The Family Bush - Always Above the Law

As the news of Eliot Spitzer's resignation resounded endlessly on cable news stations yesterday, ...

The Bush Family Gets Away with Crimes That Would Land Anyone Else in Jail
By Robert Parry,
Consortium News. Posted November 26, 2007.

For decades, the Bush family has operated above the law, using powerful connections to brush aside evidence that would put lesser Americans in the slammer.
In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.
When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.
If there's any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it's their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light.
For decades -- arguably going back generations -- the Bushes have been protected by their unique position straddling two centers of national power, the family's blueblood Eastern Establishment ties and the Texas oil crowd with strong links to the Republican Right. [For details on this family phenomenon, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]




http://www.alternet.org/story/68843/

Published on Saturday, September 22, 2007
by The Nation

Blackwater: Hired Guns, Above the Law
by Jeremy Scahill

This is an edited transcript of the prepared testimony of Jeremy Scahill before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, September 21, 2007.


Over the past six days, we have all been following very closely the developments out of Baghdad in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of as many as 20 Iraqis by operatives working for the private military company Blackwater USA. The Iraqi government is alleging that among the dead are a small child and her parents and the prime minister has labeled Blackwater’s conduct as “criminal” and spoke of “the killing of our citizens in cold blood.” While details remain murky and subject to conflicting versions of what exactly happened, this situation cuts much deeper than this horrifying incident. The stakes are very high for the Bush administration because the company involved, Blackwater USA, is not just any company. It is the premiere firm protecting senior State Department officials in Iraq, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This company has been active in Iraq since the early days of the occupation when it was awarded an initial $27 million no-bid contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer. During its time in Iraq, Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights and other deadly incidents. About 30 of its operatives have been killed in Iraq and these deaths are not included in the official American death toll.




While the company’s operatives are indeed soldiers of fortune, their salaries are paid through hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxpayer funds allocated to Blackwater. What they do in Iraq is done in the name of the American people and yet there has been no effective oversight of Blackwater’s activities and actions. And there has been absolutely no prosecution of its forces for any crimes committed against Iraqis. If indeed Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater USA last Sunday, as appears to be the case, culpability for these actions does not only lie with the individuals who committed the killings or with Blackwater as a company, but also with the entity that hired them and allowed them to operate heavily-armed inside Iraq–in this case, the US State Department.
complete text is available at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/22/4016/


Bush Commutes Libby Sentence
(just as Poppy commuted Caspar Weinberger for war crimes in South America)

By Paul Kiel - July 2, 2007, 5:48PM
Breaking, from the AP:

"President Bush commutes the prison sentence for former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby."

Update: The president has reduced Libby's original sentence of thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine by stripping the sentence of the 2 1/2 years of jail time.

...
And isn't that the way it goes. The family Bush can do ANYTHING and they are never arrested, held to account nor do they enforce the law, except against people like Eliot Spitzer...and even that is interesting when you scrape the surface and see what and who Spitzer was investigating:


Two criminal investigations in New York are getting close to exposing a major Bush family and associates' international money-laundering operation that has spanned more than a generation and has been used to illegally fund US elections since the Nixon era.
According to CIA sources, most Bush family assets are tied up in off-shore accounts that are masked from investigators through the use of pass through companies and secretive interlocking board directorships.
The investigations of the secret Bush money trenches are coming to the fore as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer focuses in on the scandal involving Maurice "Hank" Greenberg and the inflation of the worth of American Insurance Group (AIG) through shady affiliates, including AIG reinsurer Coral Re of Barbados.
Greenberg was the CEO of AIG but was forced to step down amid the Spitzer probe. AIG was founded from Asia Life/CV Starr, a Shanghai-based international import/export and insurance firm founded in 1919 by Cornelius V. Starr, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative in Southeast Asia during World War II.
AIG's largest shareholder is Starr International Company (SICO), an off-shore corporation incorporated in Panama with headquarters in Bermuda.
Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who prosecuted President Clinton, is the nephew of Cornelius Starr.
Greenberg inherited the CEO job and Chairmanship from Starr as well as the $3.5 billion Starr Foundation.
Another probe by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is focused on long-time Bush backers Sam and Charles Wyly of Texas and a Bank of America off-shore account in the Isle of Man. According to intelligence sources, that probe is getting very close to an Isle of Man multi-billion dollar account controlled by the Bushes through an off-shore contrivance known as Five Star Trust.
http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2005/10/us_private_mili.html

George of Arabia: Better Kiss Your Abe 'Goodbye'
By Greg Palast

Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That's $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.
Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah's stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.
Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can't lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.
The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America's private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government's Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It's no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah�s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.
Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai's ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi's buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.
So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn't matter a twit whether it's Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citys past Chairman.
It's the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that's killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors' interest burden quintupled in just two years.

As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:

The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. There is no America. There is no democracy.The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Stealth, "Only our continued silence, compliance and protection of this evil within allows it to continue. When we realize how strong we are as individuals and most importantly collectively, we will no longer tolerate this dark night of the soul, imposed on our societies by those devoid of soul, passion, integrity, intellect and compassion - all the reasons for living. What we do from this moment forth only we can weigh in the mirror. WE can stand and demand these
thugs be removed from office (since congress is criminally complicit in obstructing impeachment) and have our city and state legislatures stand as our elected representatives, to begin at a local level to take our homes, our families and our country back from fascism.