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 ÔIt
is becoming increasingly clear,' said a grave Ted Koppel, Ôthat 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 *****
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,
ÔIraqgate 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,
ÔWe 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
Ôproduced 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. ÔWe 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 ***** 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 ***** 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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Kind Regards,
Barbarossa