ADN

This thread is going to rub some people the wrong way and go in 2 or 3 different directions but over time you will see that they all connect and the CIA should change its name no to mention the Bush family and friends need to be locked up.

Showtime is airing a documentary "American Drug War" (THAT EVERYONE AMERICAN SHOULD WATCH) and the taliban came into play, now everyone has heard and/or seen the commercials with Bush and the dummies saying that if you buy drugs you are aiding terrorists, but what the fuckers didn't say is that Afghanistan is now producing 80% of the heroin coming into the U.S. whereas in past years Bin laden and the taliban were burning the poppi fields. But here is some funny shit, we just so happen to kick off our war campaign in Afghanistan right as it was time to pick the poppi the crops.

The "American Drug War," "War on Terrorism," "Gulf War" same, same..... One connection... 2 words, World Bank, 1 fucked up family the Bush's.... I know they are all connected but the only thing I can't seem to find a connection on is our invasion of Iraq today... I know there is a connection and its not oil.... The connection stems from the world bank and haliburoton. But if you look at the executive levels of govt right now all of the CIA members who were apart of Iran Contra are presently in office. Sec. of Def., director of NSA so on and so forth.....

IF YOU VOTED FOR A BUSH, ANY BUSH, AT ANY TIME, PLEASE SHUT DOWN YOUR COMPUTER AND/OR LAPTOP AND HANG YOURSELF. THANK YOU...

Oh yeah, Bush Sr. and Jr. didn't just learn this shit, it was past down to them by Prescott Bush.... Remember Bush is a German name and I'll get to his ass later....

Lets get started with the Gulf War.

February 19, 1998

WHERE DID SADDAM COME FROM?

Memo To: Chairman Jesse Helms, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Where did Saddam Hussein come from?

In our first part of this thumbnail history, Senator, I took us through the Iran-Iraq war. One of the important pieces I omitted, but should bring to your attention in this second part, is the matter of Iraq’s nuclear power plant, which Israel blew up in 1981. What reminded me of my omission was The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial yesterday, "Waiting for a Pirate." I commented on this in a client letter I sent out yesterday, the 18th:

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Journal this morning finally decided to join the bombers, in an editorial, "Waiting for a Pirate," that dispenses with any serious intellectual analysis and says it has come down to this: "Who’s in charge here, Iraq or the United States?" One might ask "Who’s in charge of the editorial page?" The Journal’s editor, Robert L. Bartley, obviously gave some junior member of the staff responsibility for beating the war drums. The author fondly remembers: "In 1981 Israel bombed and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction, no doubt delaying Saddam’s expansionist instincts. Oh yes, critics of the moment said the Begin government had ruined Iraq’s ‘drift toward the West.’" What really happened was that Iraq, a signator to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, had built a power plant at the urging of western governments, including the United States, which said the world was running out of oil. At a cost of several billion dollars, mostly spent on western engineering and material, the plant was supervised by the International Arms Control Agency, which signed off on the plant and would monitor it into the future to make sure it wasn’t producing bomb stuff. Israel’s spymasters, the Mossad, decided it was too much of a threat anyway and blew it up. The UN General Assembly condemned the action, but the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning Israel. Saddam immediately began secret work on nuclear weapons. Boys will be boys.

You may dispute me, Jesse, but you have far greater resources than I to get precise information. At the time of the Israeli action in 1981, I supported it when told it was justified by our government. As more information has emerged, I don’t think there was justification. I wish you would get a serious report from your staff on the circumstances of the 1981 terrorist act of Mossad. (I hope you agree that blowing up someone else’s power plant is at the least a criminal political act.) I said in yesterday’s report that at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1987, Saddam was in serious financial distress. The cost of the war was enormous, and nobody doubts that Iraq was doing its best to neutralize the forces of Islamic fundamentalism threatening the Middle East, and Israel. The figures vary, but he seemed to owe at least $50 billion in hard currency and had run up debts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which were happy to have poor Iraqis die on the battlefield to save the monarchs of the Middle East. Alas, the price of oil was slumping and of no help to him. The living standards that had climbed in the good years had fallen back with the war-time austerity programs. Saddam was in a survival mode, not an expansionist mode. Every $1 to the price of oil was worth $1 billion to him, and he observed his fellow OPEC members selling more oil than they had agreed upon, driving down the price to his oil, in order to keep the sheiks and playboys of the "moderate" states in the style to which they had become accustomed. He was demanding OPEC agree to a higher oil price so he could pay his post-war bills, which would mean Kuwait would have to produce less.

Remember that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was on August 2, 1990. "On 12 April 1990 Saddam met with five US senators: Robert Dole, Alan Simpson, Howard Metzenbaum, James McClure and Frank Murkowski; the US ambassador [April Glaspie], soon to be famous for her ‘green light’ to Saddam, was also present. No-one reading the various transcripts of this meeting can doubt the general placatory tone. The US senators even criticized the American press in their attempts to propitiate Saddam, emphasizing that there was a difference between the attitudes of the US government and those of the journalists."

This account appears in the 1996 edition of "Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam," published in London by the St Martin’s press. You and your staff should read it, not for further evidence of Saddam’s readiness to use force himself, but for the evidence of gross stupidity by our government at various moments in this unfolding history. In the account cited, author Geoff Simons, a respected British journalist, noted that during the meeting Howard Metzenbaum, the only Democrat, spoke up (‘I am a Jew and a staunch supporter of Israel’) who "then decided to pay Saddam a compliment: "‘...I have been sitting here and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware that you are a strong intelligent man and that you want peace... If... you were to focus on the value of peace that we greatly need to achieve peace in the Middle East then there would not be a leader to compare with you in the Middle East.’"

In the period between this meeting and the Kuwait invasion, the record indicates that the Bush administration bent over backwards to indicate that it was thrilled to pieces with Saddam, especially as he was using his oil money to buy what we permitted him to buy to reduce our trade deficit. On May 1, Secretary of State James Baker III was asked by a Senate committee if Iraq should be put back on the list of terrorist states, having been removed the year before. Baker said "It is a bit premature of me to sit here and make that determination. [If we cut Iraq from our credits] in all probability our allies will be very quick to move in there and pick up our market share." The record is clear that the Bush administration argued against the imposition of sanctions, as the Simons book notes, and "it emerged that the US Attorney General Richard Thornburgh had blocked the Atlanta investigation into Saddam’s laundering of $3 billion through the Atlanta branch of Italy’s Lavoro Bank for the acquisition of American weapons, including components for nuclear devices."

At this point, Saddam Hussein had his back to the financial wall, he thought of how much treasure he had expended on a war with Iran that left both sides exactly where they were eight years earlier, and observed that Kuwait, run by a spoiled little emir with several hundred wives, was pumping more oil than he was supposed to be pumping from the fields along the Iraq border. It was even shown that the western companies were slanting their drilling into Iraq, under the border, to steal Iraqi oil. The fact that Kuwait was part of Iraq until the British after WWI decided to simply give it to the playboy princelings of that Iraqi province was also weighing on his mind. His people had lost several hundred thousand of their children in a war fought for the west and the monarchs. Now they were cheating him on his oil receipts. He began to argue that the monarchs had declared economic war on Iraq.

On 24 July 1990 two Iraqi armoured divisions moved from their bases to take up positions on the Kuwaiti border. Later the same day the US State Department spokeswoman, Margaret Tutwiler, asked whether the US had any military plans to defend Kuwait, replied: ‘We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.’ The next day Saddam Hussein summoned US Ambassador April Glaspie to his office in what was to be the last official contact between Baghdad and the United States before the invasion of Kuwait. Even at this late stage, with an obviously deteriorating situation in the Gulf, Glaspie still made efforts to placate Saddam Hussein. She emphasized that President Bush had rejected the idea of trade sanctions against Iraq, to which Saddam replied: ‘There is nothing left for us to buy from America except wheat. Every time we want to buy something, they say it is forbidden. I am afraid that one day you will say, "you are going to make gunpowder out of wheat".’ Glaspie was quick to reassure the Iraqi leader : ‘I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.’ And she emphasized that a formal apology had been offered to Iraq for a critical article that had been published by the American Information Agency: ‘I saw the Diane Sawyer program on ABC...what happened in that program was cheap and unjust...this is a real picture of what happens in the American media -- even to American politicians themselves. These are the methods that the Western media employ. I am pleased that you add your voice to the diplomats that stand up to the media....’ Later Glaspie added that "President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq...’; and then the ambassador produced the much-quoted comment that was perhaps the biggest ‘green light’ of all: "I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait. [Author’s italics]."

On July 31, two days before the invasion, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly testified before Chairman Lee Hamilton of House Foreign Affairs. Asked repeatedly if we would come to the defense of Kuwait if it were attacked, he insisted there was no obligation on our part to do so. Meanwhile, Iraq prepared for a meeting the following day with Kuwait to negotiate a deal on the oil issues. The talks ended badly, with the Kuwaiti emir refusing to attend and Saddam refusing to attend because the emir would be absent. The Iraqi demand for $10 billion was clearly made under the threat of force and constituted blackmail, but Iraq’s arguments were that the payment was justified for services rendered in the Iran/Iraq war. It was at this point that Saddam decided to go into Kuwait.

At the time, I was not happy with the idea of the United States intervening to counter the invasion. This is because I observed that Kuwait’s neighbors did not seem concerned, even when Iraq did not stop at the Rumailah oil fields, which Iraq had claimed as its own since 1922, but went on to Kuwait City. It was in 1922 that a British diplomat, Percy Cox, drew a line on a map dividing up the Ottoman Empire as part of the fallout of WWI. There had as yet been no oil produced in the swatch of desert he gave to the new emirate of Kuwait, but Kuwait got the swatch apparently because it offered better oil concessions to the British oil companies. In 1980, a decade before the invasion, Iraq staged a major propaganda campaign reasserting its rights over the Rumailah fields. In that last-ditch meeting prior to the August 2 invasion, the Kuwait representative was not permitted to offer Iraq more than $1 billion to settle the dispute.

I did alter my position, Senator, when our former UN Ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and I, attended a briefing at the Saudi Embassy in Washington by its ambassador, Prince Bandar. He told us that his government was not worried about the invasion at first, and that it in fact had good relations with Baghdad. King Fahd changed his mind when shown photos by U.S. Naval Intelligence that the Iraqi army had bypassed Kuwait City and had taken up positions on the Saudi border. President Bush had persuaded the King in several phone calls that Iraq might very well be bent on swallowing up Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia was persuaded, I was more open to the idea that it was U.S. responsibility to counter Saddam with force. When Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak dropped his opposition to intervention and said his country would join the coalition, I became a solid supporter of the U.S. intervention. I have to say I was still suspicious, wondering how Saddam could possibly have thought he could get away with an invasion of Saudi Arabia or even a determination to swallow all of Kuwait instead of the Rumailah oil fields. If he could not defeat Iran in an eight-year war, how could he expect to engage the allied powers in a grab for Middle East oil?

In the years since, I’ve concluded that Saddam had no intention of invading Saudi Arabia. I later learned, as did you, of the "green light" that April Glaspie gave Saddam in their July 24 meeting. I also learned that Ms. Glaspie was subsequently "surprised" when the Iraqi army did not stop at the oil fields, but went on to Kuwait City. Of course, if you consider that Kuwait is only 13% the size of your home state of North Carolina, and Iraq is 10,000 square miles larger than California, you will see that it did not take much for tanks to overshoot Kuwait City and appear to be menacing Saudi Arabia. In his invasion of Iran, remember that Saddam did stop when he got what he wanted, and was later criticized for not pushing as far as he could so that he would have a better bargaining position.

Indeed, there is in the historical record evidence that on August 3, the day after his forces waltzed into Kuwait City virtually unopposed by the emir’s handful of soldiers, Saddam announced that he would be prepared to leave Kuwait as soon as it was determined the security of Iraq or Kuwait was not threatened. This was two days before President Bush announced Iraqi aggression "will not stand." In the Simons book, the case is made that Baghdad repeatedly offered to negotiate its departure from Kuwait prior to the hostilities of Desert Storm. Perhaps these accounts are in error, but Simons is a respected journalist and the book is endorsed by British MP Tony Benn, who was the most active British politician in that period in trying to negotiate a peace before the U.S. bombing campaign began. It is Simons’ argument that George Bush put together the coalition against Iraq by fabricating a crisis that did not exist, by pressuring King Fahd into a request for military assistance ("all but demanding a Saudi request for American protection") and then asking Morocco and Egypt to back up the Saudi request. At first Egypt resisted, but then:

In 1990 Egypt had massive debts, the largest in the whole of Africa and the Middle East. Almost $50 billion was owed to the World Bank, and Secretary of State James Baker... proposed a bribe (or ‘forgiveness’) of some $14 billion. At the same time Washington pressured other governments, including Canada and Saudi Arabia, to ‘forgive’ or delay much of the rest of the Egyptian debt. And where the tactic of bribery worked well with President Mubarak, it could be exploited to equal advantage with other national leaders.

Indeed, the consensus was built with money and arms. Turkey, Syria, even Iran joined the coalition with sudden fountains of credit produced by the World Bank. It does appear in my readings that there came a point where there had to be a war to justify all that had been done. In the last weeks before the bombing of Iraq began on January 16, it is clear with hindsight that there was no interest in talking to Baghdad because Iraq had to be taught a lesson. Several hundred thousand Iraqis died as a result of the bombing. The reason we lost only 148 men was that Iraq was attempting a retreat throughout the 100 hours of battle. If it had put up any resistance, they would have been completely slaughtered. As it was, Colin Powell called off the "turkey shoot" after it had accomplished partial slaughter.

Now I am not trying to argue here, Senator, that what Saddam Hussein did was right and what we did was wrong. I’m saying this thumbnail history of Saddam Hussein’s intersection with our national interest demonstrates a different picture than we now are presenting to the American people. If you want to go ahead with another massive bombing campaign "to teach the Iraqi people another lesson on who is boss," perhaps that too will be justified by history. I’m only trying to make sure you have all the information you need before you throw in with the President, our commander-in-chief.

James R. Bath, friend and neighbor of George W. Bush, was used as a cash funnel from Osama bin Laden's rich father, Sheikh bin Laden, to set George W. Bush up in business, according to reputable sources from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The connection between GW Bush, the bin Laden family, and the Bank Commerce Credit International (BCCI) is well documented.

The excerpts from the books and news articles are supplemented by the links at the bottom of the page to the cash flow charts of the bin Laden-backed BCCI money which was funneled into the Bush family in return for favors. Just click on the links at the bottom of the page to see the flow charts and use the back and forward keys on the screen to return to this page where you can then access the next flow chart link.
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"Bath--who made his fortune by investing money for Mahfouz and another BCCI-connected Saudi, Sheikh bin-Laden--...was an original investor in George Bush Jr.'s oil exploration company..." from The Outlaw Bank, page 229.
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"Bath provided financing to George W. Bush, the future president's eldest son, when he went into the oil business..." from False Profits, page 365.
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"Bath told me he was in the CIA...he had been recruited by George Bush himself in 1976 when Bush was director of the agency...Bath and George, Jr. were pals and flew together in the same Air National Guard unit, and Bath lived down the street from the Bush family when George, Sr. was living in Houston...he became representative for Sheikh Khalid bin-Mafouz...one of the richest men in the world, and he was a controlling shareholder in...BCCI..." from The Outlaw Bank, page 228.
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"BCCI was charged with laundering drug money..." from False Profits, page 433.
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"During George Bush's tenure as CIA director, the agency was allegedly involved in a very curious business deal with James R. Bath, a Texas businessman who is a friend and sometime financial backer of one of Bush's sons (George Bush, Jr.). Bath was also a business associate of Khalid bin Mafouze and an important BCCI insider."
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"...BCCI would make payments to key officials, sometimes in suitcases filled with cash. As BCCI officer Abdur Askhia stated in interviews tithe Subcommittee staff: Abedi's philosophy was to appeal to every sector. President Carter's main thing was charity, so he gave Carter charity. Pakistani President Zia's brother in law needed a job, he got a job. Bangladeshi president Ashraf's mistress needed a job, she got a job. Admission of your son to a top college, he would arrange it somehow. There was a world wide list of people who were in the payoff of BCCI...". from United States Senate Subcommittee Report on Bank Credit Commerce International, 1992--the Kerry Committee.
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Osama bin Laden, whose funds were inherited from his father, Sheikh bin Laden's BCCI investments, has been operating out of Afghanistan since he was established as a conduit for CIA funds in the 1980's. "Afghanistan was by far the biggest; it was, in fact, the biggest CIA operationof all time, both in terms of dollars spent ($5-$6 billion)
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The story of the Bush involvement in the BCCI scandal involved "trails that branched, crossed one another, or came to unexpected dead ends...". It was like a "three dimensional chess game." from The Outlaw Bank, page 227.
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The BCCI bribery connection went straight to the George Bush oval office. The White House political director, a man whom the Senate noted sat in on presidential meetings, named Ed Rogers, was hired away from the Chief of Staff's Office to represent the BCCI's American representative, Sheik Adham..
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"Q - Mr. President, considering your concern about propriety in government, what was your reaction when a senior member of your White House staff, Ed Rogers, left the White House employ and signed a contract with a Saudi sheikh accused of being a key figure in the BCCI scandal?
The President - Well, he is a free citizen to do anything he wants once he leaves the White House. My concern is about the White House itself, that it be beyond any perception of impropriety.
Q - Well, what do you think he was selling to the Saudis except for accessing---
The President - Ask him. I don't know anything what he's selling. I don't know anything about this man, except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like what I read about him. But I would suggest that the matter is best dealt with by asking this man what kind of representation he is doing for this sheikh. But it has nothing to do, in my view, with the White House." from the Official Papers of the Presidents, Press Conference, October 25, 1991. George Herbert Walker Bush.
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The Senate Commitee on BCCI, the Kerrey Committee, noted that Ed Rogers, the White House political director, was hired directly away by the BCCI sheikh and paid, along with a hitherto unknown assistant named Haley Barbour (later to become National Republican Committee Chairman), the sum of $600,000 to not do much of nothing. The Senate Committee concluded that it, along with the "gifts" of cash to GW Bush, was intended to influence President Bush.
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After GW Bush's company, Arbrusto, went bust, the bin Laden connection with BCCI went to work once again to prop up the president's son and to buy influence. GW swapped out shares until he had an interest in a new company, Harken Energy, which quickly received a lucrative oil concession in Bahrain..
An "extraordinary number of people connected to Harken or the oil deal have ties to BCCI...Sheikh Khalifa bin-Salman al-Khalifa helped to ensure that Harken was awarded the offshore drilling contract...Sheikh Abdullah Taha Baksh..Ghairth Pharaon...Bin Mahfouz...Talat Othman who has visited the White House..." from False Profits, page 370. "Knowledgeable oil company sources believe that the Bahrain oil concession was indeed an oblique favor to the president of the United States but say that Saudi Arabia (home of bin Laden) was behind the Decision". from Outlaw Bank, page 230.
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The payback was access: "After the Harken-Bahrain deal was signed, Talat Othman was added to a group of Arabs who met with George Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft three times in 1990 -- once just two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Othman was the representative of Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, who purchased 10% of Harken stock and had several ties to the infamous BCCI bank. Bakhsh was a co-investor in Saudi Arabia with alleged BCCI front man Ghaith Pharaon. Bakhsh's banker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, was another BCCI figure and head of the largest bank in Saudi Arabia. Sheikh Kalifah, the prime minister of Bahrain, was a BCCI shareholder and played the key role in selecting Harken for the oil contract."
LINKS TO CASHFLOW ANALYSIS

James R. Bath cash flow
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi?_BATH_JAMES_R

George W. Bush
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi ... EORGE_W_JR

Bank Credit Commerce International
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi ... ernational

BCCI Official Reports and the Bush White House

Official US Senate Report--BCCI Crimes
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rp ... 4crime.htm

Official US Senate Report--Ed Rogers and BCCI
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ww ... rogers.htm

Ed Rogers--Cash Flowchart
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/nbonlin6.cgi ... DWARD_M_JR

How the Bush family's private connection to a dirty offshore bank is the only link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The following chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's new book "A Game as Old as Empire," just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco).

Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-President Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.
BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.
The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the $2 billion that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.
The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance, which he would put to use when he organized the jihad against the United States. He would move money through the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland with two Osama siblings as shareholders.
At the same time, BCCI helped Saddam Hussein, funneling millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Baghdad's U.S. banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.
U.S. congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.
Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.
Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.
Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 percent to 30 percent of the stock for nearly $1 billion. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.
The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."
The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi regime. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.
When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.
Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's father, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organizing al Qaeda.
The money BCCI stole before it was shut down in 1991 -- somewhere between $9.5 billion and $15 billion -- made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy system effectively covered up the money trail.
But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq ("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."
When the BCCI scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr. Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to -- only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But evidence about BCCI's broader links exist in numerous U.S. and international investigations. Now could be a good time to take another look at the BCCI-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.

Granddaddy Bush:

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor". He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes".

Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".

Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.

Biography

Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.

However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

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If you don't believe one word ask yourself one question. How is it that the value of gold is going up but the value of a dollar is going down?????