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The Best Enemies Money Can Buy
From Hitler
To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden – Insider Connections and the Bush
Family’s Partnership with Killers of Americans
Brown
Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group
By
Michael C.
Ruppert
[© Copyright 2001. All Rights
Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be
reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]
FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the
Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, major media
powerhouses and the increasingly influential alternative media alike have
begun to focus attention on Bush family connections and a long history of
arming and financing America’s attackers in the months and years prior
to the outbreak of war. Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept.
27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 1, 2001), as well as a host of reports
from so-called alternative news sources have begun to focus attention on
the Bush family’s profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies.
The following is a more
comprehensive look at the documented history of these relationships that
will also open some new avenues of inquiry for the press, Congress and the
American people.
In a world now filled with
biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, and chemical weapons like
Sarin gas -- where there are people in many countries with reasons to
oppose the
United States
-- the Bush Administration is following predictable strategies in a way
that redefines the concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend
upon the will and the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus
on these relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover – and I
am not the first to say this – if a national security priority is to
seize the financial assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps
we should start right here at home.
---
Adolph Hitler
Meticulous research, including
U.S. government records from the era, along with contemporaneous news
stories from the New York Times and other papers is presented in the 1992
book entitled, “George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography” by Webster G.
Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by The Executive Intelligence
Review and located at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm.
The following is sourced entirely from Chapter II of this essential work.
[Note: Although FTW does not always agree with conclusions reached by the
Executive Intelligence Review, or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have
never found a single flaw in any of their factual research. History is
history, no matter who presents it. And this history is essential to
understanding our era.]
George W. Bush’s grandfather,
Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director of the investment bank Brown
Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was Brown
Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, the Rockefeller family,
Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the Fords who served as the
principal funding arm in helping to finance Adolph Hitler’s rise to
power starting in 1923. This included direct funding for the SS and SA
channeled through a variety of German firms. Prescott Bush, through
associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, Nazi banker Fritz
Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of Germany, The German Steel
Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence Dillon), and I.G. Farben,
used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast quantities of money to the
Nazis and to manage their American interests. The profits from those
investments came back to Bush allies on Wall Street. Thyssen is
universally regarded as having been Hitler’s private banker and ultimate
owner of the Union Bank Corporation.
Early support for Hitler came
from Prescott Bush through the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line -- also
funded by Brown Bothers -- that funneled large sums of money and weapons
to Hitler’s storm troopers in the 1920s.
According to Tarpley and
Chaitkin, “In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated,
an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi
commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Company… was to head
a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from
Hitler Germany to the United States.”
Furthermore, a 1942 U.S.
government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings
found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an “interlocking
concern” with the German Steel Trust that had produced:
-
50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron
-
41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate
-
36% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate
-
38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet
-
45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes
-
22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire
-
35% of Nazi Germany’s explosives
The business relationships
established by Bush in 1923 continued even after the war started until
they became so offensive and overt as to warrant seizure by the U.S.
government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942.
In 1942, “Under the Trading
with the Enemy Act, the government took over Union Banking Corporation, in
which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union
Banking Corp.’s stock shares…
“… all of which shares are
held for the benefit of… members of the Thyssen family, [and] is
property of nationals… of a designated enemy country.”
“On October 28, the
government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the
Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the
Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.”
“Nazi interests in the
Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his
father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with
the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942…” These seizures of Bush businesses
were reported in a number of American papers including The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal.
Prescott Bush went on to become
an influential Republican Senator from Connecticut who went on to be a
regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were
the lawyers John Foster and Allen Dulles, the later became the CIA
Director under Eisenhower.
Saddam Hussein
After becoming President in
January 1989, Prescott Bush’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush – father
of our current President – authorized a series of programs that not only
armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology
that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and
biological weapons, which he still possesses. Apologists for Bush (the
elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s left the region
unstable, he was just trying to establish a new balance of power. Not so.
Bush directives and policies, including relationships with the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro (BNL) were directly and deliberately responsible for creating the
army the U.S. fought in 1991.
A story by Russ W. Baker, in
the March/April issue the Colombia Journalism Review (
CJ
R), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate that I have seen.
“ABC News Nightline opened
last June 9 with words to make the heart stop ‘It is becoming
increasingly clear,’ said a grave Ted Koppel, ‘that George Bush,
operating largely behind the scenes throughout 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…
“Why, then, have some of our
top papers provided so little coverage?” Baker poignantly asks.
“ The result: readers who
neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The
Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who
do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which
apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam’s arms buildup, and thus
became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
“Complex, challenging,
mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI)
increasingly define our times: yet we don’t appear to be getting any
better at telling them…
“Much of what Saddam received
from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology --
ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals,
and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military
applications. We’ve learned that a vast network of companies, based in
the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until
August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
“And we’ve learned that the
obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5
billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were
supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the
purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture
department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took
advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have
been left holding the bag for what looks like $2 billion in defaulted
loans to Iraq.
“… In fact, we now know
that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh [appointed by
George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and
Istanbul to pursue the case…
“… As New York Times
columnist William Safire argued last December 7, ‘Iraqgate is uniquely
horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse of power by misguided
leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., Britain, and Italy] to
secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator.”
While Democrat Henry Gonzales,
Chairman of the House Banking Committee during the period, stood as the
lone voice from the wilderness in raising alarms about Bush’s obvious
corruption, the rest of the Congress sheepishly ignored all the signs
demanding immediate action. Gonzales’ voice reportedly fell silent after
his empty car was machine-gunned in a Washington suburb in what passed for
a drive-by shooting.
The
CJ
R continues: “Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major
investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue…
“That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert
decision to arm Iraq,’ Waas wrote, “is the most serious consequence of
a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the
advice and consent of the American public…”
The L.A. Times, on Feb 23,
1992, dug deep enough to find secret National Security Decision Directives
by the Bush Administration in 1989 ordering closer ties with Baghdad and
paving the way for $1 billion in new aid. The Times’ series, co-authored
with Waas, emphasized that, “buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press
piece – that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi
foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to
support U.S. government loans guarantees to Iraq.”
Baker’s
CJ
R report also noted, “On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal reported [BNL
official Christopher] Drogoul’s assertion that the director general of
Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him, ‘We
are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government
works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraqi government.’
Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] Gonzales ‘produced
a phone-book-sized packet of documents’ showing the involvement of U.S.
exporting firms… The documents mentioned one… which designed parts for
Iraq’s howitzers and was financed through BNL…”
In the wake of highly
suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just miles from where several of
the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one final note. In his 1998 book
"Bringing the War Home" author William Thomas writes, “ Under
that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria
were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection
company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the US Army's high
security germ warfare labs.”
The Carlyle Group, the
Bushes and bin Laden
The warnings about the Carlyle
Group, the nation’s 11th largest defense contractor, and the Bushes came
long before the World Trade Center attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely
held corporation, exempt, for that reason, from reporting its affairs to
the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little is known of what it
actually does except that it buys and sells defense contractors. As of
October 4, 2001, it has removed its corporate web site from the World Wide
Web making further investigation through that channel impossible. Its
Directors include Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Secretary of Defense;
James Baker, former Bush Secretary of State; and Richard Darman, a former
White House aide to Ronald Reagan and Republican Party operative.
On March 3, 2001, just weeks
after George W Bush’s inauguration, the conservative Washington lobbying
group Judicial Watch issued a press release. It said:
“(Washington, D.C.) Judicial
Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes
government abuse and corruption, called on former President George Herbert
Walker Bush to resign immediately from the Carlyle Group, a private
investment firm, while his son President George W. Bush is in office.
Today's New York Times reported that the elder Bush is an
"ambassador" for the $12 billion private investment firm and
last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former president
also helped the firm in South Korea.
“The New York Times reported
that as compensation, the elder Bush is allowed to buy a stake in the
Carlyle Group's investments, which include ownership in at least 164
companies throughout the world (thereby by giving the current president an
indirect benefit). James Baker, the former Secretary of State who served
as President George W. Bush's point man in Florida's election dispute, is
a partner in the firm. The firm also gave George W. Bush help in the early
1990's when it placed him on one of its subsidiary's board of directors.
"This is simply
inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately resign from the
Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of interest. Any foreign
government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush
Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with
the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign
nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with
the interests of the United States government," stated Larry Klayman,
Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel.
"Questions are now bound
to be raised if the recent Bush Administration change in policy towards
Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to gain
investments from other Arab countries who [sic] would presumably benefit
from the new policy," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.”
Judicial Watch noted that “even
the Clinton Administration called on the Rodham brothers to stop their
business dealings in [The former Soviet Republic of] Georgia because those
dealings started to destabilize that country.”
Since the WTC attacks the Wall
Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 2001) that, “George H.W. Bush,
the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in
Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm.”
The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice in the
last three years – 1998 and 2000 -- as a representative of Carlyle,
seeking to expand business dealings with one of the wealthiest Saudi
families, which some experts argue, has never fully severed its ties with
black sheep Osama in spite of current reports in a mainstream press that
is afraid of offending the current administration.
The Nation, on March 27, 2000
– in a story co-authored by David Corn and Paul Lashmar – wrote, “In
January former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister
John Major paid a social call on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah…”
This story confirms at least one meeting between the elder Bush and Saudi
leaders, including the bin Ladens. That the bin Ladens attended this
meeting was confirmed in a subsequent September 27, 2001 Wall Street
Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 meeting with the bin Ladens was also
later confirmed by Bush (the elder’s) Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only
after the WSJ presented her with a thank you note sent by Bush to the bin
Ladens after that meeting.
James Baker visited the bin
Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci.
The WSJ story went on to note,
“A Carlyle executive said that the bin Laden family committed $2 million
through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which
raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace
companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million
back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40%
annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said.
“But a foreign financier with
ties to the bin Laden family says the family’s overall investment with
Carlyle is considerably larger…”
In other words, Osama bin Laden’s
attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in
the U.S. defense budget have just made his family a great big pile of
money.
More Bush connections appear in
relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ story also notes that, “During the
past several years, the [bin Laden] family’s close ties to the Saudi
royal family prompted executives and staff from closely held New York
publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips to the family headquarters,
according to Forbes Chairman Caspar Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of
Defense in the Reagan administration. ‘We would call on them to get
their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors.’”
President G.H.W. Bush pardoned
Weinberger for his criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989.
Our current President, George
W. Bush has also had -- at minimum -- indirect dealings with Carlyle and
the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000
from Texas investment banker James R. Bath who was also the U.S.
investment counselor for the bin Laden family. In his watershed 1992 book,
“The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush,” award winning Texas
investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into Bath’s background,
revealing connections with the CIA and major fraudulent activities
connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 billion out
of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of George W.
Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing operations in the
Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden friend Adnan Khashoggi.
One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was the arms merchant at
the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi, whose connections
to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got his first business break
by acting as middle-man for a large truck purchase by Osama bin Laden’s
older brother, Salem.
Another key player in the Bush
Administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, left his
post as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration
after a series of scandals connected to CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted
Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines placed him at the brink of
criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and Secord are veterans of Vietnam
operations and have long been linked to opium/heroin smuggling. The
Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal provision of weapons and war
materiel to potential or actual enemies of the U.S. and to the Contras in
Central America.
Armitage, a former Navy SEAL,
who reportedly enjoyed combat missions and killing during covert
operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has never been far from the
Bush family’s side. Throughout his career, both in and out of
government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug smuggling
operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 Washington Post
story, called Armitage, “my white son.” In 1990, then President Bush
dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its “transition” to
capitalism. Armitage’s Russian work for Bush has been frequently
connected to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias,
which became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s
Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the
Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and
consolidating its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70%
of the heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 – April
24, 1999]
Armitage and Carlucci are both
Board Members of the influential Washington think tank, the Middle East
Policy Council.
The connections continue with
Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the multitude of oil pipeline
construction running through the new war zone is one project – according
to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal story – a joint venture in which
the bin Laden family joined with the construction firm H.C. Price. A
researcher named “Phoenix,” writing for the Internet news site Rumor
Mills News Agency located at www.rumormillnews.com, reported
that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero Shaw, Inc. and is now
owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, Dresser Industries.
It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. Bush his first post war
job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web sites has confirmed
this.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who
served as Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm, directing the campaign
against Saddam Hussein, was Halliburton’s CEO until last year’s
election.
And, according to a 2000 story
from Harper’s Magazine, in 1990 our current President, through a
position as a corporate director of Caterair, owned by the Carlyle Group
– at a time when the bin Laden’s were invested in Carlyle – had
additional connections to the bin Laden family. In addition, on March 1,
1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and a senior Trustee of the
university, the University of Texas Endowment voted to place $10 million
in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to how much of that money went
to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we do know that there is a long
tradition in the Bush family of giving money to those who kill Americans.
Now, as the people of America
are beginning to awaken to what is really being unleashed upon them, as a
few brave souls are asking who’s going to get all the money the Bush
Administration is “borrowing” from government coffers and who’s
going to pay for it - the above history is more than ominous.
Considering that during the
1980s, under the pretext of fighting a Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that
never once launched an attack on the U.S., these same people oversaw an
explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption that went from 80 metric tons in
1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - considering that the CIA trained and
equipped death squads that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of
people from Guatemala to Panama – considering that these same people
have brutalized Iraq, leaving portions of it radioactively contaminated by
depleted uranium for the next 4 billion years and causing a fivefold
increase in the number of childhood leukemia cases amidst a starving
population, one can only wonder what they will produce for the world now
given the context of the World Trade Center attacks.
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