?Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951? - Federal Documents

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHG...NN_Bush_Nazi_2

?Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951? - Federal Documents
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.

Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.

Bush's partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.

At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.

Denial and Deceit

While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues, Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.

All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents state.

Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a relationship. "Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual ownership of the company," states a government report.

H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC "for many years," also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship with Thyssen's Dutch bank, according to the documents.

Investigators later reported that the company was "wholly owned" by Thyssen's Dutch bank.

Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that "a careful examination of UBC's general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart."

In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing director of Thyssen's Dutch bank and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz's father.

The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.

In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses.

"The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver," a U.S. government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.

After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.

The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil - all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.

One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets.

"It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party," government investigators concluded.

At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.

Investigation Investigated?

In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans.

"I gave 'a memorandum' which did not say anything about the American officers of subject," the investigator wrote. "(Another investigator) wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to them."

No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.

What Does It All Mean?

So why are the documents relevant today?

"The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country," says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. "It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day."

Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush's intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. "Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy," he says. "That's the relevance of the documents and what they show."

Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says "the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the world." Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush's invasion of Iraq and Hitler's occupation of Poland in 1939 - the event that sparked World War Two.

However, others see an even larger significance.

"The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany," says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur 'Nazi hunter.' "It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush's role in that dark operation."

Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.

What Next?

Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family's Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.

"The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history," says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. "That's the only way we can understand it and deal with it."

For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. "It's impossible to stop it," he says, "when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House."

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John Buchanan is a journalist and magazine writer based in Miami Beach. He can be reached by e-mail at jtwg@bellsouth.net.

Stacey Michael is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of Religious Conceit. His most recent book is Weapons of Mass Dysfunction: The Art of "Faith-Based" Politics, due in early 2004. He can be reached by email at staceymichael@religiousconceit.com

[HARDCORE]

DUDE et al -

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.

"Closets, lots of closets, but then D.C. has a near monopoly on them!? Much was also said, was it not, about the dealings of yet another president's father!?"

VERITAS

[Gimpy]

Like "grandad".....like "grandson"!

Check THIS out!

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Doing Business With The Enemy
Jan. 25, 2004


Did it ever occur to you that when President Bush says, "Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations," he's talking about your money -- and every other American's money?

Just about everyone with a 401(k) pension plan or mutual fund has money invested in companies that are doing business in so-called rogue states.

In other words, there are U.S. companies that are helping drive the economies of countries like Iran, Syria and Libya that have sponsored terrorists. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
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"The revenue that is generated from the work that these companies are doing, we believe, helps to underwrite and support terrorism,? says William Thompson, the New York City comptroller who oversees the $80 billion in pension funds for all city workers.

He says he wants everyone with a retirement or investment portfolio to know what these companies are up to: ?We're going to increase the public visibility on this issue until these companies change their practices.?

He?s actually identified specific companies that have invested in these rogue countries, including Halliburton, Conoco-Phillips and General Electric. And he points out that New York's pension funds own nearly a billion dollars worth of stock in these three Fortune 500 companies, which have operations in Iran and Syria.

What was Thompson?s reaction when he found out about this? ?Anger that there were companies that could be contributing to attacks on our nation,? he says. ?You?d think to yourself, well, why would they do that? ? I didn't think they could. And more than anything it was, you thought, that the law prevented them from doing this.?
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In fact, U.S. law does ban virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, but there's a loophole that G.E., Conoco-Phillips and Halliburton have exploited: The law does not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans.

?These three companies, as far as we were concerned, appear to have violated the spirit of the law,? says Thompson. ?In the case of Halliburton, as an example, they have an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands. That subsidiary is doing business with Iran.?

That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands ? a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly.

Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO in 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian Government.

In the case of Iran, Thompson says they earn most of their revenues through their oil industry. So what is the connection between that oil business and terrorism and weapons of mass destruction?

?The Iranian Government is receiving dollars from it. And then turning around and exporting terrorism around the world. It benefits terrorism. At least that's our belief,? says Thompson.
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60 Minutes decided to ask Halliburton's subsidiary about its work in Iran. But we weren't allowed to enter the building with a camera. So we went in with a hidden camera, and were introduced to David Walker, manager of the local Calidonian Bank, where the subsidiary is registered.

60 Minutes was expecting to find a bustling business, but, to our surprise, Walker told us that while Halliburton Products and Services was registered at this address, it was in name only. There is no actual office here or anywhere else in the Caymans. And there are no employees on site.

We were told that if mail for the Halliburton subsidiary comes to this address, they re-route it to Halliburton headquarters in Houston.

?If you understood what most of these companies do, you would, they're not doing any business in Cayman per se. They're doing business, international business,? says Walker. ?Would it make sense to have somebody in Cayman pushing paper around? I don't know. And some people do it. And some people don't. And it's mostly driven by whatever the issues are with the head office.?

Does that mean the head office is calling the shots? If it is, that would be against the law, which says the subsidiary must be completely independent of the U.S. company. But 60 Minutes? attempts to ask headquarters in Houston about this were rebuffed.
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In a letter to New York City Comptroller Thompson, Halliburton says its Cayman Island subsidiary is actually run out of Dubai. 60 Minutes went there and learned that it shares office space, phone and fax lines with a division of its U.S.-based parent company -- which raises more legal questions about its independence from Houston. But once again, our inquiries went unanswered.

In its letter to Thompson, Halliburton insists it is complying with all U.S. laws. But he and legal experts we consulted believe they are dancing right along the edge of legality.

?If the intent was to try and prevent United States-based companies from doing business in these "rogue" nations, then it appears as if they've gotten around what the law had intended,? says Thompson, who filed a shareholder?s resolution calling on the company to review and justify its operations in Iran. ?Halliburton attempted to block the shareholder resolution. They went to the SEC and asked for permission not to put this before shareholders.?

Did the SEC take it up and rule on it?

?Oh, absolutely. The SEC ruled against Halliburton and said that it had to be put in front of the shareholders,? says Thompson, who plans to file the resolution at the next shareholders meeting in April.

He?s also taking issue with GE and its electrical work in Iran, as well as Conoco-Phillips' gas production business in Syria: ?If there are nations that wind up increasing their resources because these companies are doing business there, and we're attacked because of it, it in fact undermines our entire country.?
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Thompson says he decided to open the investigation in the first place at the request of New York City's police and firemen, who were outraged when they learned where their retirement money was going.

?The members of the Fire Department and the Police Department, after September 11th, given the fact that hundreds of them died in the World Trade Center as a result of a terrorist attack, had greater sensitivity than almost anybody,? says Thompson. ?And they were the ones who kind of took the lead on this.?

But why do moral issues come into play when talking about pension funds?
?The way we've approached it isn't as on a moral basis, it is as investors,? says Thompson. ?And what is in the best long-term interests of our pension funds because we hold stock in these companies.?

What these companies are doing, he says, isn't just a question of ethics - it's financially unsound, and bad for business.
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Roger Robinson, who runs a research firm in Washington that monitors companies working in rogue states, agrees. He cites the case of Talisman Energy, whose reputation was damaged when it did business with the Islamic Republic of Sudan. The negative publicity led to something Wall Street calls "The Sudan Discount of Talisman Stock."

?In other words, the share value or stock price was depressed by some 20, 25 percent by some estimates,? says Robinson, who believes that Halliburton and GE could face the same risk.

Robinson has identified nearly 400 companies that are in most pension portfolios that are doing business in terrorist-sponsoring states. Well over 200, he says, are actually doing business in Iran; of that, more than 60 are doing business in Libya.

He says the companies are funneling tens of billions of dollars worth of capital, technology and know-how to the state-owned oil and gas sectors of these two countries.

Does he ever say to himself that by revealing this information, he?s taking steps to hurt the company and hurt the pension fund?

?I think that it could be looked at another way. We're certainly alerting investors to a genuine new risk category in the markets, every bit as legitimate as environmental risk was through Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez and superfund legislation,? says Robinson. ?So investors, we think, have a right to know. Remember, this is their retirement dollars. They should have a sense of those who invest on their behalf, are there genuine risks there??

With that question of risk in mind, state treasurers across the country, like David Peterson of Arizona, are using Robinson's database to investigate their pension portfolios.

?I want to find out what projects they're doing and what is specifically the dollars they're investing, where they're going,? says Peterson.

Taken together, state-run pension investments amount to something like $7-trillion dollars.

?Connecticut is working on it,? adds Peterson. ?I know Pennsylvania, their legislature passed unanimously that we need to screen, with the approval of their pension system, for these risks.?
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But some of the state treasurers are running into resistance from the pension funds. In Peterson's case, the Arizona State Retirement System refused to tell him anything about its holdings.

?I have asked the pension system. We'd like to know what investments you have, the scope of your investments, what companies you're involved with. We had a legislator ask,? says Peterson. ?We actually had an intern from this office ask about what investments holdings do they have in some of these companies. And they just didn't want to provide it to us.?

And Peterson believes that they really don?t have grounds to refuse to give him, as state treasurer, that information.

?They've more just kind of tried to be evasive, and said that it's too hard to get this information,? he says.

This went on for months, but to our surprise, when we asked Arizona's pension fund managers for a list of its holdings, they gave it to us right away. And it confirmed what Peterson had suspected: that Arizonans unwittingly own stock in companies like Halliburton, General Electric and Conoco-Phillips.

?There's about 11 to 14 companies that are on the S&P 500 that are involved in some substantial projects with some of these countries,? says Peterson.
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Congress recently directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor companies operating in rogue nations.

But in New York, Comptroller Thompson isn't waiting. He says he's going to expand his investigation to include Boeing and other companies that do business in terrorist states.

?Those countries depend on dollars from us to live, to do business also,? says Thompson. ?If we have, and if we put pressure on the companies, and they can't do business there, and others become embarrassed in doing business or buying oil there, well maybe we can help to force these countries to change their practices.?

Does he think this issue's going away?

?This issue isn't going to go away any time soon, at all,? says Thompson.

Halliburton declined 60 Minutes' request for an interview, but in an e-mail, the company indicated it has no intention of leaving Iran -- or addressing the questions we raised about the independence of its subsidiary.

As for General Electric and Conoco-Phillips, they say they are breaking no laws, and like Halliburton, make no apologies for their business dealings with states that sponsor terrorism.


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All I can say is--- :cd: