Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (93 page)

18
. Littwin made the same allegation of a Barnes-Bush deal in court pleadings during his suit alleging wrongful termination.

19
. Pete Slover and George Kuempel, “Adviser Asked Barnes to Recall Guard Details Before bush joined Race,”
Dallas Morning News
, September 26, 1999.

20
. Thomas B. Edsall and Mike Allen, “Bush ‘Bundlers’ Take Fundraising to New Level,”
Washington
Post
, July 14, 2003.

21
. Association records show Spellings as a lobbyist in 1999; five years later he was president of the association.

22
. The No Child Left Behind Act is a federal law with a budget of over fifty billion dollars aimed at reforming various areas of U.S. primary and secondary schooling with a focus on outcome-based education such as standardized testing. The act also requires schools to release the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every enrolled student to military recruiters unless the student specifically opts out.

23
. Ron Suskind,
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 2.

24
. A colleague who had accompanied me to Spellings’s office spoke to him by phone the next day. In that subsequent conversation, Spellings confirmed that he knew George W. Bush in 1968, when he worked for Barnes.

25
. Bill Minutaglio,
First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), pp. 175–76.

26
. Laurence I. Barrett, “Junior Is His Own Bush Now,”
Time
, July 31, 1989.

21: SHOCK AND . . . OIL?

1
. David Brooks, “Obama Admires Bush,”
New York Times
, May 16, 2008.

2
. David Nyhan, “A Bush Slip-Up at the End,”
Boston Globe
, December 3, 1999.

3
. Few families were more involved in the military economy than the Bushes. Munitions had long been part of the family business, starting with W.’s great-grandfather Samuel Bush, who served as point man for American small arms manufacturing in World War I and also played a crucial role in the nation’s oldest continually operating gun company, Remington Arms. Dresser Industries, with Prescott Bush on its board, had expanded greatly during World War II, thanks to defense contracts. Poppy served as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, which, until just after September 11, enjoyed substantial investments from Saudi Arabia’s bin Laden family and specialized in buying and selling defense companies that did business with the government.

4
. Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(New York: Metropolitan, 2007), p. 380.

5
. Project for the New American Century,
Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources
for a New Century
, September 2000, p. 51.

6
. Klein,
Shock Doctrine
, p. 441.

7
. Stephen J. Glain, “Halliburton Says Employees Got Kickbacks on Iraq Work,”
Boston Globe
, January 24, 2004.

8
. Don Van Natta Jr., “High Payments to Halliburton for Fuel in Iraq,”
New York Times
, December 10, 2003. Also Joel Brinkley and Eric Schmitt, “Halliburton Will Repay U.S. Excess Charges for Troops’ Meals,”
New York Times
, February 3, 2004.

9
. James Risen, “Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said,”
New York Times
, July 18, 2008.

10
. Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein,
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
(New York: Random House, 2006), pp. ix–x.

11
. Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, “ ‘A Different Understanding with the President,’ ”
Washington
Post
, June 24, 2007.

12
. Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, “Document Says Oil Chiefs Met with Energy Task Force,”
Washington Post
, November 16, 2005.

13
. Judicial Watch, “Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields,” July 17,2003,
www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi=oilfield=pr.shtml
.

14
. Author interview with Royal Masset, May 27, 2004.

15
. For an excellent account of the U.S. role in propping up and arming Saddam Hussein, see Alan Friedman,
Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq
(New York: Bantam, 1993).

16
. Andrew Cockburn,
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
(New York: Scribner, 2007), pp. 76–77.

17
. Richard Sale, “Saddam Key in Early CIA Plot,” United Press International, April 11, 2003.

18
. Tom Barry,
Central America Inside Out: The Essential Guide to Its Societies, Politics, and Economics
(New York: Grove, 1994), p. 470.

19
. At the same time, Noriega authorized intelligence-gathering flights by U.S. Lockheed Martin SR-71 “Blackbird” high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft over Nicaragua and El Salvador in order for the CIA to supply intelligence data to the contras and the Salvadoran government forces fighting the leftist and FLMN guerrillas.

20
. Author interview with Larry Birns, August 15, 2008.

21
. Count de Marenches and David A. Andelman,
The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage
in the Age of Terrorism
(New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 254.

22
. In an interview with Paris’s
Le Nouvel Observateur
in January 1998, Brzezinski was asked, “Do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” He answered: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

23
. See among others Cockburn,
Rumsfeld
, pp. 1–10; and Gail Sheehy, “Who’s in Charge Here,”
Mother Jones
, July 22, 2004,
http://motherjones.com/news/update/2004/07/07_400.html
.

24
.
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
, CNN, September 8, 2002.

25
. In 2004, Secretary-General Kofi Annan would denounce the invasion in blunt terms: “It was illegal.”See “Iraq War Illegal, Says Annan,” BBC News, September 16, 2004.

26
. Kevin Phillips,
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of
Bush
(New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 18–19.

27
. Simon Pia, “Scotsman Diary: Oiling the Wheels,”
Scotsman
, September 15, 2000.

28
. Heather Connon, “Cairn Builder Reaches Peak,”
Observer
, January 25, 2004.

29
. Author interview with Mark Vozar, November 12, 2006.

30
. As noted in chapter 15, when George W. Bush’s Arbusto received an infusion of more than a million dollars from Moran Exploration, Moran staffers in Midland expressed misgivings about the deal to their bosses. Years later, Dick Moran said that he did not recall putting the money into Bush’s company. It is worth noting that about the time of Moran’s bet on Bush’s risky deal, Moran itself was benefiting from a twenty-million-dollar infusion from London American Energy (LAE), a U.K.-financed enterprise. LAE’s board members included John Mackin, a Scottish American who chaired Zapata Offshore, and London American chairman Sir Alastair Down, a former head of BP who had spearheaded drilling in Alaska and who was in 1982 serving as a director of the Scottish American Investment Trust. (At least two of the companies funded by LAE, Moran and Adobe Oil and Gas, were drilling heavily off Scotland at the time.)

31
. Nicholas Christian, “Bush Not Sheepish About Trick,”
Scotsman
, February 20, 2005.

32
. White House press release, “Interview of the President by the Times of London,” June 30,2005. Available at
www.whitehouse.gov
.

33
. In 1998, Gammell’s Cairn Energy, together with Brown and Root (then part of the Dick Cheney–run Halliburton), signed a deal to build a gas pipeline from Burma to the Indian state of Orissa with the Indian government’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. But when India exploded its first nuclear bomb the following month, the Clinton administration imposed sanctions, which nixed the deal (and the enormous income promised by Halliburton to the brutal Burmese military regime). Still, Cairn persevered, despite conventional wisdom about India’s lack of oil. A report in the
New Zealand Herald
(Paran Balakrishnan, “Proving the Critics Wrong,” July 17, 2007) highlighted the improbability of Cairn’s making a profit: “Ask any oilman and he will probably tell you that India is rated fairly low in the oil industry.” In 1999, Cairn ended up striking oil off the west coast of India in the Gulf of Cambay—a lucrative addition to the company’s already sizable natural gas interests in Bangladesh and oil wells on the Indian mainland. Enron began expanding its operations to India and was already running a privatized electrical-distribution system in Bombay. President George W. Bush took a different tack to India than Clinton, granting it a special exemption to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. By 2006, Cairn was so focused on India that Gammell became chairman of the firm’s Indian subsidiary, which was listed on the Mumbai/Bombay Stock Exchange and made $1.4 billion on the market. Now, Cairn has almost 90 percent of its assets in India and Bangladesh.

34
. Kevin Maguire, “Among Friends at ‘Blair Petroleum,’ ”
Guardian
, November 9, 2001.

35
. Andrew Grice, “Blair Confidante Quits Downing Street to Join BP,”
Independent
(London), November 9, 2001.

36
. David Rose, “Bush and Blair Made Secret Pact for Iraq War,”
Observer
(London), April 4, 2004.

37
. Heraldo Muñoz,
A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons
(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).

38
. Frank Rich,
The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 30.

39
. Howard Kurtz, “Peter Jennings, in the News for What He Didn’t Say,”
Washington Post
, September 24, 2001.

40
. Rich,
The Greatest Story Ever Sold
, p. 75.

41
. Ibid., p. 77.

42
. Ibid., p. 76.

43
. John R. MacArthur,
Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 58.

44
. “To Sell a War,”
The Fifth Estate
, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 1992.

45
. Walter V. Robinson, “1-year Gap in Bush’s Guard Duty,”
Boston Globe
, May 23, 2000.

46
. White House press release, “President Honors America’s Veterans,” November 11, 2003. Availableat
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031111-8.html
.