Origins of the G.W. Bush-Carlyle-Nazi Axis
By Alex Constantine
Even the most loyal conservative must admit that George
Bush, Jr. is a
strange bird. Texans have never truly accepted him as one of their
own.
"Like his father," the UK's Observer jeered in 1994, "his
home-grown
credentials are questioned." In general, the natives were somewhat
uneasy
about the occasional bizarre antic - like the fist day of a local
dove
shoot, highlighted by Bush bagging a protected songbird, not the
designated
target (Ed Vulliamy, "White Hot Mama Fights a Texan Bush War,"
Observer,
October 2, 1994). "No real Texan would have done that!" barked then
Governor
Ann Richards.
But then, in the mid-90s, the Texas political landscape
shifted
radically, the old order crumbling and a home-grown right-wing
mutation
plowing through the crust. Democrats had dominated the state since the
Civil
War, but with Napoleanic zeal the Christian-Right rallied and seized
control
of the Republican Party, led by the state's Christian Coalition and
Eagle
Forum, and went on to demonstrate that any political machine is
mutable,
even in the deep South.
But Bush still didn't quite fit the ticket, some Texans
felt. True, his
business was petroleum. But shortly after George, Jr. joined the board
of
Harken Oil, BCCI, the international bank that parlayed middle eastern
oil
profits into political influence, not to mention engaging in
child
prostitution and arming Iraq, dropped a number of lucrative
drilling
contracts in his lap (Petzinger, Truell & Abramson, 'Family Ties,'
Wall
Street Journal, December 5, 1991, p. 1). Texans were left to ponder
the
unspeakable question: Why in tarnation was W. in business with
Shiek
Khalifah bin-Salmon al-Khalifah, the scandal-ridden ruling emir of
Bahrain?
In 1990, the Shiek's name surfaced on a list of primary shareholders
in
BCCI's parent company, BCCI Holdings in Luxembourg. Bush had pulled
strings
to throw the contracts to Harken. In return, Harken Oil helped
BCCI
investment bankers gain a foothold in the U.S.
When the Iraqgate scandal broke, W. attempted to separate
himself
from the deal, blaming a former aide who had gone to work for BCCI
and
resigned when the press caught whiff of corruption.
At the same time, it was clear that the young entrepeneur had
his gaze
fixed on his father's eyrie in Washington. George W. Bush had been one
of
his father's leading advisors, a "lead player," in "the campaign to
oust
White House Chief of Staff John Sununu' (Pertzinger, Truell & Abramson).
The
Wall Street Journal looked into Bush's business dealings and found
a
"complex pattern" of provocative personal and financial ties, but
Bush
refused to respond to questions: "George W. Bush, a managing partner of
the
Texas Rangers baseball team, declined to be interviewed," but "he
did
provide brief responses to written questions through an intermediary."
Where
was the bold Texas moralist with an aversion to "even" the
vaguest
appearance of wrong-doing? In hiding.
But still exploiting those personal and financial
relationships, of
course. On March, 1995, the regents of the University of Texas, at
the
behest of Governor Bush, invested $10 million with the Carlyle Group,
a
merchant bank in the District of Columbia. Carlyle was chaired by
Frank
Carlucci, Ronald Reagan's secretary of defense and, since 1989, "a
darling
of the corporate sector," per the L.A. Times. Carlucci sits on the board
of
numerous mega-corporations, including Bell Atlantic, Ashland Oil and
the
Kaman Corporation. Carlyle's sole outside parner is the Mellon
Family.
Richard Darmon, economic advisor to Bush, Sr. was on the board. So did
James
Baker III, former secretary of state. These investments raised a ruckus
in
the business press. G.W. himself had long-standing business ties to
Carlyle
Group. In 1990, he was given a seat on the board by former Nixon aide
Fred
Malek, a Carlyle advisor (Joe Conason, "Notes on a Native Son,"
Harper's,
February 2000, p. 49).
Fred Malek, mind you, was the CREEP deputy director who,
prompted by
Nixon's trembling belief that "a Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of
Labor
Statistics was bent on is destruction, made up a list of Jews in the
bureau.
Malek was made deputy director of the Republican National Committee
by
George Bush, Sr., an old friend. It was Malek who organized an
"ethnic
coalition" of Nazis in August 1988, the Heritage Groups Council,
that
included the lies of Laszlo Pastor (a Hungarian-American, former
fascist
Arrowcross officer and junior diplomatic envoy to Berlin under Hitler),
and
Father Florian Galdau (a priest, Vatican P-2 member and New York leader
of
the Iron Guard, a latter day version of the old SS-run Romanian
terror
organization).
Once again, the Bush family distanced itself from scandal. The
clan pled
ignorance, even though Bush, Sr. had cherry-picked Malek for the
job.
Supposedly, they had fooled everyone, even the conservative National
Jewish
Coalition, which boasted In 1992 that "Vice President Dan Quayle,
HUD
Secretary Jack Kemp, GOP Campaign Manager Fred Malek and a large number
of
key Senators, Congressmen and candidates for office addressed
Jewish
delegates and community leaders at a series of events hosted by the
NJC
during the Republican convention in Houston last month." (NJC
Bulletin,
September 1992).
On February 2 1990, USA Today's Tom Squitieri wrote that
"four key
Republican activists, ousted from George Bush's 1988 campaign amid
charges
of anti-Semitic or pro-fascist links, are back working for the party."
These
included Fred Malek and Phil Guarino, another pro-Nazi P-2 member. George
W.
Bush ran spin control for his father's 1988 presidential campaign, and
when
the Nazi scandal burst ever-so-briefly in the media, GW protected his
father
by urging the European fascists to resign from the Heritage
Council
(Citizen's Law Web Site,
http://www.citizenslaw.net/
bushdynasty_corrupt.htm).