Part Three: Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

What I find most interesting is the intersection of these groups and the Crescent Investment Management group... perhaps these are the folks that set the Put Options for 9/11... NeoCons, Kroll, SDI- Israeli Tech liason James Abrahamson, Cheney, Bush, Jews...Pakistani Anthrax-WMD expert Mansoor Ijaz, more Israeli-Dual Loyalist Traitor Jews.. SAIC, which has made a ton of cash off of the WOT...  -- CSR

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Part Three: Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence

By Kevin Ryan~9/11 Blogger

Careful investigation leads one to notice that a number of intriguing groups of people and organizations converged on the events of September 11th, 2001. An example is the group of men who were members of Cornell University's Quill & Dagger society. This included Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisors Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, Marsh & McLennan executive Stephen Friedman, and the founder of Kroll Associates, Jules Kroll. Another interconnected group of organizations is linked to these Cornell comrades, and is even more interesting in terms of its members being integral to the events of 9/11, and having benefited from those events.

After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (WTC), a company called Stratesec (or Securacom) was responsible for the overall integration of the new security system designed by Kroll Associates. Stratesec had a small board of directors that included retired Air Force General James Abrahamson, Marvin Bush (the brother of George W. Bush) and Wirt Walker III, a cousin of the Bush brothers. Other directors included Charles Archer, former Assistant Director in charge of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and Yousef Saud Al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.[1]

Yousef Saud Al Sabah was also chairman of the Kuwait-American Corporation (KuwAm), which between 1993 and 1999 held a controlling share of Stratesec. The other owners of Stratesec were Walker and an entity controlled by Walker and Al Sabah, called Special Situation Investment Holdings (SSIH).[2] SSIH was said to form a group with KuwAm, and the group owned several other companies, including Commander Aircraft and Aviation General. In any case, the Kuwaiti royal family can be said to have benefited from 9/11 due to "The War on Terror" that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, that was the second consecutive US war that Kuwait benefited from, the first being the 1991 Gulf War led by President George H.W. Bush.

Stratesec director James Abrahamson was President of Hughes Aircraft from 1989 to 1992, when Prescott Bush Jr. was helping Hughes lobby Bush's brother, the US President, to lift sanctions on the Chinese government. Abrahamson became a director of Stratesec in December 1997.[3] He also co-founded a company called Crescent Investment Management (Crescent) with the Pakistani-American, Mansoor Ijaz. Crescent's board of advisors included James Woolsey, the CIA Director for President Clinton who became a PNAC signatory and Booz Allen Hamilton executive.[4]

Mansoor Ijaz is the CEO of Crescent, and is a rare individual in that he claimed to have the ability to persuade several governments to extradite Osama bin Laden. After meetings with Clinton and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (who first introduced Woolsey to Clinton), Ijaz said that he could not convince them to work toward the extradition.[5] Additionally, Ijaz introduced the journalist Daniel Pearl, by way of a personal letter, to those in Pakistan who are believed to have been involved in his death.[6] Ijaz went on to become a Fox News correspondent, and he was a strong promoter of false claims leading up to the Iraq War, including WMDs and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.[7]

Stratesec had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off on 9/11. Another client was Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where scientists were working on the development of nanothermite, a type of explosive material that has since been discovered in the WTC dust.[8,9]

The Carlyle Group

In 1998, Barry McDaniel came to Stratesec to become its Chief Operating Officer. McDaniel was therefore in charge of the security operation at the WTC in terms of what he called a "completion contract," to provide services "up to the day the buildings fell down."[10] McDaniel had previously worked for the United States Army Materiel Command (AMC), located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business "in an area the Navy called Black Projects," or budgets that were kept secret.[11]

BDM has had an interesting history. In 1990 it was a subsidiary of Loral Corporation, a company owned by Bernard Schwartz that was related to WTC security company Ensec, and Ensec director Terry McAuliffe.[12] Loral sold BDM to The Carlyle Group in 1992, at which time Frank Carlucci became chairman of BDM. Carlucci was a covert operative in his early career, and got his start in national politics through his old college roommate, Donald Rumsfeld, becoming Rumsfeld's assistant at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969. Carlucci went on to be named Deputy Director of the CIA and Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense.

During his first few years at Carlyle, Carlucci asked his friend Norman Augustine, later CEO of Lockheed Martin, if Carlyle could be included in a deal to buy the defense contractor LTV Corp.[13] That deal did not happen, but LTV was among the companies whose stocks were flagged for insider trading related to 9/11.[14,15] The FBI also briefly considered investigating Stratesec for insider trading related to 9/11, due to an SEC referral of suspicious accounts. But since the people involved were considered to not have any "ties to terrorism or other negative information," an investigation into Stratesec was not pursued.[16] Putnam Investments, a subsidiary of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, was one of Stratesec's investors.

During the time that Stratesec executive McDaniel worked for them, the Caryle Group began to add some very powerful people to their leadership group. One such figure was James Baker, who went to Princeton with Rumsfeld and Carlucci, and who was White House Chief of Staff, and Secretary of the Treasury, for Reagan. Baker was also George H.W. Bush's campaign manager and Secretary of State, and Bush's White House Chief of Staff again in his last government position. Baker became a partner at Carlyle just two weeks after the February 1993 bombing of the WTC.

Earlier in his career, Baker had worked in President Ford's department of Commerce, along with WTC impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys. And Baker was a longtime, close friend of Raymond Hill, an elite Texan who owned the mafia and CIA-connected Mainland Savings. American taxpayers shelled out approximately $500 million when Mainland failed in 1986. Investigators have since discovered that Mainland, like a number of other savings and loans that failed in the late 1980s, was a vehicle for CIA and mafia activities.[17]

Baker is also remembered as the one person most responsible for changing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, in favor of George W. Bush. As Congressman John Conyers wrote: "Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to shut down the counting of votes in the 2000 Florida election."[18]

On September 11, 2001, Baker was at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington DC, for the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group. Also present with Baker was Carlucci, "representatives of the bin Laden family," and George H. W. Bush.[19] Carlyle had been doing business with the bin Laden family since the early 1990s.

Baker's grandfather started the law firm Baker Botts, which had offices in Saudi Arabia and which, after 9/11, represented the Saudi Arabian government in a lawsuit filed by families of those killed and injured in the attacks. The Saudi connection is interesting considering that Carlyle owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts in the Middle East since 1975, training the Saudi Arabian National Guard and also training Turkish security forces.

Vinnell was considered "by some experts to be a CIA front."[20] Of course Frank Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, who was Baker's boss for many years, was in the CIA for a majority of his career.[21] Perhaps as a result, in 1995 Vinnell was reported to be one of the first targets of al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.

BDM, Vinnell's parent company, was sold to TRW in 1997. Directors at BDM at the time included Carlyle Group executives and a former assistant to Henry Kissinger, Philip Odeen, who went on to become the CEO of TRW. Directors at TRW at the same time included Robert M. Gates, former Director of Central Intelligence and current Secretary of Defense. Arden Bement, who was appointed by George W. Bush to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) one month after the 9/11 attacks, had left his position as TRW Vice President in 1992, moving to Purdue University in the interim.

In 1998, at the time that Barry McDaniel moved to Stratesec, TRW merged with Lockheed Martin, the company that sub-contracted the WTC security job to Ensec.[22] Stratesec and Ensec, along with E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, worked to build the security system that was in place at the WTC when the buildings were destroyed. All four of these companies had done significant work in Saudi Arabia before working at the WTC.[23]

Marvin Bush was a director of Stratesec from 1993 to 2000. It was during that time that Kroll and Stratesec planned and executed the extensive rebuilding of the security systems at the WTC complex. As his stint with Stratesec ended, Marvin Bush became a principal in the company HCC Insurance, one of the insurance carriers for the World Trade Center.

SAIC

Marvin Bush was the cofounder of Winston Partners in 1993, a company that benefited greatly from the War on Terror. In 2000, Winston Partners invested heavily in a defense contractor called AMSEC that was 55% owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). It has been noted that SAIC was not only a major contributor to the NIST WTC report, it was also a company that had expertise in nanothermites, explosive materials which were found in the WTC dust as mentioned earlier.[24]

Founded by a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, SAIC had a long history at the WTC, having evaluated the basement levels of the buildings as a potential terrorist target in 1986.[25] Interestingly, the company was hired to investigate the 1993 bombing of the WTC, an event that was "remarkably like the one which" they had foreseen in 1986.[26] In fact, SAIC later boasted that — "After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, our blast analyses produced tangible results that helped identify those responsible."[27]

After 9/11, SAIC supplied the largest contingent of non-governmental investigators to the WTC investigation conducted NIST. At the same time, "SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them."[28]

SAIC was also a pioneer in the intelligence contracting business, as a founding member of the Security Affairs Support Association in 1979, along with companies like TRW, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft. A special taskforce of the Defense Science Board, which was led in 1993 by BDM's Philip Odeen, recommended a vast increase in the outsourcing of intelligence, which all these companies ended up benefiting from greatly.

Today a majority of government intelligence work is outsourced, and SAIC is known first and foremost as an intelligence contractor. SAIC sells expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about "information dominance" and "information warfare," and has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. In fact, the company was paid huge sums to rebuild the NSA and FBI systems that supposedly failed before 9/11.[29]

SAIC is integral to the operations of all the major intelligence collection agencies, particularly the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA. In fact, the CIA relies on SAIC to spy in its own workforce.[30] But SAIC has also played an integral role in the "War on Terror", and was even responsible for capturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was SAIC staff and technology that "tease[ed] out crucial clues about Mohammed's activities from intercepted text messages that he sent to his al Qaeda operatives using as many as 20 different cell phones."[31]

In an interesting coincidence, while the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corp was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard, SAIC was training the Saudi Navy and bringing Saudi military personnel to company headquarters in San Diego for further study. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.[32] Vinnell now works with SAIC to train the Iraqi military.[33]

SAIC employees or board members have included Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Deputy Director of CIA Bobby Ray Inman, former NYC OEM director Jerome Hauer, anthrax attack suspect Stephen Hatfill, former CIA Director John Deutch, and Lawrence B. Prior, a military intelligence officer and former TRW executive. Also formerly with SAIC, during the time of the planning and implementation of the 9/11 attacks, was Dick Cheney's undersecretary of defense, Duane Andrews.

Duane Andrews considered Dick Cheney to be his personal, lifelong hero.[34] While he worked for Cheney, Andrews supervised Stephen Cambone, who went on to become Donald Rumsfeld's "special assistant." When Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993, he became chief operating officer for SAIC, where he supervised "much of the company's work on secret projects with defense and national security agencies."[35] Andrews and Cambone both later hired on to the British intelligence firm Qinetiq, along with George Tenet. Coincidentally, The Carlyle Group was a major shareholder in Qinetiq as of February 2003.

Halliburton and BCCI

When we examine who had the greatest motive for the attacks of 9/11, we need to look at who most benefited from those events. Certainly SAIC and other companies like Maurice Greenberg's American International Group (AIG) are among those who profited the most after 9/11. But The Carlyle Group and oil companies like Halliburton led the field in terms of profiting from 9/11.

Dick Cheney was hired as CEO of Halliburton in 1995, despite having no practical business leadership experience. He quickly went on to add new directors that shared his political convictions, including Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State under the first President George Bush. Eagleburger also served as a director of Kissinger Associates, and on the board of Dresser Industries, where George H.W. Bush got his start. Others Cheney added to his team included Ray Hunt, of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, a longtime supporter of the Bush clan.

Cheney named Charles DiBona as one of his first appointees to the board of Halliburton. DiBona had been the Deputy Director of the White House Policy Office and Special Assistant to President Nixon in the early 1970s. DiBona was also an associate of WTC south tower impact zone tenant Joseph Kasputys, at the Logistics Management Institute, and DiBona and Kasputys had previously worked together during the Arab Oil Embargo as representatives of the emerging US Department of Energy (DOE). In fact, DiBona was one of the first US "Energy Czars."

Like DiBona, Joseph Kasputys was in the US Navy for 20 years, and both of them retired as Commanders. They then both worked for the predecessor agencies of the DOE, and Kasputys worked for the Department of Defense as well. In 1975, Kasputys was appointed by President Ford to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. As stated in the review of tenants in the towers, Kasptuys went on to run a large corporation called Primark that had offices in both towers on 9/11. One of the subsidiaries of Primark, The Analytical Sciences Corporation (TASC), worked with "so-called 'black' or top secret programs." TASC also worked closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.[36]

After his government service, DiBona went on to lead the American Petroleum Institute, the petroleum industry's national trade association, in a position he held for nineteen years. During that time, DiBona was also a director of First American Bancshares, the American bank secretly owned by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network, from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported, relative to BCCI, that — "You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services."[37]

BCCI was also clearly connected to the mafia. Munther Bilbeisi, a notorious BCCI representative who was finally indicted for tax fraud in 1991, was associated with several mafia families in New Jersey, including the DeCavalcante and Luchese crime families.[38]

More importantly, there were indications that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[39] There were also connections between George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director during BCCI's heyday, and George W. Bush, through Harken Energy. But other US government representatives helped BCCI too, simply by not doing anything or allowing BCCI to make acquisitions in the US when they should have closed the operation down. For example, at the time that BCCI was first publicly suspected of wrongdoing, in 1988, both the US Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) were hesitant to investigate or prosecute, despite the fact that there were signs that both of these organizations already knew of BCCI's fraud. When the Fed finally did take its first disciplinary action, it appeared that BCCI had a friend at the top, in that one member abstained from a critical vote. That member was the chairman, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan later explained that he had socialized with BCCI attorney and First American Bancshares President, Robert Altman.[40]

Kissinger and his associates

Henry Kissinger and his associates were also connected to BCCI in several ways, although he refused to share documents with the related Senate investigation. For example, Sergio Correa da Costa, who served as Brazil's Ambassador to the US in the mid-1980s (note that Ensec was a Brazilian company), worked for Kissinger's consulting company, Kissinger Associates, and was also a nominee shareholder for BCCI. And as early as 1971, Kissinger was linked to BCCI through the Pakistanis that arranged for his first visit to China.[41] At the time, Pakistrani agents who later became BCCI representatives were involved in fooling journalists into thinking Kissinger was in Pakistan instead of China. Kissinger returned to China many times and on occasion took very close friends and business associates along with him, most notably Maurice Greenberg of AIG, who traveled extensively with Kissinger.[42]

From 1985 to 1990, a client of Kissinger Associates, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) provided $4 billion in unreported loans to Saddam Hussein and his government in Iraq. Henry Kissinger was on the International Advisory Board of BNL during that same time period. Kissinger and his leading assistants Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were investigated in this matter by the House Banking Committee just as the first Gulf War was ending.[43]

But the numerous connections between assistants and associates of Kissinger, and the most significant events of 9/11, are astounding. To begin with, Kissinger, who is considered by some to be an international terrorist due to his bombing of Cambodia, his role in the 1973 coup in Chile, and other atrocities, was the Bush Administration's first choice to lead the 9/11 Commission. Although he later resigned from the Commission to avoid exposing his client list, Kissinger's closest friends and aides played significant roles with regard to 9/11.
# L. Paul Bremer, the managing director at Kissinger Associates from 1989 to 2000, left there to take a job with WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, and then played a leading role in establishing the official myth of 9/11.
# Peter Rodman, PNAC member and Assistant Secretary of Defense on 9/11, hosted meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed the week before 9/11, and had previously been a Special Assistant to Kissinger for eight years.[44]
# Joseph Kasputys, south tower impact zone tenant, worked with Kissinger in the Ford Administration (along with Cheney, Greenspan, DiBona, and Rumsfeld).[45]
# Kissinger is also closely associated with several 9/11 Commissioners, including his long-time National Security Council assistant John Lehman, and his fellow Hollinger board member James R. Thompson.
# And Phillip Odeen of BDM, who was Barry McDaniel's boss until McDaniel left to lead WTC security company Stratesec, was a Kissinger assistant for several years.

There was also Renato Ruggiero of Kissinger Associates. Mr. Ruggiero was present on 9/11 in the sense that he was on the International Advisory Board for Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten of the 47 floors in WTC building 7.[46] SSB even shared the all-important 23rd floor with the New York City OEM. More striking is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld was the chairman of that SSB board, and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld served as chairman of the SSB International Advisory Board since its inception in 1999, but had to resign in 2001 when he was confirmed as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, and Cheney resigned at the same time when he became Vice President.

Another interesting coincidence is that Global Crossing was brought public in 1998 by SSB. Global Crossing was the company that Ensec director McAuliffe made a fortune on, when he purchased $100,000 in stock before the company went public and cashed out several years later for $18 million. Richard Perle was a lobbyist for Global Crossing.

On 9/11/01, Salomon Smith Barney's parent company was Citigroup. Citicorp was the nation's largest bank in 1990, but dropped half of its value from the summer to the winter of that year due to the S&L scandal. The company was saved by Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, who pumped an initial $590 MM into the company in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. It is believed that the money, and more, came from BCCI as it was dissolving.[47]

Therefore, when Salomon Smith Barney was taken over by Citigroup in 1998, it was taken over in part by Saudi owners who were apparently redistributing the funding and networks of BCCI. Rumsfeld and Cheney entered the picture less than a year later, in May 1999. Jules Kroll, the founder of the WTC security design firm, and Rudy Giuliani, who was a former Department of Justice official, were responsible for investigating organized crime and BCCI, and were well aware of the extent of those networks ten years prior to that. Others like them, who brought the late indictments against BCCI, were leaders of the US Department of Justice.

Stratesec was at the WTC, and therefore, through Barry McDaniel and the Bush family, the influence of The Carlyle Group was present as well. In a sense, Rumsfeld and Cheney were also present at the WTC, because both of them were on the advisory board of Salomon Smith Barney. And SAIC was at the WTC on 9/11 too, as it was one of the first companies to show up at Ground Zero on that day. That fact will be discussed in the third installment of the essay series entitled Demolition Access to the WTC.

As for Kissinger, within hours of the events of 9/11 he was writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post. In it, he claimed to have thorough knowledge of what would be required to pull off such a coordinated set of attacks. Kissinger went on to inform the American public of what must happen next: "the destruction of the system that is responsible."[48] No one can argue with that sentiment. But to this day, no one can accurately describe the terrorist system that was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, let alone destroy it.

What we can say today, with certainty, is that if we are to believe that al Qaeda orchestrated the events of 9/11 then we do not know much about al Qaeda. Alternatively, there was a far more powerful and highly connected system of intelligence and financial networks, represented by organizations like Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton, that converged upon the events of 9/11. That other system continues to profit from the 9/11 attacks, and uses the fear and rage generated by al Qaeda-attributed terrorism to its own advantage. Understanding and destroying terrorism might simply be a matter of understanding and destroying the organizations that continue to profit from 9/11.

Endnotes
1. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
2. Securities and Exchange Commission document, Kuwam Corp · SC 13G · Stratesec Inc · On 2/19/98 http://www.secinfo.com/dS7kv.7v.htm
3. Stratesec Incorporated, Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders, December 23, 2002
4. Sourcewatch webpage for Crescent Investments, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _Ventures_...
5. Sourcewatch webpage for Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... Ijaz/Sudan
6. Chaim Kupferberg, There's Something About Omar: Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11, Centre for Research on Globalization, October 21, 2003, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/KUP310A.pdf
7. Mansoor Ijaz, Hand in Glove: Iraq and al Qaeda, National Review Online, February 18, 2003, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mz ... 2UwMjBmNWQ...
8. Danen, W.C., Jorgensen, B.S., Busse, J.R., Ferris, M.J. and Smith, B.L. "Los Alamos Nanoenergetic Metastable Intermolecular Composite (Super Thermite) Program," 221st ACS National Meeting, San Diego, CA, 1-5 April 2001.
9. Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol 2, 2009, doi: 10.2174/1874412500902010007, http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/conte ... 002/000000...
10. History Commons page for Stratesec, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... =stratesec
11. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group, Wiley publishers, 2003, p35
12. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security, Scoop Independent News, August 13, 2009, found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?sto ... 3150853871
13. Dan Briody, The Iron Traingle
14. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, "FBI Briefing on Trading", Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
15. Jim Hoffman, Insider Trading: Pre-9/11 Put Options on Companies Hurt by Attack Indicates Foreknowledge, 911Research.wtc7.net, http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/stockputs.html
16. FBI Memorandum released by 9/11 Commission, "FBI Briefing on Trading", Prepared by: Doug Greenburg, 8/18/03, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
17. Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush: Corruption, Greed and abuse of power in the nation's highest office, S.P.I. Books, 1992
18. Letter from John Conyer to former President Jimmy Carter, April 11, 2005, http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/ltrtopotuscarter.pdf
19. Sourcewatch page for James A. Baker III, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _Baker_III
20 Ian Cobain, Firm was 'cover for CIA', Times Online, May 14, 2003 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 132056.ece
21. George H.W. Bush's exploits in the CIA, and his many connections to the most troubling events of American history, are described in Russ Baker's book Family of Secrets, Bloomsbury Press
22. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition access to the World Trade Center towers: Part one – Tenants, 7-09-09, Distributed via the Unanswered Questions Wire and found at 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?sto ... 3033854249
23. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security
24. Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nanothermites, Journal of 9/11 Studies, July 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volu ... Nano-1.pdf
25. History Commons, Context of '(Mid-1986): Report Rates Vulnerability of Public Areas of WTC to Terrorist Attack as 'Very High'', http://www.historycommons.org/context.j ... saicreport
26. New York State Law Reporting Bureau, In The Matter of World Trade Center Bombing Litigation, 2004 NY Slip Op 24030 [3 Misc 3d 440], January 20, 2004, http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/ ... _24030.htm
27. Science Applications International Corporation, Annual Report 2004 http://www.saic.com/news/pdf/Annual-Report2004.pdf
28. Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17 ; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."
29. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Washington's $8 Billion Shadow, Vanity Fair, March 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... ency200703
30. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
31. Paul Kaihla, US: In The Company Of Spies, CorpWatch, May 1st, 2003, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7892
32. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire, Simon and Schuster, 2008
33. The Center for Public Integrity, Winning Contractors: U.S. Contractors Reap the Windfalls of Post-war Reconstruction, October 30, 2003, http://projects.publicintegrity.org/wow ... spx?aid=65
34. Laura Rozen, The First Contract, The American Prospect, March 30, 2007, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12612
35. Bruce V. Bigelow, No. 2 executive at SAIC resigns after 13 years, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 2, 2006, http://ww.uniontrib.com/uniontrib/20060 ... 2saic.html
36. The Funding Universe web page for Analytic Sciences Corporation, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company- ... nces-Corpo...
37 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Scandals: Not Just a Bank, September 2, 1991, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -4,00.html
38. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992, pp 181, 286, 359, 365, 432
39. Ibid
40. Ibid
41. Ibid, p 141
42. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p 739
43. Kissinger Associates, BNL and Iraq, Pinknoiz, http://www.pinknoiz.com/covert/iraqgate04.html
44. Kevin R. Ryan, Mahmud Ahmed's itinerary from his Washington DC visit the week of 9/11, 911blogger.com, 11/27/2009, http://www.911blogger.com/node/21978
45. See the following daily diary of President Ford for typical meetings that all these people shared, http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/librar ... 750718.pdf
46. List of tenants in Seven World Trade Center, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_te ... ade_Center
47. Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle
48. Henry Kissinger, Destroy the Network, The Washington Post, September 12, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy ... =&contentI...

http://www.puppetgov.com/2010/02/14/par ... nvergence/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Older but related:

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Southern Strategy, Inc.: Where Wall Street Meets Tobacco Road

by John Hoefle

This article first appeared in EIR on Jan. 1, 2001, as part of a feature entitled, ``Southern Strategy: Assault on the American Republic.''

The political success of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter's ``Southern Strategy,'' transforming the White House and Congress into bastions of white Southern power, would have been impossible, without the economic transformation of the United States from the greatest industrial and scientific nation-state in history, to a post-industrial nation of white-collar accountants, real estate brokers, computer programmers, retail clerks, and hamburger-flippers. This transformation of America, over the past 30-plus years, has been characterized by the collapse of the urban industrial and cultural centers of the North--New York, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, etc.--and the gradual emergence of the ``New South'' as the heartland of America's post-industrial economy.

Today, Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and even Charlotte, North Carolina dominate the ``new economy'' and house the multinational corporate and banking headquarters that preside over the deregulated looting of every last remaining income stream.

This Houston-Atlanta-Charlotte nexus can be dubbed ``Southern Strategy, Inc.'' Of course, it was Wall Street--most prominently the financial interests associated with Harriman, Morgan, and Rockefeller--which set this shift in motion. But the deregulated monster represented by such corporate creatures as Enron Corp. in the energy field, the Rainwater interests buying up hospitals, or Corrections Corporation of America in private prison operations, signals a process of financial speculation and physical-economic chaos, which Wall Street can no longer control. With President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney moving from Texas to Washington, the power of this Southern-based corporate looting apparatus is almost certain to grow at an even more accelerated rate.

We take up one significant slice of that corporate octopus, the Texas-centered network of oil industry giants that have been tied to the political fortunes of the Bush clan for much of the last century.

Behind the Bushes
The role of the Bushes in pushing deregulation, like their role in grabbing control of physical assets, is in the service of something much older and nastier.

Sitting at the center of this web, and typifying the level of corruption, are two Texas-based energy industry giants, each with ties into the nastiest of the Wall Street and European financial oligarchies: Schlumberger and Enron.

By far the older and filthier of the two is Schlumberger, the intelligence apparatus masquerading as an oil services company. Schlumberger is one of the two biggest oilfield services companies in the world, Halliburton [fn1] being the other. While Schlumberger, the company, was formed in Paris in the early 1900s, the intelligence network which operates through it is much older, a part of the banking empire of the interlocked de Neuflize, Schlumberger, and Mallet-Prevost families, which have been running operations against the United States since the American Revolution. [fn2]

In Houston, the Schlumberger/Lazard [fn3] nexus is closely allied with a nest of British assets centered around the Harriman interests and operating through a group of powerful law firms. E.H. Harriman was a 19th-Century railroad robber baron whose companies were fronts for the British royal family and their fellow aristocrats. Harriman's agents in Houston included Baker & Botts, [fn4] the law firm of former Bush Secretary of State James A. Baker III, which has also represented Schlumberger since the 1950s. The Bush family is also a creature of the Harriman networks and their British controllers, through both the Bush and the Walker sides of the family. Both George H.W. Bush's father, Prescott Bush, and his uncle Herbert Walker were top officials of the Harriman investment bank, and the Harrimans, Lazard, and Scottish banker James Gammell funded the business and political career of Sir George (Prescott, Herbert, and Sir George were also members of Skull & Bones, the powerful Yale-based secret society). Also coming together in Houston were the British intelligence networks of Col. Edward Mandell House, the global oil cartel, and the ``legendary'' King Ranch.

Enron, which has an energy trading room in its Houston headquarters which rivals the trading rooms of the big Wall Street investment banks, is perhaps the single company most responsible for the chaos in today's domestic energy markets. Its ``success'' in energy speculation has raised virtually every electricity bill, natural gas bill, and heating oil bill in the country, some of them by orders of magnitude,

Enron is a relative newcomer, but plays an important role in allowing the financial sharks, under the guise of deregulation, to get their hands on the income streams generated from the production and consumption of electricity, natural gas, and related energy products. Enron's fortunes are directly tied to the Bush League: Enron is the single largest contributor to the political campaigns of President George W. Bush, and the firm hired as ``consultants'' a number of top officials of his father's administration--including James Baker III, and Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher--after they left Washington. In return, these officials used their political pull to get Enron a series of lucrative contracts around the world. Enron chairman Kenneth Lay has been touted as a potential member of the Bush Cabinet, and Southern Strategy zealot Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is widely known as ``the Congressman from Enron.''

Enron is ``Dubya'' Bush's biggest career patron, having given him more than $500,000, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

A Bit of Texas History
When Texas became a Republic in 1836, the political battle revolved around the forces of patriot Sam Houston on the one side, and Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar on the other. Lamar was a member of the aristocratic, plantation-owning Lamar family of Georgia and New York. Houston was inaugurated as the first President of Texas in October 1836, with his bitter enemy Lamar as his Vice President. Under the Texas Constitution, Houston could not succeed himself in office, and not one, but two of his hand-picked successors died while campaigning for the Presidency, a fortuitous set of circumstances which helped Lamar become the second President of the Republic of Texas, in 1838.

This Texas-Georgia-New York connection is one of the recurring themes in this report, exemplified by the Carter-Menil Foundation of former President Jimmy Carter and Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, and the Houston connections of Atlanta-based Coca Cola. Coke chairman J.P. Austin was the Trilateral Commission member who helped Zbigniew Brzezinski recruit and train Jimmy Carter, to be the President of the Democratic Party's version of the Southern Strategy. The Lamar tradition also remains strong in Texas: It was in the Lamar Hotel that the Houston elite gathered to play cards and run much of the state, and when Texas Commerce Bancshares celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Republic of Texas with an ad paying homage to the heroes of the Texas Revolution, leading the list was oligarch Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, with no mention of the patriot Sam Houston.

In the late 1800s-early 1900s, the government of the State of Texas was dominated by an alliance between the King Ranch and Col. Edward House. House, who later gained fame as Woodrow Wilson's controller, was the son of a wealthy British plantation owner in Houston. Back in Houston, the House family groomed young Jesse Jones to take over as Houston's leading light. In the 1920s, Jones became a real estate developer in New York, and among his partners was Robert Lovett, who succeeded E.H. Harriman as the head of the Union Pacific Railroad. Jones's personal attorney was Capt. James Addison Baker of Baker & Botts, a firm which represented Harriman interests in Texas. Jones, in turn, passed the torch to what became known as the ``8F Crowd,'' so named because they gathered to play poker and run the state in Room 8F of Jones's Lamar Hotel. The 8F crowd ran Houston and exerted considerable control over state affairs from the 1940s to the 1960s, and created institutions that continue to exert significant power today, notably three of the most powerful law firms in the country, Baker & Botts, Vinson & Elkins, and Fulbright & Jaworski. Until the late-1980s demise of the Texas banking system, these law firms were all closely associated with a major bank: Baker & Botts with Texas Commerce; Vinson & Elkins with First City; and Fulbright & Jaworski with Bank of the Southwest.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch|...
In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage, issued a book entitled Debrett's Texas Peerage, on ``the aristocrats of Texas.'' Featured quite prominently in the book was ``The Royal Family of Ranching,'' the Klebergs of the King Ranch.

``Robert Justus Kleberg, Jr., was a god among Texas ranchers,'' the chapter on the King Ranch began. ``They still talk about him today in reverent tones, not only on ranches around the world, but at `21,' The Pierre, Saratoga, The Jockey Club and other exclusive enclaves which he used to frequent during racing season in the East.''

The New York Times has repeatedly referred to the spread as ``the legendary King Ranch,'' and Debrett's said that before the ranch opened itself to oil production, it was known as ``the Walled Kingdom.'' The Klebergs, Debrett's gushed, had ``lifelong friendships with the Whitneys, Vanderbilts and other horsey families of the East.'' The ranch has also been host to some of the most powerful oligarchs in the world, including Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, hereditary head of the Venetian intelligence service, and Prince Charles of Britain. Anne Armstrong of the King Ranch was U.S. Ambassador to Britain in the 1970s, as well as being chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) from 1982 to 1990, under Reagan and Bush. [fn5]

The King Ranch was formed in 1857 by Captain Richard King, who had made his living as a steamboat captain running cargo and passengers along the Rio Grande River; he had arrived on the Rio Grande just after Gen. Zachary Taylor arrived with his army to defend the State of Texas against Mexico. King and his partner, Mifflin Kenedy, ran supplies for Taylor, in an operation which was actually an intelligence network operating under the cover of commerce. Just prior to the Civil War, King and Kenedy bought huge tracts of land just south of Corpus Christi; another member of the network was Charles Stillman, a border merchant who later moved to New York to found the National City Bank (a.k.a. Citibank). King's principal lawyer in the early days was Stephen Powers of Brownsville, who had previously been a U.S. consul to Switzerland.

During the Civil War, the King Ranch was an important transshipment point for Confederate supplies, particularly when the Mexican port of Matamoros took on crucial importance after the Union blockade closed the ports in the South. The ranch also functioned as an intelligence center for the Confederacy.

The Klebergs entered the picture when Robert Justus Kleberg (``Kleberg the First,'' according to Debrett's) married Captain King's daughter, Alice. When Captain King died in 1885, Kleberg took command of the ranch. Kleberg the First and Alice had two sons and three daughters. The elder son, Richard Mifflin Kleberg, went to Washington as a Congressmen, and hired a young man named Lyndon Johnson as an aide. The younger son, Robert, Jr., eventually took over the ranch from his father.

The business operations of the ranch in the mid-1980s were run by Jim Clement, the Princeton-trained son of Martin Clement, a former honcho of the Pennsylvania Railroad. One of Clement's friends and regular guests was the late Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, the aforementioned Venetian spook and oligarch.

The King Ranch got a financial boost when oil was discovered on the property, and royalties from Humble Oil & Refining (later bought by Exxon) started rolling in. With their social and political connections, and the oil money, the King-Kleberg heirs moved into the corporate world. [fn6]

In 1977, Prince Charles visited the Armstrong Ranch to play polo with Anne's husband, Tobin Armstrong of the Armstrong Ranch; his brother John Armstrong of the neighboring King Ranch; John's son Charles Armstrong, and oil heir Will Farish of Houston, among others.

Enter the Schlumbergers
On Jan. 10, 1901, Captain Anthony Lucas and Patillo Higgins discovered oil at Spindletop, Texas. The Spindletop salt dome contained enough oil to double the production of the Pennsylvania fields where John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil ruled, and allowed the United States to surpass Russia as the world's leading oil producer. Oil had been drilled in Texas since 1866, but Texas had never come close to matching the output of Pennsylvania--until Spindletop. With the Spindletop gusher, a black-gold rush began, and fortune-seekers from all over the world poured into Texas. Among them were oligarchs and their agents, seeking to gain control over this new source of wealth. Over time, Houston became a center of the oil industry, and a captive of the British-dominated global oil cartel.

With Schlumberger came two important figures: Jean de Menil and his wife, Dominique Schlumberger de Menil. Jean, whose background had been deliberately muddied, was a Tsarist White Russian of some stature, who had fled Russia to avoid Communist reprisals, while Dominique was the daughter of company co-founder Conrad Schlumberger. As a top official of Schlumberger, Jean de Menil's responsibilities included the company's Ibero-American operations, while Dominique was a cultural and political warfare operative who founded the Rothko Chapel as a coordinating point for all sorts of unsavory operations, including terrorist networks involved in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

While the full story of Schlumberger's intelligence remains the subject for further investigation, some aspects are already known. Jean de Menil, as documented in EIR's book Dope, Inc., was a member of the Solidarists, a group comprised of Eastern European and White Russian fascists and feudalists. Many of the Solidarists had been officials of ``quisling'' pro-Hitler governments during World War II. A leading component of the Solidarist movement was a highly professional espionage, sabotage, and assassination network called the Narodnyi Trudovoy Soyuz (NTS). The NTS had been founded by Menshevik circles in Russia in the 1920s, and functioned as one of British Intelligence's premier spy rings inside Russia. The principal Western financing conduit for the NTS and the Solidarist movement was the Tolstoy Foundation of New York, of which Jean de Menil was a director.

De Menil and Schlumberger were involved in helping to put Castro in power in Cuba, and later in attempts to overthrow him, in operations involving both the CIA and George Bush's Zapata Offshore oil company. More importantly, Jean de Menil was a key figure in Permindex, the corporate front for the assassins of John F. Kennedy and the numerous attempts on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle. Permindex was closely linked with British Intelligence's Special Operations Executive of Sir William Stephenson and Col. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, and with the FBI's secret Division Five, headed by Bloomfield. Schlumberger's links with the intelligence community are also indicated by its close relationship to former CIA director George Bush, and the presence on its board today of former CIA director John Deutch. This is not to suggest that Schlumberger is a CIA ``front,'' however, but rather that Schlumberger is part of a much older oligarchic intelligence network, with tentacles into national intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

The Schlumberger/de Menil apparatus had strong ties to the Houston corporate world and ruling elite. Jean de Menil was, for a time, on the board of Bank of the Southwest, the bank closely interlinked with Fulbright & Jaworski, the firm which produced Nuremberg and Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Baker & Botts partner Dillon Anderson, an official in the Eisenhower administration, was on the board of the Schlumberger Foundation in the 1950s, and senior partner George Jewell was on the board of Schlumberger in the 1980s. Schlumberger is also closely linked with Lazard, which played a big role in financing Texas companies like George Bush's Zapata and Pennzoil. Later, Dominique de Menil would co-found the Carter-Menil Center in Atlanta, with former President Jimmy Carter. A key liaison between Carter and de Menil was Charles W. Duncan of Houston, who is both a former president of Coca-Cola and Carter's Secretary of Energy. Both Charles and his brother John House Duncan sat on numerous corporate boards of relevance to this network, including John Duncan's seat on the King Ranch board.

Schlumberger family and board member Didier Primat has rather secretive operations in the Carolinas and Virginia, overlapping the intelligence and eugenics operations of the Smith-Richard Foundation and the family of Bush legal counsel C. Boyden Gray. Primat also held the property title to Mary Sue Terry, who, as Virginia Attorney General, led a witch-hunt against the Lyndon LaRouche movement, throwing a number of innocent individuals into state prison on trumped-up charges.

These Texas-Virginia-Carolina connections also played a role in the rise of Charlotte, N.C. as a national banking center. Charlotte's North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) has, through an ever-larger series of acquisitions, transformed itself into Bank of America, one of the largest banks in the world, while crosstown rival First Union has grown into a top-ten bank in the United States. NCNB significantly extended its reach in 1989, when it bought the bankrupt First RepublicBank of Dallas for virtually nothing, in a move that helped conceal the maneuvering that was used to keep First RepublicBank's doors open until after Presidential candidate (and former director) George Bush had won the Texas primary. NCNB transformed itself into NationsBank in 1991, with the acquisition of C&S/Sovran, itself the union of Georgia and Virginia banks. After a number of smaller acquisitions, NationsBank bought the San Francisco-based Bank of America in 1998; with the takeover, NationsBank renamed itself Bank of America, with the headquarters, and the control, remaining in Charlotte. Bank of America is number 12 on the list of top contributors to the political campaigns of Gov. George W. Bush, and in its NCNB days, the bank was caught running dirty tricks against the LaRouche movement.

The Bush League
After graduating from Yale, young Skull & Bones member George Herbert Walker Bush got his start in the business world at Cleveland-based Dresser Industries, where his Bonesman father, Prescott Bush, was a director from 1930 until he entered the U.S. Senate in 1952. Dresser was controlled by the W.A. Harriman & Co. bank, [fn7] where Prescott Bush worked and where George H.W. Bush's uncle and namesake, George Herbert ``Bert'' Walker, was president. After stints in Cleveland and California, young Bush moved to the Permian basin oilpatch town of Odessa, Texas, circa 1949, to work for Dresser's IDECO subsidiary. While Bush would cultivate an image as a Texan, the money which would finance his career came from Wall Street and the City of London; under the cowboy hat was a preppie Connecticut Yankee.

Not long after arriving in Texas, Bush decided to strike out on his own, forming the Bush-Overbey Company with landman John Overbey, funded with $300,000 raised through Uncle Bert Walker. A significant portion of that money came from the City of London and from Scottish investor James (later Sir James) G.S. Gammell of Edinburgh's Ivory & Sime. Other investors included the Lazard-linked publisher of The Washington Post, Eugene Meyer, and daddy Prescott Bush. Gammell, by the way, would later partner with Schlumberger's Didier Primat in Adams Bank.

In 1953, Bush decided to link up with Midland oilmen the Leidtke brothers, the sons of a Tulsa judge who became a top lawyer for the Mellons' Gulf Oil. They formed a new company, Zapata Petroleum, financed through Uncle Herbert; Herbert kept a chunk of the company for himself, and sold some to James Gammell, who got a seat on the board. Basically, Herbert Walker raised $500,000, and the Leidtkes' Tulsa crowd raised a like amount. In 1954, the company formed Zapata Offshore, a for-hire drilling subsidiary. Officially, the offshore company was formed to take advantage of the new leases being offered in the Gulf of Mexico, but there were other reasons as well. Zapata's first rig, the Scorpion, was leased by Gulf Oil in 1958 (three years before the Bay of Pigs fiasco) and started drilling just 54 miles north of Isabela, Cuba, a perfect base for covert intelligence operations against Castro.

In 1959, Bush and the Leidtkes decided to split their company into two parts, with Bush taking the CIA-connected Zapata Offshore, and the Leidtkes taking the rest. Bush became CEO of Zapata Offshore and moved it to Houston, while the Leidtkes expanded Zapata Petroleum through mergers, eventually transforming it into the Houston-based Pennzoil. But it wasn't long before Bush cast his eye on politics.

In those days, the Democratic Party, dominant in Texas, was divided into two camps: a liberal/FDR-influenced wing led by Ralph Yarborough, Sam Rayburn, and Wright Patman, and a Dixiecrat wing, grouped around former Democratic Texas Governor Alan Shivers and John Connally, who ultimately ran for President as a Republican. These Dixiecrats would become the basis for a Republican takeover of the South, determined to undo the industrial and racial progress which had occurred in the South under FDR and the war mobilization.

When Bush moved to Houston in 1959, he began socializing with the likes of James A. Baker III, and the Houston oily-garchs, and became active with the Harris County Republican Party, of which he became chairman in 1963, helped both by Harriman money and the sudden dropping out of the race by his opponent. In September 1963, he announced another Senatorial bid. Bush won the Republican nomination, but lost the election to Yarborough. But Bush had an ace up his sleeve, with a lawsuit to force a redrawing of Congressional districts in Texas. The result was the creation of an entirely new district on the west side of Houston, an area which Bush had carried in the 1964 election. Faced with this gift of a friendly district with no incumbent, Bush left Zapata Offshore in 1966 to run for Congress. Not surprisingly, he won, and in January 1967, George Bush became a member of the House of Representatives. In Congress, Bush heavily pushed birth control and malthusian policies, while defending the oil depletion allowance. Dissatisfied with a seat in the House, however, Representative Bush decided to run for the Senate in 1970. In that race, he expected to face Yarborough, but Yarborough lost the Democratic nomination to Lloyd Bentsen, who beat Bush 53% to 47%.

After the defeat, Bush took a series of non-elective offices. In December 1970, Nixon appointed Bush to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush moved to New York City, and the Waldorf-Astoria. He was nominally working for Secretary of State William Rogers, but his real boss was National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. In 1973, Nixon appointed Bush to head the Republican National Committee. When Nixon resigned in 1974, Bush angled for President Gerald Ford to appoint him Vice President, but the job went to Nelson Rockefeller, and Bush got the job as U.S. Liaison to the People's Republic of China; since the United States did not have formal diplomatic relations with China at the time, Bush was not officially an ambassador, and thus did not require what would likely have been a difficult confirmation by the Senate. In late 1975, Ford shifted personnel around, in preparation for his own Presidential bid, and George Bush was appointed director of the CIA. After a contentious confirmation battle, Bush was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as CIA Director on Jan. 30, 1976. It was a short-lived post, as Ford lost to Carter, and Bush returned to Texas when Carter took over in 1977.

Back in Houston, Bush was appointed to the board of First International Bank of Houston, its parent First International Bankshares (a.k.a., InterFirst) of Dallas, and InterFirst's London-based First International Bankshares merchant bank. [fn8] Bush also joined a few corporate and educational boards, and became an adjunct professor at Rice University.

Bush's main preoccupation was building a political machine that would carry him to the White House, and one of his key allies was James A. Baker III. Baker was the chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, while fellow Texan Robert Strauss headed the Carter-Mondale effort. Baker had headed the Ford campaign in 1976, and had been Ford's Deputy Secretary of Commerce. Oilman Robert Mosbacher headed up Bush's national finance operation.

Bush formally announced his Presidential candidacy on May 1, 1979, and one of his campaign themes was the Union of English-Speaking Peoples. ``The British are the best friend America has in the world today.... Sure, I'm an Anglophile,'' Bush said at the time. ``We should all be. Britain has never done anything bad to the United States.''

`Post-Industrial' Southern Strategy
The heart of the Southern Strategy was the oligarchy's plan to shift the United States from the world's most powerful industrial economy, into a post-industrial rentier-financier empire. The industrialized cities of the North would be allowed to decay, while the relatively small cities of the South would be built up as cheap-labor service centers. As the Industrial Belt turned into the Rust Belt, the New South ascended. Houston, spurred by the oil boom, became the fourth-largest city in the country, old Atlanta became the ``New Atlanta,'' and sleepy Charlotte became a major international financial center. Existing cities were transformed--Dallas, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Miami, to name a few--while Northern cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, and Philadelphia went into decline.

Coincident with this Southern shift, was the ascension of finance over industry. U.S. industry had largely been in the hands of the financiers since the days of J.P. Morgan's creation of the industrial trusts, and that control was rapidly consolidated during the 1980s. Orchestrated by Bush's masters, the speculators took over. The corporate raiders, financed by the dirty-money junk bond networks, bought up significant chunks of corporate America, and terrified the rest. The raiders' targets, and those who feared they might become targets, turned to Wall Street's investment banks and law firms for ``protection.'' As such, the leveraged buy-out/junk bond operation functioned as a giant protection racket, destroying some as a way of collecting tribute from the rest. At the same time, dirty money poured into the real estate market, notably through the giant Canadian developers Olympia & York and Cadillac Fairview. These firms built the skyscrapers which were then filled up with service workers--bankers, lawyers, accountants, clerks, and other white-collar types. Having the tallest office building became something of a fetish for the business leaders, spurring ever larger towers, which in turn were filled with ever larger numbers of white-collar workers.

The pouring of hot money into the real estate markets caused real estate prices to rise. The ``wealth'' created by these rising values provided more money to pump into the bubble. The rising stock market served a similar function. The cities were transformed into service centers ringed by suburbia, leaving the inner cities full of the poor and minorities, ripe for Strategic Bombing Survey decimation through drug distribution and ``Negro removal.''

In the office buildings and the suburbs, the ordinary citizen was also being hooked on speculation. One of the effects of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's deadly interest-rate hikes in 1979-80, was that ordinary savings accounts suddenly started paying high rates of interest, giving the ordinary citizen a taste of the action. As more and more of the ``little people'' discovered the joys of usury, the modern ``my money'' era was born. That process escalated with the rise in residential real estate prices--homes were transformed from residences to ``investments,'' with rising equity values adding significantly to the pools of ``my money.'' The ordinary citizen also began making money from the rising stock market. Over time, a significant portion of the population became addicted to usury and speculation, considering it their right to make money from the manipulation of money. The speculator went from being the enemy to being the role model; the suckers now identified with the casino. The old-style productive industry became the realm of ``losers,'' replaced by the hot new ``industries'' of finance and information. Make derivatives, not steel!

While this transformation was made possible by the policy changes in Washington and in the states, the mechanism for the change was specific networks within the corporate world.

The junk-bond market of the 1980s, for example, was a joint operation of the Morgan/Rothschild Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank, and the money laundries of Dope, Inc. Today, the junk bond market is bigger than ever, with more junk bonds issued in 1998 alone, than in all of the 1980s combined. The leveraged buy-out (LBO) wave was led by Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, which was closely linked to the Harriman/Bush machine, and continues with such new Bush-connected players as Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, the Carlyle Group, the Bass Brothers, Richard Rainwater, and Sam Wylie's Maverick Capital hedge fund. The LBO market declined significantly during the 1990s, as highly inflated stock prices became the currency of choice for takeovers, but is now making a comeback as a vehicle for taking key assets private in preparation for a crash.

The Texas networks have spawned wave after wave of deregulation. The deregulation of the airline industry began in Texas with Frank Lorenzo and Texas Air, which became Texas International, and ultimately took over Continental and Eastern, while the Bush League's Albert Checchi took over Northwest Airlines. Texas is also the center of energy deregulation, home to Enron and a host of smaller competitors, such as James A. Baker III's Reliant Energy (the parent of Houston Lighting & Power) and Dynegy; while many other players have Houston links, notably North Carolina's Duke Energy and the Schlumberger-linked CMS and American Electric Power. Enron has also moved into the private water market in England and the United States, hoping to get a piece of the income streams from water and sewage.

The effect of all this deregulation and speculation has been the decimation of the physical economy of the United States. Over the last three decades, the productive capacity of the U.S. economy has been cut in half, measured in terms of market baskets of goods on a per-capita, per-household, and per-square-kilometer basis. At the same time, the monetary claims on that declining production have risen hyperbolically. The process defined by rapidly rising claims on a steadily declining production is clearly unsustainable--at some point, it must break down; the question is not if, but when, that will occur.

Post-Crash Positioning
It is widely understood among the governments, political elites, and by the financial oligarchy, that the present financial system is doomed. While there is a desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable as long as possible, the serious thought is being put into preparing a new system to be implemented when this one goes. From the oligarchic perspective, the key to retaining control in a post-crash environment is twofold: 1) smash the power of sovereign nations through balkanization and globalization, so that they cannot protect their citizens from looting; and 2) grab control of as much of the world's supplies of essential raw materials, strategic minerals, food supplies, energy supplies, and similar assets as possible. If they can do those two things, the oligarchs believe, they can run the post-crash world.

This process is far advanced, both within the United States and internationally. Take electricity, for example: U.S. firms such as Enron have been buying up power plants all over the world. One little-known firm, AES Corp., [fn9] is poised to become the largest generator of electricity in Ibero-America, once its various acquisitions are completed. If you and a cartel of ``competitors'' can control the electricity supply of a continent, you have tremendous power to decide who survives and who dies, while grabbing as much of the electricity income stream as the market will bear.

Apply the same process to agriculture, where consolidation among the major food companies is proceeding at a breathtaking pace. Apply it to the telecommunications companies, which provide essential communications services; apply it to the production of strategic minerals and metals that are essential to modern industrial production. What you are left with, in effect, is a return to the days of the empires, when imperial trading companies controlled entire continents, and those who were not involved in making the companies rich, were considered expendable.

Notes

   1. Halliburton, which acquired the Harrimans' Dresser Industries, has surpassed Schlumberger as the largest oilfield services company. Among Halliburton's subsidiaries is Brown & Root, the Houston construction firm which does sensitive work worldwide for the Pentagon and the State Department. Halliburton was also the first U.S. oil company to work the Chinese mainland and, beginning in 1986, was selected by the People's Republic of China to perform offshore field work. In the 1980s, the Halliburton board included James Glanville of Lazard, Lord Polwarth of the Royal Bank of Scotland, William Simon of Wesray and Kissinger Associates, and the King Ranch's Anne Armstrong. The ``Torbitt'' report identified Halliburton and Brown & Root as being among the principal financiers of Permindex, the financial front suspected of involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Halliburton head Richard Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, left the firm to become George W. Bush's Vice President.

   2. The Schlumberger family was part of a Swiss-based intelligence network operating in partnership with the British Secret Intelligence Service, to defeat the American Revolution. Among the agents run by this network were Aaron Burr, the man who killed Alexander Hamilton and who was tried for treason, Jefferson's Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, and the most notorious of all American traitors, Benedict Arnold. A key role was played by members of the Prevost family, British military commanders from a Swiss oligarchic family which was intermarried with the Mallet family of the de Neuflize, Schlumberger Mallet Bank, known today as the Schlumberger interests. For further details, see Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1998).

   3. Lazard Freres is an international investment bank, operating out of Paris.

   4. The firm today known as Baker & Botts was formed in 1866 by Judge Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts, and became Baker & Botts when Captain James A. Baker joined in the 1870s. It had a distinct Confederate and Masonic heritage. Judge Gray had been the Assistant Treasurer of the Confederate States of America, where, under the command of Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, he had financed the operations of Gen. Albert Pike among the Indian tribes in the Southwest. After the war, Pike and Toombs reestablished the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite, and Pike deputy Philip C. Tucker set up a Scottish Rite lodge in Houston in 1867, with Walter Browne Botts and Benjamin Botts as leaders. Captain Baker would later play a key role in pushing eugenics--the precursor of Nazi race science--for the Harrimans, through Rice University, which he helped found and chaired for 40 years. In 1912, Baker brought in the head of the British Eugenics Society, Julian Huxley, to help the school set up its biology department.

   5. Anne Legendre Armstrong, the daughter of aristocratic New Orleans coffee merchant Armant Legendre, became friends with Helenita Kleberg at the exclusive Foxcroft School and Vassar College. She married Tobin Armstrong, whose brother John was married to Helenita's sister Henrietta Kleberg, and was second in command at the King Ranch. The Armstrongs trace their heritage to Texas Ranger John Armstrong, an enforcer for the King Ranch in its early days. Their much smaller Armstrong Ranch is, politically, an adjunct to the King Ranch. At PFIAB, Armstrong was involved in operations against Lyndon LaRouche and his associates, and helped bring Henry Kissinger into the Reagan administration in 1983. She chaired the advisory committee of the influential Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, and was co-chair of the Republican National Committee in 1971-73.

   6. Belton Kleberg ``B.K.'' Johnson started his own ranch, and joined the boards of AT&T, Campbell Soup, Tenneco, U.S. Trust and First City Bancorp., among others. His half-brother Robert Richard ``Bobby'' Shelton bought a ranch in Kerrville, Texas; Bobby Shelton also served a stint as head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police agency which included the famous Texas Rangers, which at times seemed to have functioned as the private police of the King Ranch and its cohorts. These offspring, along with Anne Armstrong, were heavily interlocked with the 8F Crowd institutions in Houston. BK and Anne both sat on the board of First City Bancorp. of Houston, and Anne was also a director of American Express, General Motors, Boise Cascade, Braniff, Union Carbide, and Halliburton.

   7. W.A. Harriman & Co., organized in 1919, was the private bank of the Harriman family. The chairman was W. Averell Harriman, who with his brother Roland ``Bunny'' Harriman controlled the bank, while founding members included George Herbert Walker, Sr. and Percy Rockefeller. Prescott Bush joined the firm in 1926. All but one were members of Skull & Bones; Walker was not, but his son, G.H. Walker, Jr., would be.

      In 1931, W.A. Harriman & Co. merged with the Brown Brothers investment bank to form Brown Brothers Harriman. The Harriman brothers and Prescott Bush were senior partners at BBH, while Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. Brown Brothers was a spin-off of the British bank Brown, Shipley, whose best-known partner was Bank of England head Montagu Norman.

      In October 1942, the U.S. government seized the Union Banking Corp. under the Trading With the Enemy Act for acting as an agent of Nazi Germany. UBC had been co-founded by Bert Walker, Sr., and its board included Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush. Several other Harriman-Bush-related companies were also seized, for the same reason.

   8. In 1987, the ailing InterFirst merged with its Dallas crosstown rival RepublicBank to form First RepublicBank, which became the biggest bank in Texas and ultimately its biggest banking disaster. Within months, First RepublicBank was insolvent, but Federal regulators kept the bank open until after the Texas primary in Spring 1988, to avoid embarrassing Bush in his Presidential bid. A few weeks after Bush won the primary, the remnants of the bank were sold to Charlotte's NCNB in a sweetheart deal. A Federal study later revealed that the government had pumped $3 billion into the bank to keep it afloat.

   9. AES may be not be widely known, but it has very high-level sponsors. Co-founder Roger Sant is a director of Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund/World Wide Fund for Nature, and AES director Russell Train is the former chairman and president of the WWF. AES specializes in expanding into areas controlled by narco-terrorists.

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