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Washington, DC, Oct. 10— After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the US media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of, and US banking operative for, the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enemy national” partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the US Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the US entered the war.

No story?

For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream US media. The essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of “official” Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of US history books covering World War II and its aftermath.

The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

The summer of ‘42

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen US enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the US had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.

“Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in US Bank,” declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as “Adolf Hitler’s original patron a decade ago.” In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen’s autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen’s US “nest egg” in fact belonged to “Nazi bigwigs” including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.

Business is business

The “bank,” founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and US Treasury and war bonds. The company’s activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized US citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.

The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC’s private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official US government scrutiny as Hitler’s plunder of Europe continued unabated.

After the “Hitler’s Angel” article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the US

Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the US entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen’s personal appointee to oversee US matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to US government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it.

UBC’s original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.

The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler’s rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler’s war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The family business

In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker’s daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.

However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact “nominees,” or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.

Seized

On Oct. 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the US Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the US Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by US Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp (Vesting Order No. 259). In November, Congress seized the Nazi interests in Silesian-American Corporation, which allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with I.G. Farben, Hitler’s third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.

The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable US assets, including gold, coal, steel and US Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World War II.

That’s one way to put it

Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four Bush-Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on Dec. 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had “received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.” The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the US government or that the new address was the US Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.

Still no story?

Since then, the information has not appeared in any US news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin’s father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family’s long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream US media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by a Lyndon LaRouche’s organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.

The essence of the story been posted for years on various internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.

Likewise, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or “unauthorized” books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.

Loyal defenders

The National Review ran an essay on Sept. 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled “Annals of Bush-Hating.” It begins mockingly: “Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president’s Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?” York goes on to discredit the “Bush is a moron” IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.

The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column Sept. 29 by Reason magazine’s Cathy Young in which she referred to “Bush-o-phobes on the Internet” who “repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family’s alleged Nazi connections.”

Poles tackle the topic

Newsweek Polska, the magazine’s Polish edition, published a short piece on the “Bush Nazi past” in its Mar. 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that “the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp,” according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media (www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.

Still not interested

Major US media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, and Miami Herald, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, Aug. 29. Newsweek US correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.

Aftermath

After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the US government quietly settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their seized business assets.

In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the US Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any US press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.

Oct. 22 (AGR)— Communities throughout the US are holding protests against police brutality today. Marking the 8th Annual National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, an event designed to show solidarity for victims of police abuse and to make a public statement against the abuses of police power, thousands of people are expected to gather in cities throughout the nation and speak our for justice.

Organizers of the event are calling attention to the murders of thousands of people at the hands of police officers in the US. While the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality was researching the third edition of its book, Stolen Lives, which documents more than 2,000 murders by US police during the 1990s, they found an increase in the number of killings by law enforcement nationwide since Sept. 11, 2001. The recent murders by police have including over 61 killings in the NY/NJ area and 49 in Chicago.

The October 22nd Coalition stated, “we have an opportunity to make a powerful and visible manifestation in the streets and in other ways to oppose this repressive clampdown and break through the wall of silence the authorities have tried to maintain around these outrages. We can drag their crimes out into the light of day so that others may join us in opposing them.”

Dozens of organizations and community groups throughout the country have endorsed the October 22nd Coalition’s event and have been actively organizing to speak out in their communities.

Although police repression is expected, organizers say that it won’t stop people from speaking out against injustice. At last year’s events, Greensboro, NC reported unusual police presence, with videotaping cameras set up at the rally site, and police following them all during the march. Participants commented that downtown Los Angeles looked like a police state that day, with unprecedented numbers of police lining the march route. Other cities echoed these experiences.

Despite last year’s police presence, more than 40 cities in the US participated in the National Day of Protest, bringing the issue to dozens of newspapers, radio stations, and television news channels. This year’s organizers are expecting an even larger turn-out than previous years.

Creating safer communities

The October 22nd Coalition and supporting groups have done more than organize an annual day of protest. Since 1996, the October 22nd Coalition has worked to unite the efforts of smaller and more localized anti-police brutality groups and the less politically active families of victims.

These groups have since been talking to the media, contacting elected officials and taking justice into their own hands. Activists throughout the nation have maintained copwatch programs and its centralized website, copwatch.com, which also hosts an international database of police abuses of power and authority. The copwatch programs maintain report lines for victims of police abuse to call and make sure that their voices are heard. Copwatch members also participate in setting up “effective” Citizen Review Boards, educating community members about their rights in the presence of law enforcement, and literally watching the police (videotaping and otherwise witnessing the actions being taking by police).

Activists and organizers of these programs state that such actions are necessary to cut back on the everyday abuses of police authority. The Portland Copwatch states on its website, “in order to curb police abuse from name-calling to shootings, the citizenry must come together and demand better training, discipline, and investigation into allegations of wrongdoing.”

Although organizers recognize that most cases of police abuse are either swept under the rug or met with little disciplinary action, they point to cases such as former DC officer Derrick A. Brown, 32, who was sentenced to 14 - 44 years in prison for the rape of a 14 year old girl during a traffic stop.

Cities throughout the country have been setting up Civilian Review Boards, which critics argue don’t help. Opponent of the boards cite New York City’s Citizen Complaint Review Board, which was largely appointed under Rudy Giuliani’s administration. Testifying before the City Council in September, a resigning investigator from the NYC Board accused the board of blindly endorsing police versions of events, and retaliating against investigators by blocking promotions if they refused to alter their reports to favor police.

Proponents of the copwatch programs argue that by getting more people active in holding law enforcement accountable, we can be assured that fewer incidents will happen and more offending officers will be justly punished.

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, Oct. 18— A Republican rebellion in the Senate against White House plans for rebuilding Iraq raised questions yesterday about President George Bush’s authority in Washington as he struggles to maintain control of a divided administration.

A late-night Senate vote to turn half the $20 billion Iraq reconstruction budget into a loan marked a serious setback for the administration, which had wanted all the money in the form of a grant. It also came as a personal defeat for the president.

On Tuesday, Bush had called in nine Republican rebels and ordered them to support his version of the bill, reportedly slamming a table at one point and refusing to answer their questions.

The outburst did him little good. Eight Republican senators voted against the administration on Thursday. One rebel, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, said: “It was very difficult to stop this train because it made so much sense.”

It may prove to be a pivotal moment for the Bush government. Senators of either party defy a popular president at their peril, but this president is no longer all that popular, particularly when it comes to US involvement in Iraq. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans believe that Bush’s leadership can be relied on in a crisis.

The failure to stabilize Iraq and the near-daily death toll among US troops is undoubtedly weighing down the White House as it sets out on its reelection campaign.

An attempt to assert direct control on the management of the occupation earlier this month with the creation of a centralized “Iraq stabilization group” under the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, served only to drive tensions in the administration to the surface.

Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, who had until then jealously guarded his exclusive control of the situation, openly revolted against the restructuring. He told journalists he had not been consulted and assured them that it was irrelevant.

According to a report by the Knight Ridder news agency, quoting a senior official, a frustrated president wondered aloud whether the internecine fighting had reached historic levels. “This isn’t as bad as [George] Shultz versus [Caspar] Weinberger, is it?” Bush asked, referring to a legendary duel within the Reagan administration. One senior official reportedly nodded and said: “Way worse.”

One alarmed senate Republican, Richard Lugar, called for Bush to get a grip.

“The president has to be the president,” he said. “That means the president over the vice-president, and over the secretaries of state and defense. And Dr. Rice cannot carry that burden alone.”

As a darkening cloud gathers over the White House, it also has to contend with a slow-burning scandal.

FBI investigators are questioning White House staff to find who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer in July, apparently to discredit the agent’s husband, a critic of the administration.

The incident has infuriated conservative Republicans, who believe that the president should have demanded the identities of the leakers and dismissed them. The critics from his party were all the more outraged when the president suggested that the culprits might never be found.

William Kristol, the editor of the neo-conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, said the leak scandal and the president’s response illustrated “the disarray within his administration,” observing that “the civil war in the Bush administration has become crippling.”

Kristol wrote: “The CIA is in open revolt against the White House. The state department and the defense department aren’t working together at all. We are way beyond ‘fruitful tension’ and all the other normal excuses for bureaucratic conflict. This is a situation that only the president can fix.”

The White House has responded with a campaign of speeches by the president and his senior aides intended to reaffirm US resolve and to insist that things in Iraq are not as bad as they seem. Instead, the president has argued, the press is to blame, for ‘“filtering” out good news.

The finger-pointing over an increasingly unpopular military involvement, and the finger-waving at the media reminded Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, of another president and another debilitating war: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. “I think there is an emerging quality to the tensions Bush faces and his reactions to the criticism that is reminiscent of Johnson in Vietnam,” said Professor Dallek.

“If the enterprise in Iraq keeps faltering this is George W Bush’s war, just as Vietnam became Johnson’s war.”

There is worse to come for Bush in the next few weeks. The leak investigation is expected to gather steam and will either produce a culprit close to the Oval Office or provoke claims of a whitewash.

Then, on Nov. 7, humiliation looms. His most ferocious critic in the Senate — Edward Kennedy, who recently called the Iraq war a fraud “made up in Texas” — will receive an award for “excellence in public service”. It will be presented in Texas by the man who selected Senator Kennedy for the honor: George Bush, the president’s father.

Source: Guardian (UK)

Sea of troubles in a stormy month

* Oct. 1: The justice department announces it has launched an inquiry into the White House leak identifying a CIA undercover agent.

* Oct. 2: The Iraq survey group, under weapons expert David Kay admits that six months after Baghdad’s fall no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

* Oct. 4: The foundation run by the president’s father announces it will bestow the George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service to Senator Edward Kennedy, arguably the president’s sternest critic, who denounced the Iraq war as “a fraud.”

* Oct. 6: The White House confirms that management of the Iraq occupation will be centralized in a new coordinating group run by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

* Oct. 7: The defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, says he was not told about the restructuring and insists there have been no real changes.

* Oct. 15: Senate votes against president and insists that half Iraq’s $20 billion reconstruction budget should be in the form of loans.