During the War, Bonesmen were active in forming the OSS and its later incarnation, the CIA. Prescott’s relationship with Dulles would become very useful during the Eisenhower years, with John Foster as Secretary of State and his brother Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA. Prescott and Dresser Industries were kept well inside the loop. Hans Gisevius, the German intelligence agent who acted as the go-between with Allen Dulles in Switzerland and Admiral Canaris in the German High Command, after the war acted as go-between with Dulles, Dresser Industries and Prescott Bush.

George Herbert Walker Bush (“Poppy”), Prescott’s son, improved on the CIA connection to the point of becoming its director in 1976.

Poppy tried to get a real job on graduating from Yale. He applied at Proctor and Gamble but was turned down. He always tried to say he was independent, striking out on his own, but the truth was he went to work at his daddy’s firm, Dresser Industries. Eventually, with money from Brown Brothers and Harriman (his dad’s parent company), he set up his own company, Zapata. It was really a CIA front. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 was probably George’s operation as much as it was Allen Dulles’. The CIA code name for it was Zapata. Two of the boats that carried the invaders from an island that was leased by George Bush to Cuba were named Houston and Barbara.

Poppy ran for Congress in 1964 by campaigning against the Civil Rights Act. He didn’t get elected that year, but he did get elected the next time he tried. When he was Chair of the Republican Party in 1972 he set up ethnic heritage groups within the party. These groups were havens for ex-Nazis.

While vice president under Reagan, Poppy was Chair of the Special Situations Group responsible for defeating the Sandanistas in Nicaragua. He and Ollie North set up, financed and armed the Contras through an elaborate and highly secretive scheme that saw private planes flying cash to Iran, buying Soviet-made guns, flying guns to the Contras at a private CIA airstrip in Costa Rica, trading guns for marijuana and cocaine, then flying the drugs to a private U. S. airbase in Homestead, Fla., where the drugs were traded for cash.

George Bush, Poppy, was vice president under Reagan from 1980 to 1988. He was elected President in 1988 and served one term until 1992. Dick Cheney was his secretary of defense. When Poppy lost, Cheney went from being secretary of defense to being CEO of Halliburton, probably the largest supplier of goods and services to the Defense Department. The revolving door connecting the military to the industrial complex seemed to be well-greased. A few years later Cheney came back through the door to be vice president for George Bush the younger.

Why did George W pick Cheney? Well, actually, Cheney picked himself. Bush asked him to make a list of candidates for vice president. Cheney did, then he sold W on the idea that he was the best man for the job.

What makes Cheney so special? So indispensable?

While Cheney was CEO of Halliburton he built up the company by buying other companies. One of the companies he bought was Dresser Industries. Halliburton spent $8 billion buying Dresser. When they bought it, Halliburton’s stock dropped by a third. Wall Street thought it was a bum deal. Why did Cheney pay so much? Was it a sweetheart deal because the owners of Dresser were his former and future bosses?

The popular image of Cheney is that he’s the brains behind Bush, that Bush is some kind of simpleton and Cheney is an evil genius. The Dresser deal makes it look like Cheney is still the loyal employee. He’s both the bag man and fall guy for the Bushs. He delivers the cash, and when the Bushs get in trouble, he’s willing to stand up and take the hit for it.

Our Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman is having a lot of fun as Chair of the Senate Committee on Investigations. He’s investigated Kofi Annan and his son and George Galloway, the English MP, for trading with Saddam Hussein and paying kickbacks in the Iraq Oil for Food program. Galloway called the investigations the “Mother of All Smokescreens.” [He also called Coleman a “common drool-on-your-tie fool.”]

During the 2000 presidential election Cheney admitted Halliburton did business with Libya and Iran, but he denied they had done business with Iraq, “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We’ve not done any business in Iraq since U. N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn’t do that,” he said on ABC-TV’s “This Week” on July 30, 2000. But Dresser was selling equipment through French subsidiaries to Iraq from early in 1997 through 2000. Halliburton didn’t buy Dresser until 1998, so, it was the Bush’s company that was trading with the enemy, and Cheney just continued the practice. Purchasing the company also covered up the trail.

In June of 1998, Cheney had already made the case, in a speech before the Cato Institute, that sanctions don’t work and unilateral sanctions are bad for U. S. companies involved in international business. The very sanctions against trade with Iraq that he wanted lifted were the ones he was responsible for putting in place after the first Gulf war. Although he never said it directly, he clearly wanted sanctions against Iraq lifted: “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically-elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.” Even before he took over Bush’s problem, he was defending it.

Why doesn’t Norm Coleman investigate the Dresser trade with Saddam Hussein that began, according to U. N. documents, as early as 1997 and continued through 2000? Did they (the Bush family) pay kickbacks to Saddam Hussein like everyone else? Shouldn’t U. S. companies that violated U. S. laws be brought to justice? Shouldn’t their officers and owners be prosecuted? Are we a nation of laws, or are we a nation of gangsters and thugs?

But, instead of punishing Halliburton or Dresser for trading with the enemy, they are actually rewarded with a no-bid exclusive contract to operate the oil fields in Iraq. They are given total control over one-quarter of the world’s known oil deposits.

The sale of Dresser to Halliburton is intriguing. We know Prescott Bush was running Dresser up until his death in 1972. We have no evidence of huge lumps of cash going into either George Sr. or George Jr.’s bank accounts. Is it possible that the $8 billion they got for Dresser was in the form of stock and stock options? Then, doesn’t it seem possible that the Bushs and their friends actually own the controlling interest in Halliburton?

We’ll never know any of this for sure because politicians are always setting up blind trusts. They say it’s so they won’t know what stocks they own and how they’re traded. The reality is that they wouldn’t put anyone in charge of their trust that didn’t completely share their understanding of the investment. [They trust old family friends. Poppy put William Farish in charge of his blind trust. Farish was the grandson of the William Farish who supplied Hitler with gas.] They know what stocks they own. The nice thing for them is that a blind trust is only blind for the public; the public can’t see what financial interests the politician is trying to protect.

Two Holocaust survivors, Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, are suing the U. S. government and the Bush family for $40 billion in compensation for profits derived from slave labor in Auschwitz during World War II. Brown Brothers and Harriman owned one-third interest in the Silesian coal field that employed prisoners of the neighboring concentration camp. Prescott Bush was responsible for managing those interests. On January 22, 1944 President Roosevelt signed an executive order calling on the military to take all measures to protect European Jews. The U. S. military could have bombed access to the camps and possibly saved the lives of 400,000 Hungarians. The lawsuit claims Prescott Bush and other business executives brought pressure on the government to ignore that order.

The U.S. government is fighting this lawsuit. It should go forward.

The International Court of Justice in The Hague should prosecute George W. Bush for crimes against humanity for his war against the people of Iraq.

The U.S. Congress should impeach Bush for causing and pursuing a war that has cost more than 2,000 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, now that we know the only purpose of the war was to enrich himself and his family. Further, he should be tried for treason for lying to the American people and betraying the high office to which he was elected. ||

Ed Felien is the publisher of Pulse of the Twin Cities.