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THE BUSH MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
"It is worth noting in this context that several members of Osama bin
Laden's family from Saudi Arabia were onboard the only plane allowed
to fly out of the country after the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, an incident that has never
been adequately explained by the Bush administration or the commission
investigating the attacks." [Glynn Wilson - "George W. Bush's Lost Year
in 1972 Alabama" - (Feb 11, 2004) -
http://www.southerner.net/blog/awolbush.html]
..."Lewis Odom, a veteran himself who managed Senator Sparkman's winning
campaign (against Blount) in 1972." said he "does remember being aware of
a group of political pros from Texas in Alabama working for Blount, and
being appalled at the deceptions of the campaign," writes Glynn Wilson.
"Odom, who served as a JAG officer in Korea and as a member of the
Alabama Air National Guard, only learned later that Bush was in the
state working for Blount while skipping out on Vietnam and his Guard
duties. But he remembers the radio tape and transcript." (Wilson)
"It was doctored to make it appear as if Sparkman was in favor of
forced-busing, which in Alabama at the time was political death.."
(Lewis Odom)
When Lewis Odom, a Vietnam veterans was asked, "Why is Bush's past
important to examine now(?)" His answer is:
"It seems to me to be important because Bush is willing to send our
boys and girls over there to get shot, killed and wounded, to lose
their arms and legs," Odom said. "Then in his own life, he did what he
could to avoid it (going to war). And then later, he presents himself
as a fighter pilot, parading around on that flight deck with his
fighter pilot jacket on with 'Commander In Chief'' on it."
(Wilson)
"Odom said the Guard probably spent a half a million dollars training
Bush, then he wouldn't even take his flight exam and failed to check
the box on the form making himself available for active duty. Later,
Bush was transferred on paper to a Guard unit in Colorado prior to his
early release to attend Harvard Business School." (Wilson)
"I see him out parading around as if he was some sort of a military
hero, when the truth about the matter is, he used his father's
prestige in the community to get into the Guard in the first place,"
Odom said. "And then he used it to get himself transferred to Alabama
to work on a political campaign." (Odom quoted by Wilson)
George W. Bush "committed the
greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he
attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein
from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government
of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and,
in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region
that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away
its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being
placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully
accept its presence." [former Ronald Reagan Navy Secretary James Webb
quoted in an article by Saul Landau in Counterpunch.com -
originally from an OpEd in
USA Today]
What made Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist (he was a special
assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell during the Nixon
Administration) a "political independent?" He says in the introduction to
"American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the
House of Bush", it was George Bush ("the elder Bush [George H.W.] turned
me into a political independent.").
>From a review of Kevin Phillips latest book,
Elizabeth Drew in "Bush familiy values" written for The Nation writes:
"As Phillips points out, the Episcopalian, establishment Connecticut
Yankee Bushes have transmogrified into wildcatting, fundamentalist Texans.
Even the "wildcatting" is a fraud, Phillips argues: Midland, Texas, where
Bush pere settled after leaving Connecticut, is one of the wealthiest
oases in the nation. George W. was eased into the oil business, as he was
eased into all of his adult jobs--including, arguably, the presidency --
through powerful, wealthy family friends, or "crony capitalism." When his
businesses failed, family friends bailed him out. The lucrative buyouts of
his oil business and of his shares in the Texas Rangers baseball team were
arranged by family connections."
"His essential point is that the Bush and Walker families--as in George
Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush--became powerful and wealthy
through connivance, connections and counterfeit. Or, as Phillips puts it,
"deceit and disinformation."" (Drew)
"Phillips argues that the Walker and Bush families, along with other
wealthy investment bankers, profited mightily from the rearmament efforts
after the end of the First World War and were prominent members of the
"military-industrial complex," about which Dwight Eisenhower warned at the
end of his eight-year presidency, and which Phillips traces back to "the
construction of a large steel-clad navy in the 1880s and 1890s" but really
took shape during the First World War. (Phillips dedicates the book to
Eisenhower and cites that particular excerpt from Eisenhower's farewell
address.) The two families, he writes, were involved with "the mainstays
of the twentieth-century American national security state: finance, oil
and energy, the federal government...and the CIA, the National Security
Agency, and the rest of the intelligence community." After Pearl Harbor
was attacked, Phillips argues, "many who had cut their teeth during the
1917-18 mobilization were given much larger war-related responsibilities,
cementing earlier elite credentials." And before he entered the Senate,
George H.W.'s father, Prescott Bush, was a prominent Wall Street
investment banker. "No previous presidential family," Phillips writes,
"has been so wholeheartedly involved with a single economic sector over
two generations, yet with so little scrutiny of the resulting narrowness
of its public policy views." Inevitably, Phillips spends considerable time
on the subject of oil. "Both Bush chief executives," he writes, "have been
powerfully influenced and biased by their Texas milieu, especially in
economic matters."" (Drew)
"Of the old-school financiers, Phillips says that they "also diverted--one
should not think they deserted--to Midland, the Ivy League beachhead in a
boom-flushed state where the larger oil and oil service firms still had
major ownership ties to Wall Street and the East." Midland was one of the
two main towns (along with Odessa) in the Permian Basin, which, Phillips
writes, "represented one of the century's great American wealth
opportunities, which nobody knew better than the New York capitalists."
(In a footnote, Phillips points out that by the year 2000 Alaska was the
only state to produce more oil and gas than the Permian Basin.) This is
where the "entrepreneurial" Bushes planted themselves. Phillips points out
the nexus between oil profits and tax shelters, on which the industry is
heavily dependent for profits, and asserts that investment bankers kept
bailing out Bush fils. And Bush pere's brothers and sons--all but George
W.--went into the investment business. As for George W.'s business career,
Phillips writes, it "was spent primarily in obtaining new financing or
lining up rescuers for his unsuccessful oil and gas ventures," and he
quotes one wag as observing that every time George W. "drilled a dry
hole...someone always filled it up with money for him." At Yale, Phillips
notes, Bush the son wanted to be a stockbroker who amassed great wealth.
He didn't become a stockbroker, but he did amass great wealth." (Drew)
"An important key to the Bush dynasty's political power, in Phillips's
view, lies in the family's connections to the CIA. He goes so far as to
assert that the CIA put George H.W. (the agency's former director) and his
son in power." (Drew)
Elizabeth Drew doesn't quite buy the assertion by Phillips that the C.I.A.
put Bush father and son in office, but as a former insider that Phillips
is, I believe gives him insight to see those connections do exist, and a
major effort was provided by the CIA and "put" Bush Senior and Junior in
the White House.
I think also that Tenet stayed on because of his connections to Bush and
is leaving because he made the mistake of turning on one of their when
Joseph Wilson's wife was exposed as a CIA operative. This was the
unforgiveable sin and Tenet had to go.
Drew says "Phillip's conspiracy theories about the CIA suggest that the
agency's connection with the Bush family began with Prescott Bush, a
handsome, undistinguished senator from Connecticut (Phillips also states
that Prescott was the first family member to harbor presidential
ambitions.)." As a former director of the CIA himself, George Bush was in
a position to prepare his way and others smoothed the passage.
Elizabeth Drew writes:
"One of the great values of Phillips's book is the light it sheds on the
current Administration's policies--its radical anti-environmental,
pro-energy-company, pro-business policies. Much of this has been
attributed to Dick Cheney and his Halliburton connection, but Bush himself
has had a large--perhaps the dominating--hand in these policies. In his
2000 presidential campaign Bush shed precious little light on his
intentions in these policy areas. So in this respect, as well as on the
war in Iraq, the American people were lied to."
George Bush fraudulently obtained the electoral college vote in Florida
because of the Supreme Court but also because of Katherine Harris, then
Secretary of State, and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida and George W.
Bush's brother. It wasn't Ralph Nader that lost the state it was the
"scrub" list.
Greg Palast, the American journalist, who writes from exile in the U.K.
wrote all about it in The Guardian and it was largely ignored by the U.S.
press (No surprise there). In "From Jim Crow to Cyberspace" from his book,
"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (2003), he writes about the Harris
list:
"You may suspect something's wrong with the list. You'd be right. At least
90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil
rights, are innocent. Notably over half--about 54 percent--are Black and
Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats."
That is what lost the election for Albert Gore. His BBC report announced
that "Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little
blackbox operation." BUT these estimates were way off. That wasn't even
close. Later after "peeling the Florida elections onion," he wrote: "We
put the number of voters wrongly barred from voting at over 90,000 mostly
Blacks and Hispanics, by a wide majority Democrats."
AND GUESS WHAT: It is happening again. The felon list still hasn't been
fixed. They didn't want to fix it in time for the 2002 elections because
Jeb Bush needed it and there are still about 50,000 voters (who are not
felons) who can't vote because they are on that "scrub" list for 2008 and
nothing has been done about it. Of the 13 states which prohibit felons
from voting, Florida is one of them. How is that for equal application of
the law -- a violation of the Constitution and it makes democracy in this
country a joke. AND Bush wants to bring democracy to Iraq? The U.S. kind
no doubt.
What next?
Privatize social security. They already started. Privatize war. They
already do. Privatize the country. That happened already. It is done.
Hank Roth
http://pnews.org/
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