The following is an unfinished article I worked on last year. It isn't finished because I don't have all the details to make a conclusion. All I have is a strong suspicion based on some very unsettling information about George W. Bush and his career in the Texas Air National Guard. In GD P2004, there's a thread asking how much of an issue Bush's alleged AWOL period really is. I don't know the answer to that question, but I do think it's important for Americans to think about that episode in their "president"'s life and what it means about his present position. So, without further ado, here it is:
Bush, Bath and Beyond
By Burt Worm
In the summer of 1972, two buddies in the Texas Air National Guard stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston lost their flying privileges, which had cost tax payers nearly $1 million apiece to train them for, over the same technicality: "failure to accomplish annual medical exam."
If not for the fact that one of these suspended guardsmen grew up to take possession of the White House nearly 30 years later, these suspensions and the document that recorded them would probably have remained lost to history. But in the summer of 2000, as packs of America's highest paid journalists diligently transcribed talking points on Al Gore's alleged character flaws faxed directly from the Republican National Committee, an Iowa farmer named Marty Heldt rescued the document amid a thick folder of other materials on Texas Governor George W. Bush's checkered career in the Champagne Squadron of TANG obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. That document can be viewed online at http: //users.cis.net/coldfeet/grounded.gif. (delete space between colon and slashes for link.)
While many Bush watchers may wonder about the unproven (and probably unprovable) claim that George W. Bush was absent without leave from TANG between May 1972 and June 1973 (a claim that I believe, by the way, for what it's worth), many overlook the related and more troubling anomaly in Bush's Guard service, an anomaly that Bush himself does not dispute. During election year 2000, Bush acknowledged that he had been suspended from flying, but he excused himself by saying he was in Alabama at the time and couldn't get to his personal physician to take the required physical. There are two glaring problems with this excuse: The required medical exams, instituted that very year, were to be conducted by authorized Air Force physicians only, not just any personal physician, and they didn?t have to be taken in Texas. More troublesome, Bush was suspended on August 1; he didn't leave Texas to work on a family friend's Congressional campaign in Alabama until late September.
Okay, so Bush--how shall I put this delicately?--was not "accurate" about something he did or didn't do 30 years ago. What's the big deal? Did anybody but the most rabid Clinton-haters really care about a failed land deal the Clintons made with Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s? If Whitewater was ultimately irrelevant to Bill Clinton's ability to be president during his term, why would an indiscretion of Bush's youth be any more relevant to his own "presidency?" Is this a sleeping dog that should be left to lie?
I don't think so. I think Bush's suspension in 1972 is highly relevant to his situation and to the Americans he "presides" over in 2003. The suspension is the beginning of a thread that winds through Bush's unusually profitable business failures, wraps around the Iran-Contra scandal, connects to BCCI, and ultimately unravels on September 11, 2001. It is not the presence of Bush's name alone, I believe, that makes this document a key to the mysteries of post-Watergate Republicanism in America. I believe what makes this such a valuable document to historians hoping to understand why we are where are is the name under Bush's on that recovered page: James R. Bath.
A little history should clarify the significance of this juxtaposition.
In late 1972, Richard Nixon, freshly re-elected when Watergate was still but a whisper in the nation's ear, named George H.W. Bush to head the Republican National Committee. Nixon had been grooming the elder Bush for greater and greater responsibilities since he had decided (wrongly) that Bush had a chance to take a Senate seat from the Democrats in 1970. According to the late James Hatfield, author of the unjustly notorious Bush Jr. biography Fortunate Son, Nixon used his own daughter, Tricia, to lure Bush Sr. into the race by offering her as a date to Bush Jr. in 1969, even flying the young airman at taxpayer expense to Washington for Republican-style (i.e., chaperoned) wooing.
The image of George H.W. Bush as a selfless, loyalist patsy for Nixon to kick around is reinforced by the number of positions Bush briefly held and added to his resume in the Nixon-Ford years. But there is plenty of contrary evidence of Bush Sr.'s lust for power and willingness to use his position and connections to advance his own career. Many Republicans at the time believed that a letter RNC Chairman Bush sent to the White House on August 7, 1974, in which he urged Nixon to resign, sealed Nixon's fate. (Nixon did, in fact, resign the very day after Bush?s letter arrived.) Almost immediately after Gerald Ford was sworn in, Bush launched an aggressive behind the scenes campaign in Congress and among elite Republicans nationally to have himself named vice president. He almost succeeded, but questions about the legality of Nixon's favoring Bush's 1970 Texas senatorial campaign at the expense of other campaigns with anonymous donations routed through Mexico undid his bid. (The Townhouse scandal, as this chicanery was called, brought on the last craze for campaign finance reform in the early 1970s.) In fine, Bush smelled too much like Nixon for the job.
As Bush Sr. was desperately climbing his way toward the inner reaches of political power, Bush Jr. was having a hell of a time in the Texas Air National Guard. The public record is silent on the circumstances that led Bush Jr. to stop flying in May of 1972, to suddenly take on mentoring inner city youths for a brief time that same year, to suddenly leave Texas to work for an Alabama political campaign and then for Harvard Business School. It is absolutely mute on why he failed to take a medical exam that would have enabled him to continue flying for the two years he had remaining in his contract with the Guard.
This silence is made more deafening by the presence of James R. Bath on the rescued document Martin Heldt acquired through the FOIA.
A few years older than Bush Jr., Bath is referred to off-handedly in the few news accounts there are about him as a Houston "entrepreneur" who specializes in aviation services and in making real estate purchases in the US (especially in Texas) for wealthy Saudis. He is also sometimes referred to as George W.'s James Baker--a fixer and right hand man. It's very peculiar, to say the least, that such an indispensable person to George W. Bush for most of his adult life has dropped almost entirely out of sight.
If you do a Google search on Bath, you will find a vaporous image of a characterless man--quotes from him are rare and descriptions rarer--with his hands in a lot of pies. He seems to have become a CIA agent in 1976, when George H.W. Bush was Director of Central Intelligence. Not long after, he was making business connections in Saudi Arabia?at the instigation of DCI Bush, according to former Houston Chronicle reporter Peter Brewton. In 1978, when Bush Jr. made his unsuccessful run for Congress, Bath invested $50,000 to procure a 5% interest in Bush's fledgling Arbusto Oil for a Saudi businessman and member of a prominent Saudi family, Salem bin Laden. Salem, who was killed in a freak ultralight aircraft accident in Texas in 1988, was the older step-brother of none other than at-large terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Salem's death conveniently gave Bath and another obscenely wealthy and well-connected Saudi, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, the opportunity to take over Salem's shares in an airport and a parking garage in Houston.
Bath became closely associated with bin Mahfouz in 1976, when he allegedly used Mahfouz's money to set up a CIA-front/airline called Skyway Aviation in Houston. Skyway was eventually investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency for flying CIA money to the Cayman Islands, a Carribbean paradise where corporations with government contracts, like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, go to stash profits and federal handouts, tax-free, and skirt laws against trading with the enemy. The DEA wanted to know if Skyway was transporting something more germane to their jurisdiction, but nothing incriminating on that score was uncovered.
When bin Mahfouz became a principal in the Pakistan-based Bank of Commerce and Credit International, better known as BCCI, Bath moved with him, serving as a liaison between the Saudi sheikh and American financial interests. The virtually assetless bank came under Congressional scrutiny in the early 1990s when its Byzantine structure was found to have hidden within it a filter for drug and gun-running money, including the funds the Reagan administration was managing in its secret privatization of foreign policy that became known as Iran-Contra. BCCI also moved funds from private investors to what were then known as "Afghan freedom fighters," but which have since become known as terrorists.
Bath, bin Mahfouz, and a few other Saudi financiers reportedly paid millions to keep Bush Jr.'s oil enterprises alive in the late 1980s. Did they do this because they believed in Bush's business acumen or because they believed in Bush's access to his father, the vice-president-cum-president of the United States? Many of these Saudis have ties to the financial network that supports al Qaeda. Interestingly, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, in September and December 2001, Bush issued two executive orders to go after al Qaeda funding; but although both of those orders name names and foreign banks as targets, neither Khalid bin Mahfouz nor his financial interests are on the list. In fact, no Saudi bank is named on either list. This is a remarkable omission, considering that the overwhelming majority of highjackers were Saudi nationals. (See the investigative reporting of Tom Flocco at
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/Mahfouz.html for more details on Bush?s failure to finger bin Mahfouz, and the possibility that the Bath connection is the reason for Bush?s reluctance. Flocco, incidentally, is no lefty bent on revenge for impeachment and the stolen election; he's an investigative reporter for Larry Klayman's Scaife-funded legal organization Judicial Watch.)
What seems evident from this history is that both George Bushes who have held power at the highest level of the American government have exhibited a pattern of contempt for democracy, contempt for the law, a willingness to sell access to the highest bidder, to pay any price for their own self-interest.
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