brother is a "hireling" of a company connected with the Nazis.) Making a case that will hold up in court or withstand historical cross-examination of the primary sources is a lot tougher. What does the article actually prove? That people who work for oil companies know people in the intelligence community and the Middle East, basically--which isn't really surprising when you think about it: logically to run an effective intelligence agency in a world driven by an oil-based economy you have to have agents in the Middle East. But where does the article show such associations affecting Bush's policies in a scandalous way? It doesn't, IMO--or at least if it does, someone will have to point it out to me, because I'm not seeing it. The article makes much of saying that members of the Bush family knew people in BCCI. It doesn't mention that BCCI was originally set up for a legitimate purpose: so British and American intelligence could track terrorist money. Nor does it mention that BCCI was penetrated by a double-agent working for Syrian and Soviet intelligence--perhaps there's more to the BCCI story than a simple CIA scandal centered on Bush? IMO there's some information in this article which does point towards genuine scandal, but to determine its significance requires looking beyond "so-and-so knew Bush" to deeper questions about how so-and-so's relationship with Bush functioned in the broader context of their individual motives and relationships with other individuals and organizations and countries. But instead of pursuing these types of questions, the article limits itself to saying things like Bush "worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider", which doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of their relationship (what exactly does "worked closely with" mean?) other than the not-surprising fact that the head of the CIA had a liaison with the head of Saudi intelligence (along with every other intelligence agency in the world!). Two questions I'd raise which I'd like to see answered in a more penetrating analysis: 1. What intelligence agencies and foreign influences besides the CIA and the Saudis were involved with BCCI?--how do the British, French, Germans, Israelis, Syrians, Iranians, Soviets, Cubans, Chinese, Koreans, etc. fit in? 2. How did the BCCI investigation relate to the partisan conflict between the Reagan administration and its critics, how did that conflict play into John Kerry's decision to take on the BCCI investigation, and how did that influence which suspects he chose to pursue and which he chose to let off?. That last series of questions also raises the question in my mind, why is this article repeating 10-15 year-old information suddenly coming out now?

re: (Example: My brother once worked at IBM. IBM has been charged with trading with Germany during World War II. Therefore according to this article's logic my brother is a "hireling" of a company connected with the Nazis.)

But...the connection IS there. First question would be: Who is your brother? CEO, CFO, VP Operations, large stockholder, etc.

Most plots of coruption have less than SIX degrees of separation, i.e. IRAQ > UNSCON > CIA or BCCI >Milken, Saudi buisnessmen, Chineese Communists, etc > Crooked financal deals.
Most of the players are well known and have had their hands dirty for years. It's the new players (or new deals)that make the news, such as Lord Black to Hollinger to Perle to Kissinger to a myrad of things...9/11 hearings, Chile, etc.

> Regarding you last post on partisan tactics, please keep me informed on your research.

Will do.

> Very interesting...To me there is a LOYALTY factor not necessarily a PARTY factor.

That can be another factor.

> The gray market areas of arms dealings and drugs are connected to shady people interlinked with people in high places. BCCI was a playground for the CIA and others. To think that collusion did not exist or to deny it out of partisanship is ignorant of a larger issue.

BCCI was a playground for some in the CIA, but to attribute this to Bush directly simply because he was director at one time--as this author tends to (not saying you're doing that)--is a leap that requires evidence. The CIA like any large company (no pun intended) is divided into departments, as well as factions that arise during transitions from one administration to the next (starting with the transition from Truman to Eisenhower), and the director during one adminstration doesn't personally supervise every field operation--and Bush's personal habit was to delegate, so he probably supervised less than most, he was mostly installed in that position for political reasons rather than operational ones because he was known for loyalty. Just because Bush was director for a very brief period while the BCCI operation was going forward doesn't by itself imply that he had any knowledge of the inner workings of an operation set up and run by others. The investigation should begin with the actual agents involved, IMO. The question of Bush's role is one that it's natural to ask, but it's a secondary question that you can only attempt to address after other questions have been answered, and this article doesn't do that because it's primary purpose is simply to implicate Bush.

> But...the connection IS there. First question would be: Who is your brother? CEO, CFO, VP Operations, large stockholder, etc.

That's part of the point of what I'm getting at above. To extend the analogy, the CEO doesn't supervise everything that goes on in Tech Support. To define Bush's role in BCCI we'd need to know how his job function related to that of the departments and agents involved in the actual operation. This article doesn't provide that information, just insinuates.

> Most plots of coruption have less than SIX degrees of separation, i.e. IRAQ > UNSCON > CIA or BCCI >Milken, Saudi buisnessmen, Chineese Communists, etc > Crooked financal deals.
> Most of the players are well known and have had their hands dirty for years. It's the new players (or new deals)that make the news, such as Lord Black to Hollinger to Perle to Kissinger to a myrad of things...9/11 hearings, Chile, etc.

My method is to start from the known players and work towards the unknown. BTW Seymour Hersh, who is another known player long opposed to the Angleton/Bush faction of the CIA, played a major role in stirring up the Perle controversy, so that's another factor to consider.

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