Jeb Bush’s name keeps floating up in discussions about candidates to run on the ticket with Mitt Romney, despite Bush’s efforts to douse the talk.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says Bush would most help Romney.

“He’d be an outstanding pick. It’s up to Gov. Romney but if I had to recommend a single person it would be Jeb,” Graham told The Hill. Graham urged his party to unify behind Romney last month after Rick Santorum exited the GOP presidential primary. Graham is a close friend of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.

Most of the focus has been on Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who are thought to be the leading contenders on Romney’s short list. But chatter is picking up on Capitol Hill that Bush could be a dark horse.

Senior political strategists think Bush could deliver Florida for Romney and help him among Hispanic and Catholic voters.

[snip] “I can’t conceive of Jeb Bush being the vice president of anything. I see him being a presidential candidate, not this go-round but in the future,” said Don Gaetz, the incoming president of the Florida Senate, who has been a friend of Bush’s for more than a decade. Gaetz said “having him on the ticket would be the best chance to carry Florida” but thinks Bush is more likely to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s playbook and tour the country.

“He might follow the path of Ronald Reagan and travel the country, make more contacts than he already has — and he has many — and articulate his message of economic and educational reform,” said Gaetz.

Gaetz noted that Bush is often asked to endorse candidates and as he has done so his collection of political IOUs has grown, which would be helpful to a future presidential run.

State Sen. John Thrasher, co-chairman of Romney’s campaign in Florida and another Bush ally, said he does not think Bush would accept an invitation to serve as running mate.

“I know him pretty well and I take him at his word. He says he’s not going to do it. I think he’s serious about not doing it,” said Thrasher, who spent time on the campaign trail with Romney Thursday.

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, Bush family

But as the troops move out, the oil companies are moving in. According to a July report from the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, oil production in Iraq is currently about 2.4 million barrels per day. The goal, by 2017 is to produce 12 million barrels per day. That’s quite a leap, especially since average production levels have held steady for more than two years. It’s going to a take a lot of investment to expand production by 10 million barrels per day.

How much? That’s anybody’s guess. For example, in January, ExxonMobil signed an agreement to redevelop and expand an oil field in southern Iraq. A company spokeswoman says that “total field capital expenditure will depend on full project scope,” which is currently being examined.

There’s a pile of oil money pouring into Iraq right now. Since last year, the Iraqi government has awarded 11 development deals to various consortia. BP and China National Petroleum Corp. are developing the enormous Rumaila field, which has a total proven reserves of about 18 billion barrels. Other companies winning awards include Royal Dutch Shell (working with ExxonMobil on one project and Malaysia’s Petronas on another), France’s Total SpA, Angola’s Sonangol, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China National Offshore Oil Corp. The signature bonuses to be paid by the consortia are anywhere from $100 million to $500 million.

More investment is on the way. Iraq’s oil ministry is planning to build four new refineries that will nearly double the country’s refining capacity. Oil services firms like Weatherford International and Schlumberger are expanding their operations in the country. Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed.

If development goes as planned, rebuilding Iraq’s oil sector could be a highly profitable investment for these companies over the long-term. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq has the third largest proven oil reserves in the world (after Saudia Arabia and Canada). In 2008, oil exports accounted for nearly 90% of the country’s revenues.

Labels: america R.I.P., Bush family, Dick Cheney, FUBAR, Greedy Republican Bastards, Iraq War

There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.

On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by “vibrancy.”

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “vibrant.” The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

But the Bush apologists hope that you won’t remember all that. And they also have a theory, which I’ve been hearing more and more — namely, that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that’s what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama’s fault. “The last year of the Bush administration,” said Mr. McConnell recently, “the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 — which wasn’t the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers — on Mr. Bush’s watch — was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 — with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing — federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.

Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole debate about the war is old if painful news — but not for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image. Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the “shameful” claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

Labels: Bush family, dynastic politics, Greedy Republican Bastards, incompetence

Here's what capitulation to the Republicans will get us: President Jeb Bush.

Don't kid yourself that this "National Council for a New America" is about rethinking, or even rebranding, the Republican Party. This is the greed wing, the Grover Norquist wing, of the Republican Party making a pre-emptive strike against Evita Mooselini, Bobby the Exorcist Jingles, and the rest of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade that hijacked John McCain last year and now threatens to hijack the rest of the party in the upcoming midterm elections and into 2012. And while Mitt Romney has a prominent role, the savior for the interests of the wealthy that is making the Greedmeisters get all tingly in the groin is Jeb Bush.

I've been saying since 1988 that the Bush family regards this entire country as a private fiefdom that's theirs to plunder as they wish for their family and friends. We've seen over the last eight years that it isn't just the country they see as their fiefdom, it's the entire world. Did anyone really think they would go away quietly? Greedy people don't take kindly to having land they think is theirs taken away from them, certainly not by black people they no doubt think ought to be their domestic servants.

And so they, with the help of the Greed Wing of the Republican Party, which has been seeking a candidate to represent their interests in 2012 to go up against the Christofascist Zombie Brigade's Chosen One, Sarah Palin, are already positioning the Bush Family Restoration to the Throne of the United States

When Jeb Bush left office four years ago, his public appearances were as scarce as bi-partisan man hugs.

He didn't want to upstage his successor in the governor's mansion nor his brother in the White House. Instead, he quietly cashed in by joining corporate boards and an elite speakers bureau, penned policy essays and gave infrequent interviews to conservative media.

But in recent months, as the Republican Party of Florida has grappled with a leadership vacuum, Bush's political profile has grown as fast as the national deficit.

He headlined a fundraiser for Bill McCollum's gubernatorial campaign, starred in a YouTube video touting Jeff Atwater's campaign for state chief financial officer and helped install state Sen. John Thrasher as the state party's heir apparent -- all the while looming on the sidelines of the fierce Republican Senate primary between Gov. Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio.

The capper came Thursday when, at the top of the 7 o'clock hour, right after Vice President Joe Biden, Bush made a rare network television appearance on NBC's Today Show. The intensely private Bush's interview with the overly familiar Matt Lauer rattled Florida political circles.

Was this the beginning of a Jeb juggernaut that would culminate in a 2012 presidential bid?

``My wife called me immediately and said he looked presidential,'' said Thrasher, who as the former House speaker helped Bush lay down his agenda. ``I said, `Who knows? We'll see.' I'm ready to go to Iowa any time he's ready.''

A government money market debacle unfolding in Florida is raising questions about former governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush's possible involvement in the mess.

Florida froze withdrawals from a state investment fund earlier this week when local governments withdrew billions of dollars out of concern for the fund's financial stability.

In the past few days, municipalities have withdrawn roughly $9 billion, nearly a third of the $28 billion fund (which is similar to a money market fund) controlled by the Florida's State Board of Administration (SBA). The run on the fund was triggered by worries that a percentage of the portfolio contained debt that had defaulted.

A majority of this paper was sold to SBA by Lehman Brothers. Bush, as the state's top elected official, served on a three-member board that oversaw the SBA until he retired as governor in January. In August, Bush was hired as a consultant to the bank. Lehman spokesperson Kerrie Cohen, speaking on behalf of Bush, said they had no comment and would not say when the bank had sold Florida the paper. SBA did not return calls.

Labels: Bush family, dynastic politics, Jeb Bush, the more things change the more they stay the same, Why even bother any more

The man who was arrested with two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition near the Capitol during President Barack Obama's health care speech in September had been an employee of the George W. Bush White House. The arrest of the man, Joshua Bowman, was widely reported at the time, but the news stories made no mention of his previous employment: For several years he worked in the Executive Office of the President, dealing with tech issues, including White House emails, his lawyer, George Braun, tells Mother Jones.

On the night of September 9, Bowman was on his way to meet Braun, a Bush administration political appointee, at the National Republican Club on First Street, SE when he was stopped by Capitol Police around 7:45 p.m.—minutes before Obama was scheduled to deliver a major address to Congress pushing his health care initiative. Bowman had driven up to a security checkpoint and told officers he wanted to park, but his lack of a permit for the area aroused their suspicions, and they asked to search his car.

The previous weekend, Bowman and Braun had gone duck-hunting, according to Braun. But Bowman forgot that he still had the guns in his car when he consented to a search of his vehicle, a Honda Civic with a bumper sticker proclaiming, "I'll keep my guns, freedom, and money.... you keep the change." The officers found a Beretta 12 gauge semi-automatic* shotgun, a .22 caliber long rifle, and over 400 rounds of ammunition in Bowman's trunk. The guns were unloaded and in their cases, according to court records. Braun says they were disassembled. The Capitol Police took Bowman into custody and charged him with two counts of possession of an unregistered firearm and one count of unlawful possession of ammunition. He faced up to $3,000 in fines and as much as three years in jail. (The case is still pending.)

When Braun—who was at the National Republican Club, hanging out with congressmen including Iowa's Tom Latham and Nebraska's Lee Terry—finally heard from Bowman, it was around 10 p.m. Bowman told Braun he needed Braun to get him out of jail, explaining that he had been stopped with guns in his car. "Don't you know that's illegal?" Braun asked. Both men were surprised when they heard the story on the radio as they left jail the next day. Braun thought the coverage was excessive. "They were making him sound like a terrorist," Braun said. "Does [Bowman] look like a terrorist? He has the élan to walk around with a bowtie."

Labels: Barack Obama, Bush family, tinfoil

Labels: Bush family, nightmare scenarios, Rachel Maddow

Labels: 2012 election, Bush family, icepick meet forehead

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the son of one president and the brother of another — has been working the phones since Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) announced earlier this month that he won’t seek reelection in 2010. Sources say Bush hasn’t made up his mind about running for Martinez’ seat, but that he’s getting green lights from would-be contributors and blessings from Republican Party leaders.

Strategists and political observers take it as a sign that Bush will run.

"Everything indicates that he's in," said David Johnson, a Republican strategist and the CEO of Strategic Vision. "You're not making calls and laying the ground work for fundraising unless you're clearing the field for your candidacy."

Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida and an expert on Florida politics, said Bush's phone calls around the state are "a good sign" that he could be jumping in the race, something that she says is "music to the ears of Florida Republicans."

"Nothing could have come at a better time," MacManus said. "Republicans here in Florida were so down after the election. The mere mention of Jeb's potential Senate run has put Republicans in a much more festive holiday mood."

Labels: 2012 election, Bush family, Jeb Bush, Republic Party

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tells Newsmax that the GOP must broaden its appeal to avoid becoming "the old white-guy party," and recommends that Republicans create a "shadow government" to engage Democrats on important issues as the incoming Obama administration seeks to enact its agenda.


In a wide-ranging interview with Newsmax, the popular former governor and younger brother of President George W. Bush said the 2008 election was neither "transformational" nor a landslide. For example, he noted that Barack Obama's significant fundraising advantage over John McCain played a key role in Democratic success this year.

Bush urged Republicans not to abandon their core conservative principles in favor of a "Democratic-lite" agenda. Still, the GOP does need to do some real soul-searching, he said.

"If you take the [last] two election cycles, there's real cause for concern, no question about it," he said.

There is good news for Republicans, Bush said: The United States remains "basically a center-right country." He cited President-elect Barack Obama's stance on taxes as an example.

...

The party should establish a loyal opposition and "organize ourselves in the form of a shadow government" that would address key issues, providing the public with "a loftier debate about policy" rather than mere partisanship.

Labels: Bush family, Jeb Bush, Marc Maron, tinfoil

AP— Bruce Ivins was so obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority that he believed it had a "fatwah" against him, once claimed to have broken into a sorority house to steal a secret handbook and claimed to know more about the organization than any other nonmember, according to government documents made public Wednesday.
***
The anthrax letters all were sent from a mailbox in front of 10 Nassau St., right across from Princeton University's campus and near the building at 20 Nassau St. where Kappa Kappa Gamma, which has no official affiliation with the university, had offices.

Labels: anthrax, Bush family, Judith Miller

United States policy is to warn companies that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law and to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The Kurdistan deal, by ceding responsibility for writing contracts directly to a regional government, infuriated Iraqi officials. But State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it, the documents show.

The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed.

In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.”

Labels: Bush family, corruption, evil, oil

Will America close the books on the Bush dynasty when George W. leaves office in January? Or is it still possible that his younger brother, Jeb, will rise from the ashes of the second Bush presidency -- perhaps even as part of the Bush clan's ongoing duel with the House of Clinton?

While one should never say never in politics, such a rematch in 2012 or 2016 is beginning to seem extremely unlikely. Even Jeb himself apparently regards prospects for a Bush resurrection as largely hopeless. To understand why, one needs to look more closely at the relationship between George and Barbara Bush's two eldest sons.

George Walker, 61, and John Ellis Bush (who turns 55 Monday) have long been their family's principal rivals, and by various accounts they are not close. In 2004, George W. told Brit Hume of Fox News that he and Jeb speak by phone only about once a month. The competition is not always obvious because of the way George and Jeb function as allies when the family enterprise's collective interests are at stake, as they did in the 2000 Florida recount. But as a factor in George's own drive to succeed, sibling rivalry has been second only to his relationship with his father. And in a way, it is the primary expression of it, because the ultimate stake in the rivalry was inheritance of their father's mantle.

George W. was always keenly aware, according to friends and family members, that Jeb was viewed the smarter of the two. Jeb, for his part, has always known that the cousins, aunts and uncles like Junior better. Jeb is relentlessly focused, introverted and serious. Though his political future was regarded as the most promising by the rest of the family, he has never had the glib banter or the gift for friendship of his older brother.

[snip]

Florida in the 1980s, like Texas in the 1960s, was a Democratic state poised to turn Republican, with a group of feverish conservatives -- the Cuban exiles -- leading the charge. Like his dad and unlike his impatient older brother, Jeb was happy to endure a dry policy discussion and a political slog. Rather than start with Congress, he ran in 1983 for Dade County Republican Party chairman, a position in which he served as a bridge between the new extremists and the national party establishment -- just as his father had for members of the John Birch Society in Harris County, Texas, in the early 1960s.

To ally himself with them, Jeb positioned himself well to the right. "I'm a hang-'em-by-the-neck conservative," he declared. When Bob Martinez was elected governor of Florida in 1986, Jeb moved to Tallahassee to become Florida's secretary of commerce.

By that point, the Bush parents had come to focus on Jeb as the family's next-generation political leader. After George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, they looked to Jeb as their best hope for vindication. Jeb's position as favorite son rankled his brother, and people I've spoken to who know the president well speculate that it was a factor in George's effort to pull his life together at age 40, when he found God and quit drinking.

In politics, George would often drop comments that suggested he measured himself principally in relation to Jeb. Asked once on the campaign trail what he was going to do for "the little guy," he responded: "I am the little guy. Jeb is 6-4. I am only 5-11."

When George first proposed running for governor of Texas in 1990, his parents strongly opposed the idea. When he returned to the idea in 1994, they reacted the same way. Barbara Bush, in particular, worried that George's campaign would drain money and attention away from Jeb's contest for the governorship in Florida, according to Doug Wead, an aide to the father who became close to George around that time. When George chose to run despite their objections, the parents expected, as did others in the family, that he would lose to Ann Richards and that Jeb would defeat Lawton Chiles. When George won and Jeb lost, their positions were reversed.

In the hotel suite in Houston where George was celebrating, his aunt, Nancy Ellis, heard him speaking to his father over the phone. "Why do you feel bad about Jeb?" he asked his dad, according to one biography of the family. "Why don't you feel good about me?" Such feelings notwithstanding, primogeniture -- inheritance by the firstborn son -- was now restored. By the time Jeb was elected Florida governor in 1998, his brother was already planning his own presidential campaign.

As the second Bush presidency grinds to its dismal conclusion, both Jeb and his parents seem to think that George's mistakes have destroyed the second son's chances of ever occupying the White House, family friends say. Jeb was merely recognizing reality when he opted not to run for president in 2008. While a campaign in 2012 or beyond is theoretically possible, Jeb says he has no interest and complains that no one will believe him.

Among those who don't want to take no for an answer is his brother the president, for whom, ironically, Jeb's election would provide a measure of historical vindication.

While Jeb seems resigned to abandoning politics, family friends have described his parents as devastated that the older son spiked the chances of the younger one.

[snip]

Jeb, the obedient son, the one who was supposed to be president, who even after George Junior's election was regarded as a potential third in the line, now faces a political impasse. His older brother dashed ahead and blew up the bridge behind him. At this point, not many people inside or outside the family think it can be rebuilt.

Labels: Bush family

President Bush, who visited troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving after the U.S. invasion in 2003, called several servicemen and women Thursday to extend best wishes and say it was “the least I can do.”

Three of those receiving holiday greetings are in the Army, two are Marines, three are in the Air Force, two serve in the Coast Guard and two in the Navy. The troops called are serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and aboard ship, said White House press secretary Dana Perino.

[snip]

The president asked for God’s blessings on the members of the military, Perino said. He said he was thankful to be commander in chief of the finest military ever assembled and told them, “calling you is the least I can do because I admire the military so much.”

The president was celebrating the holiday at Camp David with his wife, Laura, and their twin daughters, who have a birthday this weekend. Also present were daughter Jenna’s husband-to-be Henry Hager, some of the president’s brothers and sisters with their families, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Labels: Bush family, rant, Thanksgiving

The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president’s brother.

John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company, Ignite Learning of Austin, Tex. Mr. Higgins stated his plans in a letter to the group sent last week.

Members of the group and other critics in Texas contend that school districts are buying Ignite’s signature product, the Curriculum on Wheels, because of political considerations. The product, they said, does not meet standards for financing under the No Child Left Behind Act, which allocates federal money to help students raise their achievement levels, particularly in elementary school reading.

Ignite, founded by Neil Bush in 1999, includes as investors his parents, former President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. Company officials say that about 100 school districts use the Curriculum on Wheels, known as the Cow, which is a portable classroom with software to teach middle-school social studies, science and math. The units cost about $3,800 each and require about $1,000 a year in maintenance.

Labels: Bush family, Cronyism, greed, Neil Bush

Turns out Joseph Schmitz, COO & general counsel of the Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company, is married to one Lucila Garnica Gallo, Colomba Bush's sister (Jeb Bush's wife).

Labels: Blackwater, Bush family, corruption

Newly released documents reveal the FBI suspected that a plane hired to transport members of the bin Laden family from the United States back to Saudi Arabia might have been chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. The documents raise new questions about the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Truthout reviewed the 224 pages of newly released documents over the past two days.

A heavily redacted FBI report on the incident begins by describing a private jet that was hired to pick up members of the bin Laden family that were in the US eight days after the 9/11 attacks. "The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden," according to the declassified pages of the FBI investigation titled PENTTBOMB (page 3).

Subsequent references to the chartered flight in the released documents state that it was "chartered by the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC" (page 106). The possibility that the flight was arranged or paid for by Osama bin Laden was not addressed again in the subsequent 221 pages released by the FBI.

The FBI report was prepared in response to an October 2003 Vanity Fair magazine article by Craig Unger which raised questions about the FBI procedures after 9/11 that allowed six planes of Middle Eastern nationals to fly out of the United States. Most of the people on these planes were members of the Saudi Royal family, the wealthy rulers of Saudi Arabia, who have high-level contacts with the Bush administration. One plane, Ryan International Flight 441, made four stops around the country on September 19, 2001 to pick up members of the bin Laden family. According to the FBI, these individuals were half-siblings or the children of half-siblings of Osama bin Laden with no connections to the international terrorist. Critics accuse the FBI and possibly the White House of being complicit in allowing individuals with direct connections to Osama bin Laden to flee the country after the attacks. The FBI maintains that their interviews, conducted primarily at airports right before the nationals were to board planes, were sufficient and did not garner any actionable intelligence or warrant the detention of any of the nationals.

A set of documents compiled by the FBI in 2003 sheds some light on the procedures the FBI followed prior to allowing the bin Laden family members and other Saudi nationals to leave the country in the weeks following 9/11. The documents also raise new questions.

An internal FBI email described the effort to collect and compile all of the information about the Saudi nationals. "The point of this mess is a sort of damage assessment of those people leaving the US" (page 136).

The documents were obtained by the conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents had previously been released but all mention of Osama bin Laden and the bin Laden family were blacked-out by the FBI. After a protracted legal fight, these FBI redactions and their accompanying explanations were ruled unacceptable by a Washington, DC District Court judge, who ordered the FBI to reassess the redactions and re-release the report.

Judicial Watch made the re-released report public on Wednesday, with many of the blacked-out sections restored. All mention of Osama bin Laden or the bin Laden family were made readable, revealing the sentence stating that Osama bin Laden may have chartered the flight that collected members of the bin Laden family in the days following the attacks.

Labels: 9/11, Bush family, domestic terrorism

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush family

Loyalty has always been the alpha and omega of George W. Bush's presidency. But all the forms of allegiance that have bound together his administration -- political, ideological and personal -- are being shredded, leaving only blind loyalty. Bush has surrounded himself with loyalists, who fervently pledged their fealty, enforced the loyalty of others and sought to make loyal converts. Now Bush's long downfall is descending into a series of revenge tragedies in which the characters are helpless against the furies of their misplaced loyalties and betrayals. The stage is being strewn with hacked corpses -- on Monday, former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty; imminently, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz; tomorrow, whoever remains trapped on the ghost ship of state. As the individual tragedies unfold, Bush's royal robes unravel.

Loyalty to Bush is the ultimate royal principle of the imperial presidency. The ruler must be unquestioned and those around him unquestioning. Allegiance to Bush's idea of himself as the "war president," "the decider" and "the commander guy" is paramount. But the notion that the ruler is loyal to those loyal to him is no longer necessarily true. While he must be beheld as the absolute incarnation of kingly virtue, his sense of obligation to those paying homage has become perilously relative.

Those who feel compelled to tell the truth rather than stick to the cover story are cast in the dust, like McNulty. Those Bush defends as an extension of his authority but who become too expensive become expendable, like Wolfowitz. And those who exist solely as Bush's creations and whose survival is crucial to his own are shielded, like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Labels: Bush family

When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, it copied the specifications — typos and all — from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract, a review of documents by The Associated Press found.

The pumps, supplied by Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla., and installed at canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season, proved to be defective, as the AP reported in March. The matter is under investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In a letter dated April 13, Sen. David Vitter (news, bio, voting record), R-La., called on the Corps to look into how the politically connected company got the post-Hurricane Katrina contract. MWI employed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother, to market its pumps during the 1980s, and top MWI officials have been major contributors to the Republican Party.

While it may not be a violation of federal regulations to adopt a company's technical specifications, it is frowned on, especially for large jobs like the MWI contract, because it could give the impression the job was rigged for the benefit of a certain company, contractors familiar with Corps practices say.

The Corps' January 2006 call for bids for 34 pumps used the wording on how the pumps should be built and tested, with minor changes, found in MWI catalogs.

The specifications were so similar that an erroneous phrase in MWI catalogs — "the discharge tube and head assembly shall be abrasive resistance steel" — also appears in the Corps specifications. The phrase should say "abrasion resistant steel." An incorrect reference to the type of steel that would be required apparently was also lifted.

Eugene Pawlik, a Corps spokesman in Washington, said the agency is working on a response to Vitter's letter.

MWI declined to discuss how it won the contract. GAO would not talk about its probe.

Richard White, a federal contracting expert, said it is "not unheard of for a spec to be copied, in particular in cases of emergency purchases."

"It's not a good practice, but it's not anything egregious, especially if the Corps allowed other companies to negotiate to change it," White said.

After Katrina swamped about 80 percent of the city, Congress appropriated $5.7 billion to rebuild New Orleans' flood protection systems. Vitter and Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), D-La., have excoriated the Corps over its workmanship since Katrina.

In his letter to the commander of the Corps, Vitter said the bid solicitation for the pumps "includes specifications identical to those written and marketed by Moving Water Industries." In addition, "the testing specifications are also identical to the testing specifications developed and authored by MWI."

A May 2006 memo by a Corps inspector working on the project, provided to the AP earlier this year, warned that the pumps were faulty and would not work if needed to remove water during a hurricane. GAO opened its investigation after the memo surfaced.

The Corps and MWI insist the pumps would have worked, but last year's mild hurricane season never put them to the test. The pumps have been overhauled and are being reinstalled.

The Corps withheld about 20 percent of MWI's contract price — including an incentive of about $5 million to deliver them by June 1, 2006 — until the flaws have been resolved. But the Corps also spent $4.5 million for six additional MWI pumps for use in troubleshooting the defective ones.

The Corps contract officer overseeing the January 2006 bid, Cindy Nicholas, was told about the copied specifications during a conference call with FPI Inc., a Florida company that also bid on the project, shortly after MWI was awarded the contract. A recording of the briefing was provided to the AP by FPI.

"Are you folks aware that the specifications that you folks put out was a copy of the specifications in the MWI catalog?" asked Bob Purcell, who was an FPI salesman at the time the bids were taken.

"No, I'm not aware of that," Nicholas replied.

Corps official Dan Bradley said during the briefing that consulting engineers had a hand in drawing up the specifications.

Purcell then complained: "We were forced to meet someone else's specifications in entirety." He said the consultants did not cooperate with FPI, and he charged that MWI was given "a head's up" about the job. That, he said, was evident by MWI's order for pump engines before the contract was even put out to bid.

Labels: Bush family, corruption, greed

BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-president Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.

BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.

The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the two billion dollars that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujahadeen. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.

The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance that he would put to use when he organised the jihad against the United States. He would move money through the Al-Taqwa Bank, operating in offshore Nassau and Switzerland with two Osama siblings as shareholders.

At the same time, BCCI helped Saddam Hussein, funneling millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), Baghdad's U.S. banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make four billion dollars in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.

U.S. Congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.

Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.

Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.

Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 to 30 percent of the stock for nearly one billion dollars. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.

The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."

The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.

When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically-connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure 25 million dollars in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

Then, in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's half-brother, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time -- organising al Qaeda.

The money BCCI stole before it was shut down in 1991 -- somewhere between 9.5 billion and 15 billion dollars -- made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. International banks' complicity in the offshore secrecy system effectively covered up the money trail.

But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash. In 1992, he established the Muwafaq ("blessed relief") Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands. The U.S. Treasury Department called it "an al Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen."

When the BCCI scandal began to break in the late 1980s, the Sr. Bush administration did what it could to sit on it. The Justice Department went after the culprits -- was virtually forced to -- only after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did. But evidence about BCCI's broader links exist in numerous U.S. and international investigations. Now could be a good time to take another look at the BCCI-Osama-Saddam-Saudi-Bush connection.

Labels: Bush family, corruption