The elder George Bush’s son Neil broke conflict of interest rules when he was a CEO at Silverado Banking Savings and Loan in Denver.A cease and desist order restricting Neil Bush’s banking activity was demanded immediately. The judge who worked for the Office of Thrift Supervision demanded that Neil Bush make a full disclosure of all of his business dealings annually. Also the judge insisted that Bush never vote on an issue where he held an interest if he joined any bank.
Neil Bush, a Denver oil man, had been director of Silverado from 1985 to 1988. Neil resigned when his father was nominated on the Republican presidential ticket. Later that same year regulators seized Silverado Bank, declaring it insolvent. Silverado’s bank failure cost taxpayers billions.
The elder George Bush’s son Neil broke conflict of interest rules when he was a CEO at Silverado Banking Savings and Loan in Denver. Regulators discovered that Bush had failed to reveal to his fellow Silverado bank directors the fact that he had extensive business dealings at the pivotal moment Walters and Good received those enormous loans.
It was none other than Neil Bush who personally approved of these loans, never mentioning his business dealings with Walters. He personally arranged for Walters to receive a $900,000 line of credit in this cozy transaction.Neil Bush was also accused of neglecting to tell his fellow directors that Kenneth Good was preparing to invest $3 million in Bush’s oil drilling firm at this time. Bush’s lawyer Daniel Davidson accepted the regulatory agency’s allegations regarding the conflict of interest violation. He admitted they were unsafe practices.
Following Neil Bush’s conflict of interest admission, the failure had to be paid for by taxpayers, costing $1 billion. When Neil Bush’s father was president, similar deceptive traits surfaced, only in a much more deadly way.
Kuwait was slant drilling on Iraq’s land, stealing Iraq’s oil that they desperately desired. April Glaspie was U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. Saddam Hussein was understandably outraged over Kuwait’s slant drilling on Iraq land to steal Iraq’s oil.
Saddam asked April Glaspie what the United States would do if he invaded Kuwait to stop Kuwait’s oil theft. She asked U.S. oil officials about how to respond to this question. Glaspie was informed that the United States considered Kuwait’s oil theft of Iraqi oil an Arab-Arab problem to be solved by them.
Naturally Saddam Hussein interpreted this response to be a green light to invade Kuwait to right this wrong and stop Kuwait’s oil theft. He assumed that the U.S. would not interfere as April Ambassador Glaspie had told him that the U.S. had insisted that this was an Arab-Arab problem.
Convinced that he had received accurate information from Glaspie concerning the U.S. position on the slant drilling issue, which was considered a problem for Arabs to resolve, he invaded Kuwait. Now the hypocrisy of what the then Bush Administration surfaced in blazing Bush style.
Bush declared that Saddam Hussein was worse than Hitler, a strange comment indeed considering that the U.S. via the CIA helped put the ruthless Iraqi dictator in power. The U.S. then perpetuated his rule through providing advanced weaponry, even in the field of developing poison gas.
Saddam Hussein then used poison gas to commit genocide on the Kurdish population in his northern provinces and kill Iranian soldiers in the field during the Iran-Iraq War in clear defiance of international law.
Now suddenly this same dictator that had benefited from U.S. strategic and military technological assistance was said to be worse than Hitler. Bush warned U.S. citizens that Saddam Hussein might conquer the entire Middle East. In a flash Bush’s dire warnings were sent at lightning speed in a frenetic media blitz.
According to Bush, Saddam Hussein was threatening our American way of life, our jobs, and our freedom. Bush would not allow time for Arabs to negotiate to settle their problems, as Iraq Ambassador April Glaspie had been told would be the prevalent standard.
Iraq’s neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, with their sophisticated weapons, could have suppressed Iraq to say nothing of Egypt or Syria.
In Bush’s reckless haste to launch the Gulf War, he accelerated the recession of that time by spending billions to slaughter what some claim to be 100,000 Iraqis.
The Bush Administration never provided figures. When reporters questioned Colin Powell on that point he replied that the issue was of no interest to him.
Some Democrats voted against the war while polls revealed that 14 percent of the U.S. population opposed it. At the time these individuals were branded traitors by many in the neoconservative propaganda machine.
If Bush had allowed time to determine if negotiation could have prevented the slaughter, could that bloody conflict been avoided? We will never know!
Now we come to the younger George Bush acting as president. Even his election came under a dark cloud. A series of unsettling events, concerning voting irregularities, hung over the Republican Administration from day one.
Perhaps the most undemocratic and offensive moment took place in Miami, when a much-needed voter recount was being conducted. Some rabid Republicans, including staffers from the offices of Congressmen Tom DeLay and John Sweeney, boarded a bus in Washington D.C. and were Miami bound.
These Republican enthusiasts were determined that the voter recount would never take place. Stop it they did, pounding frenetically on the door of the room where the recount was proceeding, then physically abusing some involved in the process while intimidating others with their goon squad antics.
The counting by fearful unpaid citizens trying valiantly to make the democratic process work was stopped.
George Bush is considered by many, including international intellectuals such as Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter, to be the most unlawful, pathetic White House resident in our nation’s history. He is considered to be not a leader, not a genuine president, but a shabby pretender operating in a ruthless fashion with disregard for the U.S. Constitution.
When 9/11 happened, the Republican Administration, with Bush leading the way, began invoking dramatic calls for patriotism. The strange fact that those powerful planes smashing into the World Trade Center were mysteriously never intercepted has never been impartially investigated.
Why didn’t these planes approaching the World Trade Center show up on the radar warning systems so that the Air Force could be on alert to send up planes to stop this tremendous tragedy? Why wasn’t the World Trade Center protected?
George Bush used his State of the Union Address to strike fear into U.S. citizens. Bush told us that the U.S. had absolute proof that Iraq was threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. Bush went even further, claiming that the U.S. had absolute proof that Iraq was obtaining yellow cake uranium from Niger to develop nuclear weapons.
The Congress gave Bush a standing ovation for alerting us all to such a horrifying threat that Saddam Hussein and Iraq now posed. He had torn a page from his father’s propaganda book.
The elder Bush engaged in fear tactics when he compared Saddam to Hitler to help launch the Gulf War. Colin Powell was drawn into the scare tactic scenario by reading frightful forged documents to the UN General Assembly. Fox News called Powell’s effort “a virtuoso performance.”
Never have so many been fooled by so few. With television and the press along with a gullible Congress, the U.S. was off to war against Iraq in a Bush rerun, only this time the initial attack was christened under the mantle of “shock and awe.”
The shock was that after we caught Saddam Hussein he was tried and killed quickly. He could never tell that as many as 23 nations supplied him with weapons and ignored his killing the opposition in Iraq, even allowing him to keep enough weapons to perpetrate another wave of genocide on the Kurdish population of Northern Iraq.
None of these facts could be brought up at the trial of Saddam Hussein before he was convicted and executed. Photos surface, however, now and then of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein shaking hands in a friendly gesture while the dictator was being supplied with sophisticated weaponry in exchange for Iraq’s precious oil commodity.
After all the shock and awe debacle, Bush’s horrifying legacy for the Iraq War stands as follows: 600,000 to 1 million Iraqis dead, U.S. service personnel returning in coffins, 3,722, with over 55,000 combatants and non-combatants wounded.
Instead of bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq, Iraq’s infrastructure has been demolished. Two million Iraqis have fled for their lives to Syria, Iran and Jordan, generating enormous problems to feed, house, educate and provide hospital care for those who have been displaced.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Bush chases around the world in a luxuriously appointed Air Force One jet acting as if he has done a superb job while the horrifying Iraq War death debacle continues daily.
According to a recent poll, 76 percent of the U.S. public thinks that Congress has failed it. The reason, it would appear, is that the public thinks that Congress has failed it by not stopping the Iraq War.
Neil Bush, the elder Bush and the current White House resident Bush sadly force one, if honest and objective, to see a horrifying family legacy. This Bush Administration has generated the biggest national debt in the history of the planet.
Even worse, what has all this destruction and death in Iraq actually achieved?
