It was the Bush family, particularly the President’s brothers, Jeb, later Governor of Florida, and Neil, who were involved in the fraudulent and very lucrative American savings and loan scandals ranging from 1989 to 1993. These manipulations by various savings and loan operators, including the notorious Charles Keating, eventually cost American taxpayers more than $500 billion.

            Through his connections to BCCI,  a Pakistani bank used for money laundering, George W. Bush eventually gained a sizable interest in a new oil company called Harken Energy.

On January 30, 1990, a respected trade journal of the petroleum industry, Platt's Oilgram News reported that a subsidiary of a small, Dallas-based independent oil company, Harken Energy Corporation, had just signed an agreement with the government of Bahrain. "Harken Bahrain Oil Company signed a production sharing contract today," the article announced, "that gave the company exclusive rights to carry out exploration, development, production, transportation, and marketing of petroleum throughout most of Bahrain's Gulf offshore areas."

That the government of Bahrain, and its state-owned petroleum franchise, Bahrain National Oil Company, or Banoco, should choose tiny Harken Energy to explore for oil off its coast came as something of a surprise to industry experts. Amoco, the global oil giant, had also wanted the contract, and Chevron Corporation, another multinational, had advised the Bahraini government on choosing an American company for the venture.

Harken Energy had fewer than a thousand employees, and no experience whatsoever in international oil production. The company had confined its activities entirely to the domestic production of oil, and to expanding itself through the acquisition of troubled U.S. oil producers at bargain-basement prices. And it was so cash poor that it didn't even have enough capital to drill for oil without bringing in well-heeled partners to finance the exploration.

Even more surprising, Harken hadn't even actively sought the deal.

"It was not our intention to seek out international opportunities," Monte Swetnam, the president of Harken Exploration Company, the Bahrain-based subsidiary of Harken, told World Oil, another industry trade publication. "However, we were introduced to officials in Bahrain and were able to present our credentials to them. And from that, a relationship developed . . . that has evolved into one of mutual respect, ultimately resulting in signing the production-sharing contract."

The relationship promised Harken more than respect. The offshore fields were bordered on one side by a Saudi Arabian deposit with proven reserves of about 7 billion barrels, and a field belonging to Qatar with 2 billion barrels. The Bahraini offshore reserves had the potential to be enormous.

Harken Energy was in the right place at the right time. But it had something else - the right name. In January 1991 a global coalition led by President George Bush had mobilized an enormous military force to drive Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Another George Bush -- the son of the President of the United States -- was a director and shareholder of Harken Energy.

The few press reports about the deal questioned the motives of the government of Bahrain for making the deal with Harken Energy. Even the Wall Street Journal, customarily reserved on such matters, reported in a page-one analysis of the contract in December 1991 that it "raises the question of . . . an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."

George W. Bush claimed at the time that family influence plaid no part whatsoever in securing the potentially lucrative contract, a statement that can be viewed as highly doubtful.. According to Swetnam, the Bahrainis knew that Bush was on the company's board of directors and "were clearly aware he was the President's son."

Alas for Harken, the Bush name wasn't magical enough to ensure a strike off the coast of Bahrain. The company drilled two dry holes. As usual in his disasterous dealings,  Bush himself fared better. He sold off two-thirds of his holdings in Harken for nearly a million dollars, and bought a small share of the Texas Rangers, a deal that ultimately netted him -- with a helping hand from Texas taxpayers -- some $15 million.

7 Energy holdings to Harken Energy in In early 1986, George W. Bush sold his Spectrum return for 212, 000 shares of Harken stock and a seat on their Board of Directors.

            On December 10, 1986, Harken gave Bush an option to purchase an additional 80,000 shares of stock. Bush then secured a loan from Harken in the amount of $96 thousand at a rate of 5%.

            In December of 1988, Bush received another Harken stock purchase option for an additional 25,000 shares for which he secured a loan of $84 thousand.

            In total, Harken had loaned George W. Bush a total of $180 thousand.

            Although Harken Energy stock was not an attractive stock in 1990, Bush was approached by a broker, Ralph Smith of Sutro & Company of Los Angeles and offered $4 per share. He sold the stock on June 22, 1990.

            On August 20, 1990, Harken Energy stock fell to $2.37 a share.

            The name of the anonymous purchaser has never been made public although it is now believed that it was a branch of Harvard University.

            Mr. Bush somehow forgot to notify the Security and Exchange Commission of his transactions, stating at various times that the accountants had somehow neglected to send in the forms or, alternately, that the forms had indeed been submitted in a timely manner but the SEC had lost them.

            One of the forms had a Bush signature but no date.

            It should be noted that during the Persian Gulf War, it was Binladen Brothers Construction (now the Binladen Group) that helped build airfields for US military units.

            The bin Laden brothers were then described as good friends of the US government.. Later the bin Laden firm continued to be employed to construct an American air base in Saudi Arabia despite the fact that Osama had already been blamed for terrorist acts such as the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers at the Dhahran base which killed 19 Americans.

            Federal investigators closed the BCCI Bank in 1991 after it suffered more than $10 billion in losses.

            BCCI was a Pakistani-run institution with front companies in the Cayman Islands that used secret accounts for global money-laundering and was used by U. S. intelligence to funnel money to bin-Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet-backed government.

            Former Presidential assistant to President Truman and later cabinet member under President Carter, Washington attorney and staunch Democratic, Clark Clifford was indicted for his role in the BCCI swindles. He avoided the humiliation of a public trial and probable conviction because the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton determined that Clifford was “too senile” to try.

Throughout his long, disaster-crowned business career and in his six years as governor of Texas, George W. Bush relied heavily on his family’s political and economic connections in his attempt to build an economic empire. And Bush, both in private life, after becoming governor of Texas, and subsequently, President of the United States, was always more than willing to return any economic or political favors he was granted.

George W. Bush made a great deal of his Texas childhood. He proudly boasted of his attendance at San Jacinto Junior High School in Midland, Texas. Bush had no problem using his family for economic and political advantage but in practice, preferred to depict himself as just another Texas Good Old Boy.

The Bush family was, and is, East Coast Establishment. The exclusive Yale University, breeding ground for so many high level Central Intelligence Agency personages, became a second home for the Bush family.

Senator Prescott Bush, a Texas oilman and grandfather of George W. Bush, graduated from Yale. So did his uncles, Jonathan and Prescott Jr. and when Bush was born in New Haven in 1946, his father, George H.W. Bush, was completing his college degree at that institution.

George W. Bush entered Yale in 1964. He wasn't the personality his father had been, but he was eventually elected the president of his fraternity and joined the highly exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones Society to which his father had also belonged.

When Bush graduated in 1968, he faced the prospect of being sent to Vietnam, but quickly avoided the potential danger of combat by joining the Texas National Guard.

At that time, the Guard had 100,000 applicants on its waiting list. However, George Bush was sworn in as a member of the 147th unit of the Texas Air National Guard the same day he applied. Sid Adger, a Houston businessman and close friend of Bush's father, asked Ben Barnes, who was then the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, to give the Bush son a safe berth.

Bush wasn't the only son of a prominent Texan in his unit. Others included the sons of Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Republican Senator John Tower .

Bush later claimed that he wished to establish an identity separate from his famous father, who eventually became the chairman of the Republican National Committee, head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, and, from January of 1976 to January of 1977, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Gerald Ford.

After being rejected by the University of Texas law school, he subsequently enrolled in the Harvard Business School. Two years later, equipped with an MBA from Harvard, George Bush returned to Midland to attempt to make his own fortune in the oil industry, just as his father had done almost thirty years before.

Bush had no experience whatsoever in the oil business but he was given money from his parents and automatically acquired a powerful support group of wealthy family friends, who subsequently became the principal financiers of his subsequent disastrous oil ventures.

Before going into business, however, Bush made a foray into the Texas political arena. In 1978, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Midland, started a business, Arbusto Energy, Inc. (Arbusto is Spanish for Bush), married Laura Welch, a librarian from Midland and bought property in the district of retiring Representative George Mahon.

Bush lost the election, but gained the confidence of relatives and family friends who agreed to gamble on Arbusto. Owing to the huge losses its limited partners subsequently sustained, Bush's first venture into the business world could certainly be considered a tax shelter.

From 1979 to 1983 nearly fifty individuals poured over $4.7 million into Arbusto and its successor, Bush Exploration. Among them were some of his father's most reliable political supporters. These family friends and political hopefuls guaranteed that the shaky company stayed afloat.

1. John Macomber, the chief executive officer of Celanese Corporation, invested $79,500, and William Draper III, a venture capitalist, put in $93,000. Macomber, a friend of Bush's uncle Jonathan Bush, would go on to serve as the president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States under President Bush, the same job Draper had held under President Reagan.

2. George Ohrstrom and his wife invested $100,000 in Arbusto. Ohrstrom had attended Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut with Bush's father.

3. Philip Uzielli, was a wealthy  business partner of Ohrstrom and the owner of Executive Resources, a company based first in the Dutch West Indies and later in Panama. Uzielli put $50,000 into one of the early Arbusto partnerships. In January 1982, his company bought ten percent of Arbusto's stock for a $1 million. The investment made Uzielli Arbusto's largest benefactor, a privilege that later cost him dearly. 

The million-dollar purchase price was at least three times more than the stock he bought was worth. Uzielli, incidentally, had another connection to the Bush clan besides Ohrstrom. He'd been a close friend of James Baker III, who was intimately involved in the elder Bush's political career, ever since the two had been classmates at Princeton University. Baker managed Bush's presidential campaign in 1980 and was Secretary of State during Bush's sole term as President.

4. Russell Reynolds, Jr., the founder of his own executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, put up $23,250.

5. H. Leland Getz, who co-founded the firm, invested twice as much - $46,500. All of these individuals were personal friends of the Bush family.

Reynolds had attended Yale with George W.'s uncle Jonathan who was an investment manager and New York Republican Party official and who lined up most of Arbusto's backers. Many of these unshorn sheep were already clients of his, and he charged his usual commission for recruiting them. Jonathan Bush would later serve a term on the board of Russell Reynolds Associates.     

Reynolds, a former finance chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, also raised $4 million for Vice President Bush's 1988 presidential campaign.

Investing in Arbusto, however, turned out to be an economic horror show. By April 1984, Arbusto had drilled ninety-five holes, with forty seven yielding oil, three yielding natural gas, and forty five that were dry. The company had returned only $1.5 million to its investors. "The bottom line is it didn't work out very well with Arbusto," Russell recalled. "I think we got maybe twenty cents on the dollar."

Philip Uzielli tried to salvage the disaster by purchasing another ten percent in the company for $150,000, but to no avail. "We lost a lot of money in the oil business," Uzielli was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 1991. "We had a lot of dry wells. . . . Things were terrible. It was dreadful."

We wrote the money off the minute we invested," said Stephen Kass, a classmate of Bush's at Harvard Business School. Trying to capitalize on that sentiment, Bush changed the name of the company from Arbusto to Bush Exploration in 1982. His father had been Vice President for more than a year at the time.

But the name change was of no help. The world price of oil was in serious decline, and even the most successful independent oil companies fell upon hard times. The less competent quickly went bankrupt.

 By 1984 the only way Bush could save his business was to find yet another solvent partner. This time he turned to an old Yale classmate of his, William DeWitt, Jr., who owned Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, an Ohio oil exploration company. DeWitt came from a wealthy background and his father had once owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball club. DeWitt and his investment partner, Mercer Reynolds, later became significant donors to both George H.W.Bush's 1988 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee.

These two men also attended to the needs of the son. Rather than invest in Bush Exploration, they bought it out. Conveniently, as part of the rescue mission, Bush became Spectrum 7's chief executive officer at an annual salary of $75,000 and was presented with1.1 million shares of the company's stock. Unfortunately for DeWitt and Reynolds, George W. Bush, true to form, quickly turned Spectrum 7 into an economic disaster. Two years after the merger, in 1986, world oil prices fell even further. Bush needed another bailout and he quickly found a willing savior in Harken Oil and Gas, an oil exploration company headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

Despite the fact that Spectrum 7 had posted losses of $400,000 only six months earlier and now carried $3 million in debt, Bush and his partners received $2 million worth of Harken stock. Bush's share was worth about $500,000. Bush also became a director, and he was paid as much as $120,000 in consulting fees plus $131,250 in stock options even though he spent much of 1987 and 1988 working on his father's presidential campaign. That was entirely acceptable with Harken; unlike DeWitt, Bush's new benefactor, well aware of the economic disasters that followed in his wake, was certainly not interested in him having any say in the running of the company.

"His name was George Bush," Phil Kendrick, Harken's founder, said. "That was worth the money they paid him."

During the presidency of Herbert Hoover, his son declined to become involved in any business ventures because, as he said, “My father’s name is not for sale.”

It is painfully obvious that George W. Bush had no such scruples but he also had less business sense than the average janitor and if he had not had a politically and economically powerful father’s name to sustain him, his economic demise would have been swift and certain.

Stuart Watson, who was a member of Harken's board of directors at the time of the Spectrum deal, echoed that view in a 1994 interview with a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. "George was very useful to Harken," Watson said. "He would have been more so if he had had funds, but as far as contacts were concerned, he was terrific."

Indeed, once the valuable Bush name was stuck on the corporation, business at Harken began to quicken..

When Harken bought out Spectrum 7, the company was broke and desperately needed a cash infusion. As the talks with Spectrum 7 progressed, Harken officials were lining up a major new financial backer: Harvard Management Company, Inc.

 The investment firm's only client is Harvard University and it manages the school's multibillion-dollar endowments.

A month after Bush joined Harken, Harvard Management agreed to invest at least $20 million in Harken. It would eventually come to own some ten million shares of Harken's stock, making it one of the company's largest investors.

The Bush name obviously was the dominant factor in this arrangement.

Michael Eisenson, a partner in Harvard Management Company who also had the good fortune to be on Harken's board of directors, stated later that he and other Harvard officials picked Harken after reviewing several proposals from energy companies. "Harken management seemed capable and honest," Eisenson said.

The Bush family name certainly would have made an impression on Eisenson's boss, Robert Stone, Jr., who was one of Harvard Management's directors. Stone was "the driving force" behind Harvard's Southwest oil and gas investments, according to Scott Sperling, who worked with Eisenson at Harvard. Stone himself was heavily involved in the Texas oil and gas industry. At the time of the Harken flowering, he was the chairman of Kirby Exploration, an oil and gas transportation company based in Houston and he also knew the Bush family.

His father-in-law, Godfrey Rockefeller, had invested in George H.W. Bush's oil drilling ventures in the late 1940s. Stone's brother, Galen L. Stone, was the U.S. envoy to Cyprus during the first Reagan-Bush Administration.

In 1980 and 1988 he contributed to the elder Bush's presidential campaigns. And like Bush's uncle Jonathan, Stone had been on the board of directors of Russell Reynolds Associates.

            Harken was Harvard Management's first major investment in Texas wildcat operations, a part of the university's investment history it would rather forget. The investments in oil and gas would eventually generate nearly $200 million in losses for the endowment.

The university's commitment to Harken was surprising in view of the bad shape the company was in. By Harken executives' own accounts, the company's financial statements were "a mess" and "a fast numbers game." But insiders insist that Harvard's money mangers wouldn't have kept pumping money into Harken if they didn't think it would become profitable.

For a time, they had reason to believe it would.

The Bahrain agreement, announced on January 30, 1990, seemed to justify Harvard's enthusiasm for Harken. While Bush said he had no role in securing the deal, and added that he had argued against it, his wealthy patrons certainly ensured that Harken could pull it off.

Bass Enterprises Production Company put up $25 million to finance the drilling. After Bass Enterprises invested in the Bahrain operation, paying for the exploration that would eventually produce two dry wells, Harvard Management upped its stake in Harken to 30 percent.

Bass Enterprises is part of the financial empire of the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, two of whom became members of Team 100, an elite club of big donors to the Republican National Committee, during the elder Bush's 1988 presidential campaign.             The Bass family has been generous to the son as well, having contributed more than $273,000 to him. All four Bass brothers -- Sid, Robert, Edward, and Lee -- attended Yale, as did their father, Perry Bass. Edward was enrolled at Yale with George W. Bush.

In August 1990, Harken posted a $23 million loss from its consolidated operations, sending its share price down from $3 to a year-end low of $2.37. Bush, however, avoided the downturn in the company's fortunes. Two months earlier, on June 22, 1990, he had unloaded 212,140 shares, or about two-thirds of his holdings, for $848,560.

As a director of the company, Bush was required to promptly report the stock sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He did -- eight months late. Bush later claimed he had indeed reported the transaction in a timely manner, but that somehow the paperwork had been lost. Whatever the case, the eight-month delay attracted the attention of SEC investigators. The timing of the transaction seemed too good to be true.

As a member of Harken's audit committee, Bush was completely familiar with the company's finances and was aware that it was about to restructure its debt - a move that would immediately depress the price of its shares. In addition, he may have been alerted that the company was about to post a huge loss. In April 1991 the SEC launched an insider-trading investigation of Bush. The outcome of the probe raised more questions than it answered.

When the investigation began, the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breeden, who had been appointed by President Bush. Before joining the SEC, Breeden had for several years been the President's economic policy adviser. President Bush thanked Breeden by name in several speeches. Breeden's office at the SEC was adorned with so many pictures of President and Mrs. Bush that a reporter for the New York Times observed, "George Bush is Breeden's Mao." Before going to the White House, Breeden had been a partner in Baker & Botts, the law firm started by the grandfather of James A. Baker III, President 's Secretary of State.

The SEC's general counsel at the time, who would be ultimately responsible for any litigation the commission would initiate, was James Doty. Doty had also worked at Baker & Botts, where he represented the younger Bush in business related to his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team.
             In addition to collecting reams of documents, investigators for the SEC interviewed Harken's lawyer as well as the broker who'd sold Bush's stock. Then, in 1993, the agency dropped the investigation. William McLucas, the director of the SEC's enforcement division, said "there was no case there." But in a letter to George W. Bush announcing the agency's decision, McLucas's deputy, Bruce Hiler, wrote that the end of the probe "must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff's investigation."

Bush, who by then was running for governor of Texas, gave the letter his own spin. "The SEC fully investigated the stock deal," he said in October 1994. "I was exonerated." Since 1993, Breeden, Doty, and other lawyers at Baker & Botts have given George W. Bush $182,000.

One of the questions the SEC didn't answer was who bought Bush's stock.

In his statement of intent to sell, which Bush also had to file with the SEC, he said he was putting his 212,140 shares on the open market. That was nearly twenty times the daily volume of stock that traded on average during June 1990; without a buyer willing to absorb such a large block of stock, the share price would have plummeted.

Under questioning by SEC investigators, Ralph Smith, a Los Angeles broker with Sutro & Company, who handled the sale, said that he solicited the shares at the behest of an institutional investor whose name has never been released.

There is considerable and convincing evidence that suggests that the mysterious institutional investor was Harvard University. The university is known to have increased its holdings in Harken at that time.

In all of these disastrous financial dealings in involving the grossly incompetent son of a President of the United States, one fact stands out with great clarity.

George W. Bush is someone who lived off of the reputation of his father, had no sense of moral or financial integrity whatsoever and was the only one who benefited from the collapse of the various businesses he was able to persuade others to support.

When the logical consequences of his cataclysmic ineptness became evident, George W. Bush was able to escape financial loss by selling his endangered stock and cheerfully allowing others to suffer the consequences.

These thoroughly amoral and certainly dishonest dealings are by no means limited to a small handful of men but are certainly the norm, not the exception. And since men like the ones mentioned here have access to large sums of other people’s money, they always remain above the destruction of their cheerfully manipulated and piratical forays into the marketplace.

While a legion of small stockholders and an even greater legion of unsuspecting employees are left holding a very empty bag, the Bushes of the world merely look for another succulent deal while their inferiors are forced to look for other employment where then can help enrich other paragons of corporate virtue.

Let us now consider additional activities of America’s economic ruling classes.

`           There exists yet another close connection between bin Laden and the Bush family is a $12-billion private international investment firm known as the Carlyle Group. Although it has removed its web site since the Sept. 11 attacks, it is know that Carlyle directors include former Reagan Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker and former Reagan aide and GOP operative Richard Darman.

            The New York Times, in a 2001 article, reported that former President Bush was allowed to buy into Carlyle's investments, which involved at least 164 companies around the world.

            According to the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 28, 2001, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm."

            It has been confirmed by the senior Bush's chief of staff that Bush sent a thank you note to the bin Laden family after a social visit in early 2001.

            With such connections and his son as a sitting President of the United States, the senior Bush's Carlyle involvement was questioned by Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, who said, "Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States government."

This article, compiled from various published sources, is an excerpt from a forthcoming work on the economic and political background of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Gregory Douglas, author of ‘Regicde: The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Available from TBR Books.