The Barreling Bushes

Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties
with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest

<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...>

By Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips’ new book, "American Dynasty:
Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush,"
has just been published by Viking Penguin.

WASHINGTON - 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 E. 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 U.S. and its
military to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran
during the 1980s. The U.S. 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 Hussein’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 C. 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 last month 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 U.S. launched a second war against Iraq in 2003 but failed to
find weapons of mass destruction that Hussein 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 Qaeda 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 to rogue elements
in the Middle East had crippled U.S. investigations in the months
leading up to 9/11. Sen. Charles E. 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 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.