CHAPTER 1
THE BUSH FAMILY ‘PREYS’ TOGETHER
PRESCOTT SHELDON BUSH.
Prescott Sheldon Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, had close connections to both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman Company and director of Union Banking Company of Manhatten, both of which had close connections to both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Union Banking Company and W.A.Harriman & Company sold over $50 million in German bonds in the United States starting in 1924. W.A. Harriman and Company gave loans to the Soviet Union which was rebuilding its oil fields that had been devastated during World War I.
According to John Loftus, president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank. When Union Banking Corporation was liquidated in 1951, Loftus said, Bush’s grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5 million from the bank as part of that dissolution. The bank was liquidated in 1951, and Bush’s grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5 million from the bank as part of that dissolution. (Newscoast, November 16, 2000; Russell Bowen, The Immaculate Deception)
GEORGE HERBERT BUSH.
George Herbert Bush’s ties to the Middle East began in 1964. Running for the United States Senate from Texas, he was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush’s company drilled offshore oil wells. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. In the Middle East, he had ties to rogue banks such as Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In each of the government offices he held, Bush encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world’s primary destination for arms shipments. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)
As CIA director in 1976, Bush improved relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)
As CIA director under President Ford, Bush not only met with Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, but he also provided him an annual salary of $110,000. President Carter worked to revamp the CIA and picked a new director, Stansfield Turner, who promptly took Noriega off the agency’s payroll.
As vice president in the 1980s, rumors circulated that the CIA funneled cash to the Contras in Central America, and tons of cocaine returned to the United States. In 1985, the Iran-Contra story broke with allegations that the Reagan-Bush administration was covertly and illegally selling weapons to Iran in hopes that Hezbollah would release American captives in Beirut.
Over his 12-year span as vice president and president, Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered scandals. Although he claimed he was “out of the loop,” allegations surfaced that he had ties to the Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran, some BCCI-financed, helped illegally fund the operations of the Contra in Nicaragua. As vice president, Bush was a member of the NSC. He attended at least six documented meetings between May and October of 1986 and a total of at least 24 meetings in the 1980s. The arms-for-hostages plan was undoubtedly the primary agenda item at these meetings.
In 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh concluded that Bush had indeed been “in the loop” on multiple illegal acts. But Bush made sure that all litigation would halt, when he pardoned Caspar Weinberger whose diary was in Walsh’s hands and contained evidence which could have implicated Bush. Additionally, possible personal testimony could also damage Bush’s credibility, since he had vehemently denied any role in Iran-Contra. Bush also granted pardons to several other Iran-Contra figureheads, including former NSC adviser Robert McFarlane and former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams. (Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)
The Reagan-Bush administration was also embroiled in Iraqgate. Bush’s first involvement with Saddam Hussein occurred in 1986, when the vice president sent strategic military information, gathered by American intelligence, during the Iran-Iraq War. The administration also sold military trucks and helicopters to Iraq. American corporations sold military hardware to Saudi Arabia, and some was passed on to Baghdad. According to the General Accounting Office in 1986, the United States sold an undisclosed number of TOW anti-tank missiles. In return, the Saudis sold 1,500 bombs to Iraq. These included 300 MK-84 2,000 pound bombs. This was directly in violation of the Arms Export Control Act which prohibited the transfer of American weapons to other nations without the written approval of Washington.
After leaving the White House in 1993, Bush spoke in Japan to 50,000 disciples of the Women’s Federation for World Peace in 1996, led by the wife of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Sun Moon had spent a year in an American federal prison in 1982 for tax evasion and publicly described America as “Satan’s harvest.”
In 1994, Bush traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina where he delivered paid speeches to banking and pharmaceutical groups and was paid by Moon’s Washington Times Foundation.
PRESCOTT BUSH, JR.
Prescott Bush, Jr., President George Herbert Bush’s older brother, served on the advisory board of Americares. Prescott lobbied his brother and received federal humanitarian aid for the Contras after the Boland Amendment prohibited military support.
Prescott developed Prescott Bush Resources Ltd., a real estate and development consulting company. He received a consulting fee of $250,000 for helping to develop an internal communications network in China. However, President George Herbert Bush imposed sanctions that suspended $300 million worth of Hughes Aircraft satellite. But Prescott got a big boost, when President Bush lifted sanctions on the satellite contract on December 19, 1989. (Jack Colhoun, The Family Preys Together)
JEB BUSH.
His right-wing connections./ George W. Bush’s oldest brother, Jeb, also had Contra connections. In 1984, he set up a meeting between Oliver North and Mario Castejon, a right-wing Guatemalan politician.
Jeb had ties to another Contra sympathizer, Miguel Recarey, who headed the International Medical Centers (IMC) in Miami. IMC was one of the largest health maintenance organizations in the United States, receiving $30 million a month for its Medicare patients and clearing $1 billion in federal monies from 1981 to 1987. A federal audit of IMC in 1986 determined that the firm illegally used Medicare funds to treat wounded Contras at its hospital. The funding was arranged by IMC official José Basulto who was trained by the CIA.
Jeb was linked to Leonel Martinez, a Miami-based right-wing Cuban-American drug trafficker, who attempted to smuggle more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine into Miami in 1985 and 1986. He was arrested in 1989 and later convicted for bringing 300 kilos of cocaine into the United States.
Jeb had ties to BCCI, notorious for money laundering during the Contra war. In 1988, Jeb was mentioned in a deposition taken by a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee which was investigating drug money laundering operations in the United States.
In 1988, Jeb and his business partner Armando Codina profited after President Bush bailed out Broward Federal Savings and Loan in Sunrise, Florida. The FDIC absorbed $285 million in bad loans, including a $4.6 million loan by the Bush-Codina partnership. The two partners wrote a check for $505,000 to the FDIC, and the government paid off the remaining $4.1 million of the loan for an office building on which Jeb and Codina defaulted.
Jeb lobbied his father to release Orlando Bosch from prison in Florida. Bosch was a leader of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) and was responsible for more than 50 anti-Castro bombings in Cuba and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. He was jailed in 1988 for jumping bail on a 1968 conviction for shooting a bazooka at a Polish freighter in the Miami harbor. He also the mastermind of the explosion of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados on October 5, 1976, in which 73 passengers were killed.
Assuring his brother would carry Florida. When it became clear that the disputed Florida election in November 2000 could deliver the White House to his brother, Jeb Bush immediately recused himself from any official role in the recount. He promised to avoid even the “slightest appearance of a conflict of interest.” He directed his staff to spend their time on government business and pledged to do the same.(Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
However, there were several indications that Jeb Bush did not stay out of the process. The Florida governor’s office made 95 telephone calls to the George W. Bush presidential campaign, its advisors, lawyers, and staffers during the 36-day recount period, records showed. At least 10 calls came from an office number used primarily by Jeb Bush, including one call to a private line in George W. Bush's gubernatorial office in Austin. Another call from Jeb Bush's number went to Karl Rove. One went to the Texas governor’s chief of staff, Clay Johnson. Another went to Michigan Governor John Engler who soon flew to Florida to monitor the ballot recount in Broward County. Additional calls were logged to cell phones assigned to Bush campaign staffers. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
Jeb Bush said in an e-mail that he could not recall the purpose of the calls: “I have no clue what these calls were about. They most likely were return phone calls. In the alternative, they could have been my assistant passing on a request for an invitation to speak or an autographed picture. They might have been answering a request on where to eat in Tallahassee for the hoards of Austin folks that made their way here. They could have been for many reasons. I cannot remember.” (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
Jeb Bush visited the state GOP headquarters in Tallahassee that functioned as the Bush campaign command center for the recount at least once. He also dialed into at least one conference call with campaign operatives. Days after the recount ended, he hired Kathleen Shanahan, the Bush-Cheney deputy campaign manager, as his chief of staff in Tallahassee. Al Cardenas, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said that Bush was kept abreast of developments in each of the state’s 67 counties. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
During the Florida recount, Jeb Bush made 34 calls from the governor’s office to the Bush for President campaign office in Miami. Six were made November 22, the day the Miami-Dade canvassing board abruptly abandoned its manual recount. One call went to the Miami law firm that employed Miguel De Grandy who represented the Bush campaign before the canvassing board. An additional 25 calls were made to the Washington law firm known as Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal that wrote briefs for the George W. Bush campaign during the recount and that argued his case before the Florida Supreme Court. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
Jeb Bush’s legal staff phoned the Washington offices of the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher on December 5, the day after the United States Supreme Court sent the recount case back to Florida. Theodore Olson and a team of lawyers from that firm worked on the case for the Bush campaign. After he was elected, George W. Bush appointed Olson solicitor general. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)
NEIL BUSH.
George W. Bush’s younger brother, Neil profited from questionable Silverado Savings loans of $132 million, leaving the taxpayers to pick up the tab. Neil reportedly failed to some business connections, when he voted to approve a $900,000 line of credit to Good International, Inc. Good gave Neil a $100,000 loan to invest in the commodities market, which Bush was never required to repay.
Neil failed to inform Silverado that of a $150,000 contribution to JNB Exploration, and he never disclosed that Cherry Creek National Bank in Denver extended a $1.5 million line of credit to JNB Exploration. Neil contributed only $100 when he founded JNB Exploration, but over the following five years was paid $550,000 in salary drawn from the Cherry Creek National Bank line of credit.
While his brother was president, Neil Bush signed a $400,000-a-year contract with China’s Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation on August 15, 2002 to provide business advice. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush was helping American corporations compete more effectively against China. (Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2003)
According to the consulting contract, Neil Bush received $2 million worth of Grace Semiconductor preferred stock over five years, issued in annual increments of $400,000. He was also paid $10,000 for each meeting he attended. In return, Bush agreed to “provide GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest information and trends of the related industry, and other expertized advices.” (Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2003)