The Best Enemies Money Can Buy
Jul 08, 2002 02:30 AM
by Frank Reitemeyer
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 Nacional 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 (CJR),
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 Nacional 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 Nacional 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 CJR 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 CJR 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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