Bush supporters' aftermath thread II

Some Republicans and some conservatives are finally opening their eyes. What's wrong with Tico & Bill?

The Big Lie
Published on Wednesday, August 16, 2006 by TomDispatch.com

Oliver Stone, 9/11, and the Big Lie

by Ruth Rosen

When World Trade Center ended, I left the theater tense, my muscles aching. The superb directing and acting, coupled with still hardly imaginable scenes of death and destruction, had sent painful muscle spasms up my back, evoked tears, and left me, yet again, with searing and indelible images of that hellish morning.

I felt disoriented in the bright sunlight of a Northern Californian afternoon. As my mind regained its critical faculties, however, another kind of shock set in. I suddenly realized that Oliver Stone's movie reinforces the Big Lie -- endlessly repeated by Dick Cheney, echoed and amplified by the right-wing media -- that 9/11 was somehow linked to Iraq or supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

It might surprise you that this Oliver Stone film is neither ideological, nor conspiratorial, which in my view is just as it should be. Instead, it is a portrayal of what the men who braved hell and the families who anguished over their survival experienced.

World Trade Center gives 9/11 a distinctly human face by following two Port Authority policemen and their families. We watch the men muster their courage to help evacuate people in one of the towers; we gasp as they are buried alive; we wince as heavy slabs of cement crush their bodies; and we hold our breath as they struggle to keep each other going in the face of imminent death.

Expert editing brings us the anguish suffered by their wives, children, and relatives. Some are in denial, others in shock. Some have faith; others are resigned to the men's deaths. They live in their own hell and we empathize with their wrenching agony.

With a subtle touch, Stone shows us people all over the planet horrified by television images of the airplanes crashing into the towers. He reminds us that the people of the world expressed an outpouring of sympathy (since been squandered by the Bush administration).

Meanwhile, Stone introduces us to one ex-Marine who feels called by God to help rescue those buried alive. He gets his hair cut short, puts on his old uniform, and with all the authority of a former staff sergeant, does what he knows best -- uses his military skills to save people's lives. Determined and angry, he insists that we must avenge this horrendous attack.

We also watch a group of Wisconsin policemen viewing the terrorist attacks on television. One screams out, "The bastards!" Stone, in other words, captures the desire for revenge already in the air.

And yet, in none of these profoundly moving scenes is there even a mention of who might have committed this atrocity. Neither the name al-Qaeda, nor Osama Bin Laden, is so much as whispered.

You might say, "But everyone knows it was al-Qaeda." And you'd be right, but do most Americans really know just who those terrorists were or that they had no connection to Iraq -- that not a single one of them even came from that country? It doesn't sound very important until you realize that various polls over the last five years have reported from 20% to 50% of Americans still believe Iraqis were on those planes. (They were not.) As of early 2005, according to a Harris poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein actually helped plan the attack and supported the hijackers. And in February, 2006, according to a unique Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, "85% said the U.S. mission is mainly ?'to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks'; 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was ?'to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'"

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf,was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich. The idea was simple enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) often enough and most people will come to accept it as the truth. During World War II, the predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, described how the Germans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

This is, in fact, just what the Bush administration has been doing ever since 9/11. As a result, in 2005, an ABC/Washington Post poll found that 56% of Americans still thought Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction "shortly before the war," and 60% still believed Iraq had provided "direct support" to al-Qaeda prior to the war. In June 2006, Fox News ran a story once again dramatizing the supposed links between 9/11 and Iraq. And, as recently as July, 2006, a Harris poll found that 64% of those polled "say it is true that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda."

The Bush administration's Big Lie has worked very well. Dick Cheney, the point man on this particular lie, has repeated it year after year. In a similar way, George Bush has repeatedly explained his 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, by insisting that we must fight terrorists in that country so that we don't have to fight them here. (It turned out to be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.)

Neither these, nor so many other administration statements had a shred of truth to them. Even the President, who repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the September 11th attacks, admitted on September 18, 2003 that there was no evidence the deposed Iraqi dictator had had a hand in them. But that didn't stopped the Vice President from endlessly repeating the Big Lie that justifies this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Most of the controversy over World Trade Center has focused on whether, as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, it is still too soon for a cinematic depiction of these horrendous events. For some people, perhaps that may well be the case. I myself don't think it's too soon for such a film; but I do worry that, powerful and evocative as it is, it may, however inadvertently, only deepen waning support for the war in Iraq,

Despite the near flood of documentaries on the terrorist attacks heading toward the small screen this September, Stone's film, for many Americans, may end up being the definitive cinematic record of what it felt like to be inside the hellish cyclone known simply by the numbers 9/11.

To offer a faithful recreation of that historical catastrophe, however, Stone owed viewers the whole truth, not merely a brilliant, graphic portrayal of what happened and how it affected the lives of some of those involved.

As it ends, a written postscript appears that describes what happened to the buried Port Authority policemen, their families, and the ex-Marine who helped rescue them (whose last line is: "We're going to need some good men out there to revenge this"). We learn that the two men survived an unbearable number of surgeries and are living with their families. Next we read that the ex-Marine re-upped and later did two tours of duty in Iraq. At that moment, I wanted to shout out, "Don't you mean Afghanistan?" Then I imagined the satisfaction Dick Cheney and sore-loser Senator Joseph Lieberman would take in this not-quite-spelled-out linkage of 9/11 and Iraq.

I kept waiting for what never came -- even a note in the postscript reminding the audience of those who had actually committed the crime. This is where, by omission, Stone's film ends up reinforcing the administration's Big Lie. You could easily have left the theater thinking that the saintly ex-Marine had gone off to fight those who attacked our country.

That evening, I wrote the words that should have appeared in the postscript: "Government officials later confirmed that the organization which plotted the destruction of the World Trade Center was al-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian. Nineteen men executed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fifteen of them came from Saudi Arabia; the remaining four from Egypt, The United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon. None of them came from Iraq."

What happened to Oliver Stone, the filmmaker who gave us Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, and Nixon? Despite his conspiratorial foibles in JFK, he has long been a movie-maker dedicated to raising tough questions about our American past. Where did his commitment to opening historical subjects for debate go? He was right not to politicize this film, but truth-telling required that he identify the terrorists. Truth-telling would have resulted in his helping to dismantle the Big Lie that has resulted in the deaths of so many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and has plunged Iraq into chaos and civil war.

How could Oliver Stone leave it up to viewers to discover for themselves who committed this crime? And how could he leave the audience with the impression that there was a connection, as Dick Cheney has never stopped saying, between 9/11 and Iraq?

This is the tragic failure of Stone's World Trade Center. It undercuts the historical value of the film and reinforces the Biggest Lie of the last five years, still believed by far too many Americans -- that in Iraq, we are fighting those who attacked our country.

Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her most recent book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2001), will be published with an updated epilogue in 2007.

© Copyright 2006 Ruth Rosen

leave it to America to recreate such a thing and offer it up as summertime 'entertainment'. Enjoy your popcorn......

Newsweek Review of Oliver Stone's film:


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Natural Born Heroes
Many artists have struggled to capture 9/11. Now Oliver Stone directs a true story you'd never expect?-and won't forget.

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Talk Transcript: 'World Trade Center'
NEWSWEEK's David Ansen hosted a Live Talk on Oliver Stone's new 9/11 film on Thursday, Aug. 3.

By David Ansen
Newsweek
August 7, 2006 issue - In Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," on the morning of September 11, 2001, a Port Authority cop named Will Jimeno is doing his everyday job, shooing away prostitutes and panhandlers from the bus terminal, when he hears a loud rumble overhead. The camera pans, not up at the sky, but down the street, to reveal the shadow of a low-flying plane climbing the face of a building. Stone never shows the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. He's letting us know, right from the start, that we will see history unfold as it happened on the ground, from the perspectives of ordinary men and women.


The policemen portrayed in "World Trade Center" are real guys, and Stone is telling a true story. His heroes are not prepared for the disaster that looms. Most of the cops in the little squad headed by Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) decline to volunteer to go into the buildings, but a few, including Jimeno (Michael Peña), step forward. The men are obviously frightened, especially when they hear the sickening thump of bodies falling around them. They don't rush boldly into the buildings like action heroes in a disaster movie, but rather move slowly, hesitantly. Still, they do their duty in the face of terrible danger. Their bravery, as well as the courage of their families and their rescuers, helps to redeem the darkest of days.

This is not the 9/11 story most people would expect from Oliver Stone. There are no conspiracies lurking in the background. No axes to grind. Five years ago, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Stone was asked what kind of movie he'd make in response to the attack. He invoked the classic French thriller about terrorism, "The Battle of Algiers." He described a movie structured like a hunt, which would show how terrorism worked, from both the Arab and the American sides. "And if it were done realistically, without the search for a hero, which is often required, it would be a fascinating procedural," he said. A ragged Stone, who looked as if he'd been up half the night, was onstage at the New York Film Festival on a panel called "Making Movies That Matter," which this writer moderated. It was less than a month after 9/11, and passions ran high. Christopher Hitchens, the acid-tongued English journalist, jumped on Stone when he too-casually referred to the attack as "the revolt." Stone went on a tear about how capitalism had run amok and was destroying the movie business. He got pilloried in the press. Stone, who never forgets a fight or a bad word written about him, is still angry about the way the media twisted his words, making them sound as if he said the attack was a specific response to the corporate New World Order.

These days, if Stone has a theory about September 11, he's keeping it to himself. Capitalism marches on. "World Trade Center" ?-made with the full cooperation of McLoughlin and Jimeno?-is a far cry from "The Battle of Algiers." It has no interest in the terrorism. It's explicitly about heroism. It may strike some, at first glance, as a surprisingly conventional film from this controversial filmmaker. And it's the rare Stone film he didn't write himself. But he knew when he first read Andrea Berloff's powerful screenplay that he wanted to make it, and he petitioned for the job. "The beauty of the script was that it had hope," Stone says. He knew that, after "Alexander" and other commercial failures, Hollywood regarded him as tainted goods, never mind his two Oscars. "I guess I couldn't get arrested, is one way of saying it." But "World Trade Center" is anything but an impersonal job-for-hire. The passion that went into its making is pure Stone, and many of its concerns?-his fascination with men in groups, with working-class camaraderie, with the nature of courage?-can be traced back 20 years, to "Platoon."

Did you miss my post where I said you were ignorant of the facts, Pachelbel? I'll give you another shot at it unless you are afraid to handle the rebuttal I made of your pathetic and misleading post-




Wrong_Pachelbel

about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and?-yes?-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix?-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past?-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.




So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP?-Ammunition Supply Point?-with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson,

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written,

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that

Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.1

**********************************************************

Only someone highly ignorant of the facts would try to put the lie to the DOCUMENTED FACT THAT THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES OF BRITAIN, GERMANY, CHINA, RUSSIA, ISRAEL AND FRANCE REPORTED THAT IRAQ WAS CONTINUING TO EXPAND ITS WM

*********************************************************

Pacelbal's source wrote:


An army officer, a key source in Kirkuk, reports that not only is the MEK (Mujahaiden Badr Corps) not a pro-Al Queda operation with ties to Iran, as the Bush administration asserted, it is opposed to the regime in Iran and has been fighting Iranian para-military units in Northern Iraq. Well equipped and superbly trained, the MEK did fight with Saddam Hussein against Iran, but only for the purpose of toppling the Mullahs. Most of the upper level MEK commanders and a very significant minority of their troops are women, so they hardly qualify as Fundamentalist terrorists. When Condoleeza Rice said their base in Northern Iraq where they trained was tied to Al Queda, she was lying through her teeth. She knew exactly who and what they were. The Army source in Kirkuk reports that Rumsfeld is considering using them in an invasion of Iran, the way he used the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The only difference is that the MEK is a far superior fighting force. It is currently under U.S. Army protection against the Iranian para-military units.
********************************************************

quote from above--"An Army officer, a key source in Kikurk!!!"

If one does not know that unnamed and anonymous sources are not worth a damn, one should not be posting on this venue!!*********************************************************

Pachelbil's source then wrote:


The Bush administration also accused France and Germany with providing Iraq with technology in the form of precision switches that could be used to detonate nuclear bombs. In actuality, as The New York Times reported, the switches were presented as spare parts for medical equipment and French authorities had immediately barred the sale.

Was this a Hitlerian use of the "big lie" technique ("Repeat a lie often enough and the people will believe it. The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.") or did the Bush administration actually believe that these things existed? And if it were a matter of lying, is lying about war any better or worse than lying about sex? When Clinton denied that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinski, his position was that there had been no penetration. Of course, he lied under oath, which is not the same thing as lying in a speech or a press conference. But if the lies add up to what can be called an "abuse of power," it starts to become something much more troubling than the inability to acknowledge that fellatio is indeed sexual, the major difference being that in the case of abuse of power, it is the country and its people who are violated. And abuse of power is abuse of power, whatever the nutty professor, Leo Strauss, might have said.
***********************************************************

Pacelebel'a source obviously knows NOTHING about the legal definition of a lie.

Black's law Dictionary--A falsehood uttered for the purpose of deception--An INTENTIONAL statement of an untruth.

No one has ever proven in court beyond the shadow of a doubt that President Bush lied, in fact the essay by Podhoretz shows that he did not lie--CLINTON? HE ADMITTED LYING!!! Pacelebel's source is obviously in erroR

***********************************************************

Pachelbel' source wrote:

Moreover, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, has said, "We conclude that the large number of deployed weapons the administration said that Iraq had was not nearly as sophisticated as the administration claimed." And the discovery of two possible mobile biological weapons labs falls far short of the claims that Bush and members of his administration made before the war.
************************************************************

BUT IF LARGE NUMBER OF DEPLOYED WEAPONS WERE NOT NEARLY AS SOPHISTICATED AS THE ADMINISTRATION CLAIMED, THERE WERE S O M E W E A P O N S I N I R A Q.





Now, Pacelbel, I did what must be done in a debate. I took your source and rebutted a good part of it. If you are unable to do the same thing to mine, or too lazy, I understand, but then my POST STANDS UNREBUTTED.

PS Note carefully the many quotes from Democrats in my post!!!

Rebut those!!!!!

I'd really like to see you come up with substantial evidence to rebut this.
But you won't, because this is the truth behind the Bush family. Friends of the Nazi's, drug smuggling, bank scandals. money laundering - how do you think the Bush family made its millions? By being honest?
it would make a good movie don't you think? What a nice, American family


The Bush Crime Family Tree

George Walker, GW's great-grandfather, set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest. It was only in 1942, when the government seized Union Banking Company assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act, that George Walker and Prescott Bush stopped pumping money into Hitler's regime. (1)


Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush. (2) On the 20th of October, the government commenced action against the company under the trading with the enemy act. (3) After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal. (4) In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past.(5)


George Herbert Walker Bush, the presidents father. Bush, as director of the CIA, had funneled enormous amounts of cash to drug runners including Manuel Noriega and helped in the destabilization of Argentina. Bush utilized his own connections to help fund drug runners from Laos to Panama. Most shocking was the so-called "cocaine coup" in Bolivia in June 1980, masterminded by fugitive Nazi Klaus Barbie, "The Butcher Of Lyons." Barbie, who had been previously secreted in Latin America by the CIA, began working closely with the Argentines and used drug money to finance a neo-Nazi cabal, one that succeeded in overthrowing the government. The troops swept through the capital wearing Nazi armbands, according to former DEA agent Mike Levine. George H.W. Bush later facilitated the Iran-contra affair, employing many of the same methods: secretly selling Central American cocaine in America and weapons to Iran while using the profits to fund the contras and to overthrow democratically elected socialists in Central America.(6) as the head of the CIA and later as Vice President, toppled democratically elected regimes in South and Central America and began propping up a dictator by the name of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Although forbidden by congress to do so, he continued to sell chemical and biological weapons to Saddam even after he used them on villages of innocent civilians. A decade later The United States had to go to war against him and the Bush family again, made millions from it.

Jonathan J. Bush, the Presidents uncle. Jonathan Bush's "Pioneer Profile" in "George W. Bush's $100,000 Club" cites him as the "head" of the Riggs Investment Management Co.; "Bush's uncle Jonathan ... founded its subsidiary, J. Bush & Co., of which he is chair. He also is an ex-chair of the New York Republican State Finance Committee. Bush credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his 'success' in the Texas oil industry in the early ?'80s." (17)
Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering. Jonathan Bush, who is a major fundraiser for his nephew, was appointed in 2000 to run Riggs Investment Management Co. His association with Riggs began when he headed J. Bush & Co., a New Haven, Conn., company he created in 1970 and built to offer advice on money management. (18)

According to the 5/14/04 New York Times, Federal regulators fined the Riggs National Corporation, the parent company of Riggs Bank, $25 million yesterday for "failing to report suspicious activity, the largest penalty ever assessed against a domestic bank in connection with money laundering. The fine stems from Riggs's failure over at least the last two years to actively monitor suspect financial transfers through Saudi Arabian accounts held by the bank." The 5/14/04 Wall Street Journal reported that of particular concern, Riggs failed to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." According to the 4/18/04 Washington Post, Saudi Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, "may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists."
(...)
According to the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Jonathan Bush is the President and CEO of Riggs Investment Management - a major arm of Riggs Bank. He is also the uncle of President George W. Bush. The President "credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his 'success' in the Texas oil industry in the early '80s." According to Public Citizen, the uncle Jonathan was a Bush Pioneer, having raised more than $100,000 for his nephew in 2000.(19)


Neil Bush, the president's brother. Central player of the 1980'ssavings and loan scandal, he ran a savings and loan into the ground while shoveling millions of its taxpayer-backed dollars into the pockets of two deadbeat partners. Neil served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver, Colorado, from 1985 until 1988. During that time, the now-dead thrift made over $200 million in loans to Neil's two partners in JNB Exploration, Neil's abysmally unsuccessful oil company. Federal regulators determined that, while Silverado was pumping loans to Neil's two associates, Neil was completely dependent on the two men for his income. The failure of Silverado -- its closure delayed until after the 1988 election -- cost taxpayers about $1 billion. After Silverado failed, Neil started a new oil company, Apex Energy. This time, his money came from a $2.35 million loan through a Small Business Administration program. When news of this reached the press in March 1991, the SBA discovered that the companies through which the loan was approved were technically insolvent, and it gave them up to thirty months to "self-liquidate." This meant that Apex would have to repay its SBA-guaranteed loans. Neil took this as his cue to move on, and he left Apex -- and its debts -- for others to worry about. (7) update: Neil Bush made $171,370 in one day. The fact that he was a former consultant to the company whose stock he dumped is just a coincidence


Marvin Bush, the president's brother was on the board of directors of a company providing electronic security for the World Trade Center, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines, according to public records. The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp., also linked for years to the Bush family. The security company, formerly named Securacom and now named Stratesec, is in Sterling, Va.. Its CEO, Barry McDaniel, said the company had a ``completion contract" to handle some of the security at the World Trade Center ``up to the day the buildings fell down." The suite in which Marvin Bush was annually re-elected, according to public records, is located in the Watergate in space leased to the Saudi government. The company now holds shareholder meetings in space leased by the Kuwaiti government there.(8) (9) more

why has the media kept Marvin's activities so quiet?

Jeb Bush, the president's brother. After graduating from The University of Texas, Jeb Bush served a short apprenticeship at the Venezuelan branch of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas before settling in Miami, in 1980, to work on his father's unsuccessful primary bid against Ronald Reagan. Shortly after arriving in Miami, Jeb was hired by Cuban-American developer Armando Codina to work at his Miami development company as an agent leasing office space. A couple of years later, Jeb and Codina became business partners, and in 1985 they purchased an office building in a deal partly financed by a savings and loan that later failed.The $4.56 million loan, from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, was granted in such a way that neither Codina's nor Bush's name appeared on the loan papers as the borrowers. A third man, J. Edward Houston, borrowed the $4.56 million from Broward and then re-lent it to the Bush partnership. When federal regulators closed Broward Savings in 1988, they found the loan, which had been secured by the Bush partnership, in default. As Jeb's father was finishing his second term as vice-president and running for the presidency, federal regulators had two options: to get Jeb Bush and his partner to repay the loan, or to foreclose on their office building. But regulators came up with a third solution. After reappraising the building, regulators decided it wasn't worth as much as was owed for it. The regulators reduced the amount owed by Bush and his partner from $4.56 million to just $500,000. The pair paid that amount and were allowed to keep their office building. Taxpayers picked up the tab for the unpaid $4 million. (10) He also rigged an election that you may have heard about. Thousands of eligible voters were disallowed the right to vote in predominantly democratic regions. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service.Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida?s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. (11)



George W. Bush, second appointed president of the United States.
• 1979-83: Fifty Bush family investors and friends, led by uncle Jonathan, a New York Republican Party official and an investment manager, fork over $4.7 million to set up young Bush in a company called Arbusto. It's a flop, and in 1982 gets a new name: Bush Exploration.

• 1984: Spectrum 7 Corporation, an Ohio oil exploration outfit owned by Dubya's Yalie pal William DeWitt Jr., buys out Bush Exploration, setting up young Bush as CEO at $75,000 a year and giving him 1.1 million shares of the firm's stock. Another flop. The company's fortunes soon sink, with $400,000 in losses and a debt of $3 million.

• 1986: In the nick of time, Bush and partners merge the failing Spectrum with Harken Oil, a Dallas exploration company, with a $2 million stock purchase. Bush puts up about $500,000 and gets a $120,000 annual consulting fee along with $131,250 in stock options. Harken is a small outfit, looking for oil opportunities within the U.S. Then out of the blue comes Harvard Management Corporation, an investment adviser for Harvard University's endowment portfolio. It pumps millions into the venture.

• 1990: Although Harken has no international expertise, it gets the attention of the Bahrain National Oil Company, which unexpectedly appears on the scene and bypasses big oil's Amoco and Chevron to sign a production agreement with the little Texas concern. The contract grants Harken exclusive rights to what seems to be a promising offshore area squeezed between two productive tracts owned by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Wall Street Journal speculates Bahrain was trying to cozy up to Daddy Bush, who was plotting an assault on Iraq after Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.

Bass Enterprises Production Company finances the Bahrain drilling with $25 million, and Harvard Management raises its investment. A couple of members of the Fort Worth Bass family have places on Team 100, an elite business group contributing to the Republican National Committee.

In June, Harken drills two dry holes in Bahrain. The future looks bleak. Dubya dumps two-thirds of his Harken holdings (212,140 shares), for $848,560. He uses some of this money to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball club. This is a lot of stock to dump on the market all at once, and brokers say it was purchased by an unnamed institutional investor.

That August, Harken posts a loss of $23 million.

• January 1991: Daddy Bush attacks Iraq.

• February 1991: Dubya, as the official in charge at Harken, reports his big stock sale to the SEC?-eight months late.

• April 1991: The SEC begins an investigation into Harken dealings. Chairman Richard Breeden, who had been appointed by the senior Bush and served him as an economic policy adviser, hails from Baker & Botts, a big Texas oil law firm where he was a partner. Inside the SEC, James Doty, general counsel and the official in charge of any litigation that might come out of the Harken investigation, is another alumnus of Baker & Botts. And as a private attorney, before joining the government, Doty represented the younger Bush in matters related to Dubya's ownership of the Rangers.

• 1993: The SEC ends its Harken investigation following perfunctory interviews.

The good people of Baker & Botts continued looking out for Shrub. Since 1993, Breeden, Doty, and other lawyers there have given him $182,050 for his various political campaigns, making the firm one of his biggest supporters.(12)

Upon appointment as president, Bush appoints 6 Iran-contra defendants to his staff, (13) fills the upper levels of the White house and pentagon with senior members of the PNAC (14) including his speech writer, chief advisor, secretary of defense, and vice president. Uses the terrorist attacks of 9-11 (16) to illegally invade and occupy Iraq under the false pretense of imminent threat (15) and reaps billions for Cheney's Halliburton, Rumsfeld's Bechtel, and his own family's Carlyle group.
newsweek article on Bush/Nazi connection
"Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951" - Federal Documents
Karl Rove's grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter---Nazi State Party Chairman---for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp,
Still, that's ancient history. Surely bush wouldn't be repeating the actions of fascist dictators. Or would he?

Do the Israeli's know???

(1) http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/
(2) http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.html
(3) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3713.htm
(4) http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=39&contentid=997
(5) http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=39&contentid=963&page=2
(6) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/bushcontra.htm
(7) http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html
(8) http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm
(9) http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Marvin_Bush
(10) http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/BushFV.html#p2
(11) http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1
(12) http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0228/ridgeway.php
(13) http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/Central_America/Iran-Contra_Felons_Get_Good_Jobs_from_Bush
(14) http://www.oldamericancentury.org/pnac.htm
(15) http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/sperry/stories/storyReader$526
(16) http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/
(17) http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Jonathan_Bush
(18) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28396-2004May14?language=printer
(19) http://www.davidsirota.com/2004/05/bushs-uncle-is-executive-at-bank-fined.html

Pachelbel- WHAT A GREAT POST!!! You don't have to respond to my challenge in which I took your other post apart!


Do you know why, Pachelbel?

Because by listing idiocies you have shown yourself to be a total KOOK!!!


George W.Bush and his father were Nazis?

I will happily replicate that when you post again because only a KOOK actually believes that!!!

Pachelbel- I just contacted the DNC to ask them why they neglected to reveal your dynamite evidence. They obviously do not have the insight and information that you do>

LOL!!!

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.

JTT and Bernard

Would you two guys please have some consideration for everyone else in this community and cease these mile-long pastes. Put in a teaser of a few paragraphs with a link.

You know what, B? You are a total idiot. Anyone who is literate knows that the Bush family were Nazi profiteers/carpetbaggers. It's no secret. Except to people like you with their eyes completely shut. Jeez even NEWSWEEK published derogatory info about the Bush family.

I notice you did not check out any sources and did not look up: HALLIBURTON, CARLYLE, PRESCOTT BUSH/HARRIMAN. Why don't you do a google search on them and get back to me? Too afraid the truth will hit you between the eyes. Therefore your answer is mere
itshay to add to the rest of your pile. Bush media can tell you anything and you'd believe it, wouldn't you? As long as Fox TV says it, it must be true.

Karl Rove (you know him don't you?) g.Father WAS a Nazi. No disputing that. If you actually READ the article you might begin to connect the dots.

Well I guess the DNC - whoever they are - don't know crap. Doesn't surprise me, as 1/2 of Americans still think Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

Think what you like, doesn't bother me that you are considered the 1/2 of Americans who don't know when they are being lied to.

Seems the pro Bush bunch never graduated from college. DUH

oh look! An article from NEWSWEEK - the magazine you quote often to me! Maybe you should CALL them and check this out! They could be lying

newsweek article on Bush/Nazi connection
"Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951" - Federal Documents
Karl Rove's grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter---Nazi State Party Chairman---for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp,


figure it out, dumkopf. First you quote Newsweek to me then you rebut an article from them.

Please provide the link to Newsweek.


It appears the article you posted was written by John Buchanan and Stacey Michael, and first published in The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003. LINK

Sadly, this is true. The poster of long, idiotic & baseless articles is one of them. Another example on this forum thread is the poster who wanted a simple article explained to him - in other words, feed them pablum or they can't chew it. Americans will take the easy route and let Fox TV tell them what to think because most of the population are ignorant & lazy and prefer to stay that way.

I bet the Chinese leaders were incredulous that so many Americans are so stupid. Especially since the Yanks have a 'free press'. Or do they? If you told them that the corporations own the media and the corporations were a big contributor to Bush's campaign they wouldn't believe it.

Too many Americans believe what their gov't tells them, for sure. I thought they learned their lesson after JFK and the Johnson/Watergate era. Guess not.

Still waiting on that link, pachelbel.

But you won't be providing it, will you?

Oh, the power of the Bush name. It certainly served GWB quite well -- few doubt that it got him through the finest schools around, and into his failed career in the oil business. It did enrich him by virtue of his bargain purchase of a share in the baseball team. Also, it enabled him to jump ahead of many to enter the air national guard.

Neil is an interesting case. He comes across as being mildly retarded, and vulnerable to being used by anybody. He was certainly used at Silverado, testifying before congress that he "got an incredibly sweet deal" there. He could share in the profits, but not the losses. The taxpayer got hosed big time by this firm.

I'm curious ... how does he come across that way?

He told a congressional committee is a very serious way of his "incredibly sweet deal," as well as a number of other mind-numbing statements.

He sounds stupid because of the southern accent.

Why do you hate Southerners, snood?