| Harken's Board of Directors included a who's who of the Bush administration, then and now. In addition to one of South Africa's wealthiest and most powerful industrialists, a number of people involved in the notorious Nugan Hand Bank conspiracy of 1982 -- one of the most important and yet hardly reported bank collapses in history with ties to the CIA, drug dealing and the Iran-Contra scandal -- sat on the Board. (George Bush Sr., as Vice-President, had done a remarkable job of covering it up. Shades of his involvement with the Carlyle Group today, its billion dollar dealings in Saudi Arabia and its involvement with the Unocal oil pipeline now slated for Afghanistan!) Among those on the Harken Board were principals in the $1.4 trillion Savings & Loan bail-out. The lead attorney for Nugan Hand Bank was William Quasha, the father of Harken's CEO Alan G. Quasha. One Nugan Hand launders the other. In May of 1990, a classified U.S. State Department report warned of Saddam Hussein's growing frustration with Kuwait's undercutting of Iraq's oil pricing in violation of longstanding agreements. At the time, Saddam Hussein was an important ally of the United States; the CIA even had a hand in installing Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq. Iraq had just emerged from 9 years of bitter warfare against Iran at the United States' behest, leaving more than 1 million people dead. But then Kuwait's emirocracy was discovered to be "slant drilling" into Iraqi territory and stealing Iraq's oil. Saddam openly discussed the pros and cons of an oil embargo and possible incursion into Kuwait as a means to rectify Iraq's legitimate grievances. Under instructions from the Bush White House, US State Department emissary April Glaspie met with Hussein in Baghdad and gave him the "green light" to go into Kuwait to protect Iraq's sovereignty. In June 1990, George Bush Jr., who had borrowed almost $200,000 from Harken Oil, suddenly sold most of his Harken stock for $848,560. In August, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait, Harken stock plummeted by 25 percent, and Junior saved himself $212,140 by selling his shares just before the military operations began. What luck! (And still nothing about any of this context in the press today other than an occasional query of whether Bush knew that his stocks would drop!) Writing in the Houston Post, reporter Peter Brewton noted that Harken's "potentially lucrative drilling rights in the Persian Gulf are being protected by American troops" sent there, ostensibly, to face Iraq. [Guardian, Dec. 12, 1990.] It took a full two years after the end of the bombing of Iraq before Timothy Phelps, reporting for NY Newsday, broke the story that a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain named Sam Zakhem -- a political associate of brewery magnate Joseph Coors -- and two leaders of the conservative movement in Washington were indicted on charges of promoting American intervention in the Persian Gulf while secretly paid millions of dollars by Kuwait between August 1990 and June 30, 1991. [Timothy Phelps, "Ex-Envoy Indicted in Gulf War Fraud," NY Newsday] Brewton was investigating the CIA connection to the Savings & Loan scandal in which the Bush family figured heavily from both the CIA and the S&L ends. He wrote story after story for the Houston Post exposing the Bush family's sordid theft of billions of dollars from the people of the United States, but few other media wanted anything to do with it. One certainty: the war buildup did boot the Savings & Loan bail-out scandal off the front page just as today it is doing the same with Enron and the rest -- Ralph Nader calls the orchestrated war hysteria a "Weapon of mass distraction" -- saving the Bush offspring from public exposure and contempt. [e.g., Martin Tolchin, "Mildest Possible Penalty Is Imposed on Neil Bush," The NY Times, April 19, 1991.] While blue-blooded "dimwit" George Junior and his brothers Neil and Jeb raked in the cash, Papa Bush sent the blue collar sons and daughters of working class Americans to kill teenage Iraqi draftees, burying thousands alive beneath tons of desert sand. **************************************** SIDEBAR: Bush progeny, Neil, was also involved in an oil company with interests in the region. In fact, he was at the time running Houston-based Zapata Offshore Oil & Drilling Co., founded by his dad, George H.W. Bush Sr. Zapata Oil eventually evolved into the giant Pennzoil company, based in Houston Texas, and owned nearly 9 percent of the stock of Chevron -- worth over $2 billion. Chevron's Gulf Oil subsidiary has historically been the U.S.-based transnational oil company with the biggest special interest in Kuwaiti politics. In a Nov. 13, 1990 Pennzoil Co. stock report, Standard & Poor's wrote the following: "Revenues and profits in the near term could be highly volatile owing to uncertainties following the Aug. 2, 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait." George Bush always did his best to eliminate those "uncertainties" and certify his company's profits. He hired the lawfirm of Baker & Botts to represent the interests of Zapata Oil (and later, Pennzoil). This firm was headed by James Baker, a multi-millionaire oil corporation lawyer whose family held extensive investments in Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of Indiana, and Kerr-McGee, the company exposed by worker-activist Karen Silkwood for its radiation poisoning of workers and which has been blamed for her murder. Around the time of the Gulf war, Papa George named Baker U.S. Secretary of State. Corporate establishment figures sitting on the Board of the Baker family's Texas Commerce Bank included former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's wife, Ladybird, and former U.S. President Gerald Ford (who also sat on the LBJ-appointed Warren Commission which had preposterously attributed John F. Kennedy's murder to the work of a lone gunman). Gerald Ford, it turns out, was at the time of the Gulf War a director of the U.S. subsidiary of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Next Page Back to Main Page |