A Republican businessman vilifies George Bush

Richard W. Behan: 'A Republican businessman vilifies George Bush'
Posted on Monday, October 18 @ 10:21:17 EDT
Mr. Karl Schwarz -- Conservative and Devoutly Christian -- and His Wild Book of Outrage
By Richard W. Behan
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18312&mode=nested&order=0

George Bush is not a Christian, Karl Schwarz tells you. He is a liar, and Christians don't lie.

Schwarz is telling this to anyone who might listen, including President Bush, to whom he fired off a smoking email entitled "An American Demands the Truth From You."

Other listeners are adding up quickly. First he sent to his stockholders--300,000 people or so--a PowerPoint presentation daylighting the greed, deception, and stupefying corruption of the Bush Administration. Lately he is making the rounds of the talk show circuit, and the wild book of outrage will soon be on the streets.

It is a formidable read. 810 pages. And a comprehensive title to match: One Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas: A Conservative Republican Speaks Out on September 11, 2001; Afghanistan; Iraq; Bush-Cheney 2004; Imperial Oil "Strategeries".



Mr. Schwarz' faith does not surface in the book, but his disgust as a citizen is apparent, and his white-hot anger about the Bush Administration is supported by vivid descriptions of graft and corruption, with dates, names, and places.

The book displays the ongoing transformation of a decent democracy into the functional fascism of corporate empire. The Republicans are not uniquely responsible for this--Schwarz takes directed swipes at the Clinton years--but the Bush Administration's frenzied, happy sellout to the corporate and the wealthy is rapidly completing the process. George Bush and his henchmen, Schwarz asserts, are brazenly using the military might of the United States to enrich their political supporters and their associated corporate interests.

Karl W. B. Schwarz lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was twice asked by his party (but declined) to run for governor, opposing Bill Clinton. He was a top fundraiser for the Republican National Committee, as a close personal friend of RNC treasurer, William J. "Mr. Mac" McManus. Schwarz was active at the highest levels in the re-election campaign of George H.W. Bush. He has not been a lightweight Republican.

But neither is he dogmatically partisan. More than victory in politics, Schwarz seeks integrity in public life and truth in the flow of information to the public.

One Way Ticket to Crawford, Texas is a comprehensive expose of the Bush Administration's systematic deflecting of public policy to favor private, corporate interests. The Administration leapt on the opportunity provided by the anthrax scare, for example, to inoculate 550,000 servicemen and women with a vaccine known to be dangerous. Hugely profitable to a pharmaceutical corporation benefactor, there is clinical evidence the vaccine caused widespread respiratory disease, heart attacks, strokes, and pulmonary embolisms. The book also details the Bush Administration complicity in Enron's savaging of the California electricity market. And so forth.

Schwarz' signature revelation is the story of what happened to an obscure Argentinean company, the Bridas Corporation--and how that might explain 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

There is $7.34 trillion worth of petroleum and another $3 trillion of natural gas in the Caspian Basin. A pipeline across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India could bring it to market. (Included in this "market" are a number of gas-fired power plants in Pakistan, owned by US corporations, and, at the time, an Enron project in Dabhol, India.)

In 1995 the Bridas Corporation was negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan to build the pipeline. The U.S. Government and the Unocal Corporation were pressing the Taliban fiercely to decline. In January of 1996, however, Bridas signed the contract to proceed: it now controlled the flow of Caspian riches.

Fast forward to1998. The Project for a New American Century is staffed by a group of "neoconservatives," starkly rightwing political thinkers and activists. It is committed to maintaining the military and economic supremacy in the world accorded the United States by the collapse of the Soviet Union. On January 26, 1998, the PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton urging the removal of Saddam Hussein by military means, if necessary. Should he remain in power, much would be put at hazard, including "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil." Signing the letter were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams.

Fast forward now to 2000, an election year. Eleven members of the PNAC would assume prominent roles in the upcoming administration of George W. Bush: the signers of the 1998 letter to Clinton, plus Richard Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Lewis Libby. In September the PNAC made public another document, a 90-page report entitled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses." The new document advocated pre-emptive war--something never done in the history of the nation--but it realized how sharp a departure this would be. The "transformation" would be long and difficult, in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor." President Bush, early in his Administration, formally adopted the concept when he signed and issued the National Security Strategy document.

One more fast forward: to January of 2001. The Bush Administration has taken office, and the linkages with the oil industry are intimate, historic, and huge. The president and vice president are just the openers: eight cabinet members and the National Security Advisor were drafted directly from the oil industry, and so were 32 other officials, in the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.

Vice President Dick Cheney convenes his supersecret "Energy Task Force." Its membership and deliberations remain deliberately obscured, but Schwarz is certain the forced removal of the Taliban and the Bridas Corporation was discussed. The citizen group Judicial Watch did force the release of a few documents, however, with a lawsuit. Prominent among them is a map of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks: the Cheney Task Force had more than a passing interest in Iraqi oil, as well.

From Paul O'Neill and others we know the new Bush people, from their first days in office, intended to invade Iraq. Less well known was the covert planning, undertaken in the spring of 2001, for an attack on Afghanistan. The State Department gained the concurrence of both India and Pakistan for the attack, but as late as August 2, U.S. negotiators were still asking the Taliban to rescind the pipeline contract with the Bridas Corporation. The negotiations were fruitless.

On August 6, 2001, President Bush ignored the CIA's warning of a terrorist attack contained in the "Presidential Daily Briefing," and 36 days later the World Trade Center was rubble. Was this the "catastrophic and catalyzing event" the Project for a New American Century anticipated, and was the Bush Administration in any way involved?

The Internet is full of assertions that it was. Websites, books, and DVD's abound, making their cases--some alarming, others hyperbolic, conspiratorial, or looney. Michael Ruppert 's book Crossing the Rubicon is alarming. Ruppert lays the blame for 9/11 directly at the feet of Vice President Cheney, and his argument was worthy enough to stimulate an invitation from the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco--hardly on the lunatic fringe--to present it in person. Speaking on August 31, 2004, Ruppert did so. Attorney Stanley Hilton, on the other hand, claims George Bush personally signed the order authorizing the attacks of 9/11, and he intends to prove it in a court of law. Mr. Hilton was chief of staff for Senator Robert Dole, which is a decent enough credential to keep him out of the looney bin, but his assertion does give pause to reasonable people.

The reasonable people of New York City, however, are evenly split: a Zogby International poll in late August found 49.3% of those interviewed believed the Bush Administration had foreknowledge of the attacks on the Trade Towers and "consciously failed" to act.

To Karl Schwarz' credit, he chooses only to establish the dots of fact, leaving it to others to connect them and find culpability. But his dots show the Bush Administration was fully aware of the Bridas contract and its threat to the domestic oil industry.

Anyone past middle school can understand how desperately the Bush Administration needed a credible excuse to proceed with its planned attack on Afghanistan. To suggest 9/11 was engineered is risky, but to consider it an unrelated coincidence is asking a great deal. Can anyone be that lucky? There is, of course, a middle ground between engineering and random good fortune: the Bush Administration might in fact have known about the impending disaster but chose, as half of the New Yorkers believe, to do nothing.

On October 7, 2001 the attack on Afghanistan--planned long before 9/11--was undertaken. On December 31, Hamid Karzai is appointed by the Bush Administration to be interim president of Afghanistan, and much has been made of his former service to the Unocal Corporation, as a consultant on the Trans Afghanistan pipeline.

With the Taliban deposed, the Bridas Corporation's contract to build the pipeline was now in play, and on February 8, 2002 its fate was sealed. Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan agreed to a new plan for a pipeline, and by the end of the year a project known as the Central Asia Pipeline was born. The Bridas contract was, in Karl Schwarz' words, breached by US military force.

On February 23, 2003 the Bush Administration agreed to finance the Central Asia Pipeline and protect it with US troops, stationed at permanent bases in the region.

The $10 trillion of hydrocarbon fluids in the Caspian Basin are now firmly controlled by US oil companies, including BP/Amoco, Chevron-Texaco, Amerada Hess, Devon Energy, and Remington/Western Resources. (These companies also have in common a law firm to represent them: Baker Botts of Houston, Texas. The senior partner in the firm is James Baker, the engineer of George Bush's selection as President by the Supreme Court, and former Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration. Baker Botts has been retained also by Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia. Prince Aziz has been accused of complicity in 9/11--and sued--by the families of World Trade Center victims, and Baker Botts is defending him.)

In Afghanistan, neither the Bridas Corporation--nor Osama bin Laden--has been seen or heard of since.

Does the Afghanistan episode demonstrate the influence of the oil industry in the administration of George W. Bush? Does it explain what happened next?

With "Mission Accomplished" in Afghanistan, the doctrine of pre-emptive war can now be applied elsewhere.

President Bush spoke repeatedly of an al Qaida-Iraqi linkage, deliberately and successfully (and we know now falsely) persuading the American public Saddam Hussein was an accessory to 9/11. Chemical weapons, biological weapons, soon-to-be nuclear weapons. Months and months of lies and deception at home, of arm twisting abroad and at the United Nations. And then came the "pre-emptive" invasion.

Now that the lies of the Bush Administration have been exposed, we are told the Iraqi adventure was undertaken to bring freedom and democracy to that tragic region of the world. Liberation to the Iraqis, however, looks more like occupation. And the construction, once more, of permanent military bases in Iraq provides ample reason to feel that way.

US military might has now cordoned off, during the Bush Administration, both the $10 trillion in Caspian Basin resources and the world's second largest pool of petroleum in Iraq. This is a fact, one of Karl Schwarz' dots. Is it truly just a collateral result, a mere by-product of bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East?

Ask who benefits from the fact. Ask who bears the costs. And ask how it happened. Karl Schwarz can answer all three questions, with names, dates, and places. He will let you connect his dots.

Mr. Schwarz has seen what other Republicans need to see: Emperor Bush is utterly naked. He is a geopolitical Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain of his "freedom and democracy" rhetoric there lies indeed a world-class liar, a wretched charlatan.

As no other president in history, George W. Bush has directed a Big Lie campaign against his own country, disgracing our nation in the eyes of the world and dividing our people at home

We need to honor, by reinstating it, our proud national heritage of honesty, decency, and generosity in both foreign and domestic affairs. We need to regain the respect of the community of nations. We need to salvage our democracy.

We need to give George W. Bush a one-way ticket home.

This essay is deliberately not copyrighted, so permission to reproduce it is unnecessary. Richard W. Behan's latest book is Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001). For information about the book go to http://www.rockisland.com/~rwbehan/. Behan is currently working on a more broadly rendered critique, Degenerate Democracy: A Failing U.S. Constitution and the Triumph of Corporate Avarice. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com.