The Best Enemies Money Can Buy

From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden - Insider Connections and the 

Bush Family's Partnership with Killers of Americans

Brown Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group

By Michael C. Ruppert

[© Copyright 2001. All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The 

Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be reprinted or 

distributed for non-profit purposes only.]

FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade 

Center and the Pentagon, major media powerhouses and the increasingly 

influential alternative media alike have begun to focus attention on Bush 

family connections and a long history of arming and financing America's 

attackers in the months and years prior to the outbreak of war. Recent 

stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 

1, 2001), as well as a host of reports from so-called alternative news 

sources have begun to focus attention on the Bush family's 

profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies.

The following is a more comprehensive look at the documented history of 

these relationships that will also open some new avenues of inquiry for 

the press, Congress and the American people.

In a world now filled with biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, 

and chemical weapons like Sarin gas -- where there are people in many 

countries with reasons to oppose the United States -- the Bush 

Administration is following predictable strategies in a way that redefines the 

concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend upon the will and 

the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus on these 

relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover - and I am not the first 

to say this - if a national security priority is to seize the financial 

assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps we should start 

right here at home.

---

Adolph Hitler

Meticulous research, including U.S. government records from the era, 

along with contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times and other 

papers is presented in the 1992 book entitled, "George Bush, The 

Unauthorized Biography" by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by 

The Executive Intelligence Review and located at 

http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm. The following is sourced entirely 

from Chapter II of this essential work. [Note: Although FTW does not 

always agree with conclusions reached by the Executive Intelligence Review, 

or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have never found a single flaw in 

any of their factual research. History is history, no matter who 

presents it. And this history is essential to understanding our era.]

George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director 

of the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through 

the 1940s. It was Brown Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, 

the Rockefeller family, Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the 

Fords who served as the principal funding arm in helping to finance 

Adolph Hitler's rise to power starting in 1923. This included direct 

funding for the SS and SA channeled through a variety of German firms. 

Prescott Bush, through associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, 

Nazi banker Fritz Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of 

Germany, The German Steel Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence 

Dillon), and I.G. Farben, used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast 

quantities of money to the Nazis and to manage their American interests. 

The profits from those investments came back to Bush allies on Wall 

Street. Thyssen is universally regarded as having been Hitler's private 

banker and ultimate owner of the Union Bank Corporation.

Early support for Hitler came from Prescott Bush through the 

Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line -- also funded by Brown Bothers -- that funneled 

large sums of money and weapons to Hitler's storm troopers in the 1920s.

According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, "In May 1933, just after the Hitler 

regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the 

coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman 

International Company... was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to 

conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States."

Furthermore, a 1942 U.S. government investigative report that surfaced 

during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott 

Bush on the board, was an "interlocking concern" with the German Steel 

Trust that had produced:

-        50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron

-        41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate

-        36% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate

-        38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet

-        45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes

-        22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire

-        35% of Nazi Germany's explosives

The business relationships established by Bush in 1923 continued even 

after the war started until they became so offensive and overt as to 

warrant seizure by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy 

Act in 1942. 

In 1942, "Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took 

over Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. 

Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares...

"... all of which shares are held for the benefit of... members of the 

Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals... of a designated enemy 

country."

"On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front 

organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading 

Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation."

"Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by 

Prescott Bush and his father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized 

under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942..." These seizures 

of Bush businesses were reported in a number of American papers 

including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Prescott Bush went on to become an influential Republican Senator from 

Connecticut who went on to be a regular golfing partner of President 

Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were the lawyers John Foster and Allen 

Dulles, the later became the CIA Director under Eisenhower.

Saddam Hussein

After becoming President in January 1989, Prescott Bush's son, George 

Herbert Walker Bush - father of our current President - authorized a 

series of programs that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but 

also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of 

chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons, which he still 

possesses. Apologists for Bush (the elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq 

War of the 1980s left the region unstable, he was just trying to 

establish a new balance of power. Not so. Bush directives and policies, 

including relationships with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International 

(BCCI), and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) were directly and 

deliberately responsible for creating the army the U.S. fought in 1991.

A story by Russ W. Baker, in the March/April issue the Columbia 

Journalism Review (CJR), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate 

that I have seen. 

"ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart 

stop “It is becoming increasingly clear,' said a grave Ted Koppel, that 

George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, 

initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and 

military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the 

United States ultimately had to destroy...

"Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage?" 

Baker poignantly asks.

" The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind 

facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. 

In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca 

Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms 

buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in 

U.S. history.

"Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the 

S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don't appear 

to be getting any better at telling them...

"Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but 

so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored 

ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential 

civilian uses as well as military applications. We've learned that a vast 

network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi 

war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

"And we've learned that the obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy's largest 

bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. 

taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some 

government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but 

were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal 

Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by 

Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for 

munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks 

like $2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.

"... In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General 

Dick Thornburgh [appointed by George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. 

investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case...

"... As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, 

Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse 

of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., 

Britain, and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator."

While Democrat Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee 

during the period, stood as the lone voice from the wilderness in 

raising alarms about Bush's obvious corruption, the rest of the Congress 

sheepishly ignored all the signs demanding immediate action. Gonzales' 

voice reportedly fell silent after his empty car was machine-gunned in a 

Washington suburb in what passed for a drive-by shooting.

The CJR continues: "Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major 

investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue... 

"That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert 

decision to arm Iraq,' Waas wrote, "is the most serious consequence of a 

U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the 

advice and consent of the American public..."

The L.A. Times, on Feb 23, 1992, dug deep enough to find secret 

National Security Decision Directives by the Bush Administration in 1989 

ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $1 billion in new 

aid. The Times' series, co-authored with Waas, emphasized that, "buried 

deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece - that Secretary of State James 

Baker, after meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 

1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loans guarantees 

to Iraq."

Baker's CJR report also noted, "On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal 

reported [BNL official Christopher] Drogoul's assertion that the 

director general of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Production had 

told him, ‘We are all in this together. The intelligence service of the 

U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the 

Iraqi government.' Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] 

Gonzales ‘produced a phone-book-sized packet of documents' showing the 

involvement of U.S. exporting firms... The documents mentioned one... 

which designed parts for Iraq's howitzers and was financed through 

BNL..."

In the wake of highly suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just 

miles from where several of the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one 

final note. In his 1998 book "Bringing the War Home" author William 

Thomas writes, " Under that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers 

of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type 

Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of 

the US Army's high security germ warfare labs."

The Carlyle Group, the Bushes and bin Laden

The warnings about the Carlyle Group, the nation's 11th largest defense 

contractor, and the Bushes came long before the World Trade Center 

attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely held corporation, exempt, for that 

reason, from reporting its affairs to the Securities and Exchange 

Commission. Little is known of what it actually does except that it buys and 

sells defense contractors. As of October 4, 2001, it has removed its 

corporate web site from the World Wide Web making further investigation 

through that channel impossible. Its Directors include Frank Carlucci, 

former Reagan Secretary of Defense; James Baker, former Bush Secretary 

of State; and Richard Darman, a former White House aide to Ronald Reagan 

and Republican Party operative.

On March 3, 2001, just weeks after George W Bush's inauguration, the 

conservative Washington lobbying group Judicial Watch issued a press 

release. It said:

"(Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that 

investigates and prosecutes government abuse and corruption, called on 

former President George Herbert Walker Bush to resign immediately from 

the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm, while his son President 

George W. Bush is in office. Today's New York Times reported that the 

elder Bush is an "ambassador" for the $12 billion private investment firm 

and last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former 

president also helped the firm in South Korea.

"The New York Times reported that as compensation, the elder Bush is 

allowed to buy a stake in the Carlyle Group's investments, which include 

ownership in at least 164 companies throughout the world (thereby by 

giving the current president an indirect benefit). James Baker, the 

former Secretary of State who served as President George W. Bush's point man 

in Florida's election dispute, is a partner in the firm. The firm also 

gave George W. Bush help in the early 1990's when it placed him on one 

of its subsidiary's board of directors. 

"This is simply inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately 

resign from the Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of 

interest. Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor 

with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the 

Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's 

investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the 

Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States 

government," stated Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General 

Counsel. 

"Questions are now bound to be raised if the recent Bush Administration 

change in policy towards Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle 

Group, which is trying to gain investments from other Arab countries who 

[sic] would presumably benefit from the new policy," stated Judicial Watch 

President Tom Fitton." 

Judicial Watch noted that "even the Clinton Administration called on 

the Rodham brothers to stop their business dealings in [The former Soviet 

Republic of] Georgia because those dealings started to destabilize that 

country."

Since the WTC attacks the Wall Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 

2001) that, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for 

the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, 

an international consulting firm." The senior Bush had met with the bin 

Laden family at least twice in the last three years - 1998 and 2000 -- 

as a representative of Carlyle, seeking to expand business dealings 

with one of the wealthiest Saudi families, which some experts argue, has 

never fully severed its ties with black sheep Osama in spite of current 

reports in a mainstream press that is afraid of offending the current 

administration.

The Nation, on March 27, 2000 - in a story co-authored by David Corn 

and Paul Lashmar - wrote, "In January former President George Bush and 

former British Prime Minister John Major paid a social call on Saudi 

Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah..." This story confirms at least one meeting 

between the elder Bush and Saudi leaders, including the bin Ladens. 

That the bin Ladens attended this meeting was confirmed in a subsequent 

September 27, 2001 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 

meeting with the bin Ladens was also later confirmed by Bush (the elder's) 

Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only after the WSJ presented her with a 

thank you note sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after that meeting.

James Baker visited the bin Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO 

Frank Carlucci. 

The WSJ story went on to note, "A Carlyle executive said that the bin 

Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 

1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The 

fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, 

the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and 

should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle 

executive said.

"But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the 

family's overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger..."

In other words, Osama bin Laden's attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with 

the resulting massive increase in the U.S. defense budget have just 

made his family a great big pile of money.

More Bush connections appear in relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ 

story also notes that, "During the past several years, the [bin Laden] 

family's close ties to the Saudi royal family prompted executives and 

staff from closely held New York publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips 

to the family headquarters, according to Forbes Chairman Caspar 

Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. 

‘We would call on them to get their view of the country and what would be 

of interest to investors.'"

President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger for his criminal conduct in 

the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989.

Our current President, George W. Bush has also had -- at minimum -- 

indirect dealings with Carlyle and the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm 

Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000 from Texas investment banker James R. 

Bath who was also the U.S. investment counselor for the bin Laden 

family. In his watershed 1992 book, "The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush," 

award winning Texas investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into 

Bath's background, revealing connections with the CIA and major 

fraudulent activities connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 

billion out of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of 

George W. Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing 

operations in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden 

friend Adnan Khashoggi. One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was 

the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. 

Khashoggi, whose connections to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got 

his first business break by acting as middle-man for a large truck 

purchase by Osama bin Laden's older brother, Salem.

Another key player in the Bush Administration, Deputy Secretary of 

Defense Richard Armitage, left his post as an Assistant Secretary of 

Defense in the Reagan Administration after a series of scandals connected to 

CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines 

placed him at the brink of criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and 

Secord are veterans of Vietnam operations and have long been linked to 

opium/heroin smuggling. The Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal 

provision of weapons and war materiel to potential or actual enemies of 

the U.S. and to the Contras in Central America.

Armitage, a former Navy SEAL, who reportedly enjoyed combat missions 

and killing during covert operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has 

never been far from the Bush family's side. Throughout his career, both 

in and out of government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug 

smuggling operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 

Washington Post story, called Armitage, "my white son." In 1990, then 

President Bush dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its "transition" to 

capitalism. Armitage's Russian work for Bush has been frequently connected 

to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias, which 

became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s 

Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the 

Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and consolidating 

its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70% of the 

heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 - April 24, 1999]

Armitage and Carlucci are both Board Members of the influential 

Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council.

The connections continue with Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the 

multitude of oil pipeline construction running through the new war zone 

is one project - according to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal 

story - a joint venture in which the bin Laden family joined with the 

construction firm H.C. Price. A researcher named "Phoenix," writing for the 

Internet news site Rumor Mills News Agency located at 

www.rumormillnews.com, reported that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero 

Shaw, Inc. and is now owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, 

Dresser Industries. It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. 

Bush his first post war job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web 

sites has confirmed this.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense during 

Desert Storm, directing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, was 

Halliburton's CEO until last year's election.

And, according to a 2000 story from Harper's Magazine, in 1990 our 

current President, through a position as a corporate director of Caterair, 

owned by the Carlyle Group - at a time when the bin Laden's were 

invested in Carlyle - had additional connections to the bin Laden family. In 

addition, on March 1, 1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and 

a senior Trustee of the university, the University of Texas Endowment 

voted to place $10 million in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to 

how much of that money went to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we 

do know that there is a long tradition in the Bush family of giving 

money to those who kill Americans.

Now, as the people of America are beginning to awaken to what is really 

being unleashed upon them, as a few brave souls are asking who's going 

to get all the money the Bush Administration is "borrowing" from 

government coffers and who's going to pay for it - the above history is more 

than ominous. 

Considering that during the 1980s, under the pretext of fighting a 

Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that never once launched an attack on the 

U.S., these same people oversaw an explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption 

that went from 80 metric tons in 1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - 

considering that the CIA trained and equipped death squads that tortured 

and murdered hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Panama - 

considering that these same people have brutalized Iraq, leaving 

portions of it radioactively contaminated by depleted uranium for the next 4 

billion years and causing a fivefold increase in the number of childhood 

leukemia cases amidst a starving population, one can only wonder what 

they will produce for the world now given the context of the World Trade 

Center attacks.

And more---