Marvelous Marvin : the Bush Who Seems to be in All the Right Places

Marvelous Marvin : the Bush Who Seems to be in All the Right Places

By DAVE LINDORFF

Let me say right from the get go that I’m not a conspiracy theorist by nature. As a journalist I like to see the facts line up solidly before I go with an accusation.

At the same time, I also subscribe to Noam Chomsky’s approach of looking at how differently the media and government deal with similar situations and issues when they involve the right and the left.

And on that basis, I have to marvel at how the corporate media, and the various government and quasi-government bodies that investigated or are investigating 9-11, have ignored curious things involving the Bush family.

The one that has me most stunned right now is the information dug up and actually published (in the Prince George’s Journal of Prince George, MD) way back on Feb. 4, 2003, reporting that George Bush’s obscure youngest brother Marvin was on the board of directors of a company called Securacom (now changed to Stratesec) that was responsible for providing "electronic security" to the World Trade Center right up to 9/11/2001.

The company, according to author, Margie Burns, is backed by the Kuwait-American Corp., an investment firm with links to the Bush family.

Burns wrote back in 2003 that Securacom also had a contract to maintain electronic security systems at Dulles Airport, and that it "handled some security for United Airlines in the 1990s," though she notes that this work was completed prior to Marvin Bush’s joining the board in 1998.

Now all this may be purely innocent coincidence. The Bush family is composed of a bunch of money-grubbing people who use every opportunity to convert government appointments into lucrative business opportunities for themselves and other members of the family.

That said, just imagine if it had been President Clinton in the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, and if it was his brother who had been on the board of a company that had handled the electronic security for those towers! My god, the press and the right-wing attack machine would have been all over it in a moment and non-stop thereafter. There would have been demands for congressional investigations, a special prosecutor, impeachment proceedings and who knows what else.

But in this case? There apparently hasn’t even been anyone looking into this on a cursory basis at the 9-11 commission or the Justice Department. And as for the U.S. media?

Not one article or news story.

Seems to me, we ought to be calling news editors and members of congress to demand that someone start at least asking a few questions about this guy Marvin, and about Securicom/Stratexec, and its Kuwaiti investor.

At a minimum, could the company have leaked, even inadvertently, information to those seeking to attack the buildings which might have helped them plan their attack, or maximize the damage and the carnage?

Could terrorist operatives have infiltrated WTC security by infiltrating the company via the Kuwait connection?

Again, I have no clue about any of this, but if government agencies think it’s productive and important to go around randomly arresting thousands of greencard holders and other immigrants and deporting them or holding them incommunicado without charge merely on the basis that they are Arab or Muslim, if they think that it’s appropriate to shut down local Islamic charity organizations simply because they may have innocently donated some money to relief activities in certain Muslim countries, surely they should be interested in finding out just what Marvin Bush’s company did and who was involved in it at the World Trade Center and at Dulles airport and United Airlines.

Marvin and his activities ought, surely, to be subjected to at least a tenth of the investivative attention that Clinton’s family and friends were subjected to on matters of far less consequence.

If not, you have to start getting that creepy feeling that something’s not right.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can’t be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07292005.html