Mixed signals and crossed messages

Bush ponders grey areas

A tangled web

Following on from last week’s emphatic “I still haven’t figured it out completely”, this week President George Bush further sought to defend/distance himself from inquiry into his dealings as a member of the board of Harken Energy Corp. His latest defence offered a new (and possibly unprecedented) angle: “As a result of the evil done to America there’s going to be some incredible good here at home, too. I believe people have taken a step back and asked, “What’s important in life?” You know, the bottom line and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbour, loving your neighbour like you’d like to be loved yourself?”

A convincing defence?

Well, make up your own minds, but there seem to be two lines of thinking in the US: One, Bush is guilty of what he claims to be clearing up; Two, Bush is not the issue, corporate reform is. With elections pending, Congress is playing tough on the issue. Democrats are sharp with their criticism of Bush. Republicans are fearful of looking like poodles of the corporations. The result is a Senate and House double-act, looking to appear tougher than the White House. “In the environment we are in, virtually anything can pass,” Senator Phil Gramm, chum of Dubya, said this week. “Everybody is trying to outdo everybody else.”

But leaving aside Bush’s profiteering for a moment, the most jaw-dropping thing to emerge from this week’s unfolding revelations has been, in the words of NYT columnist Paul Krugman, “the way the game has been rigged on behalf of insiders.”

Cronyism.

Even dismissing the fact that Thomas White, Bush’s Secretary of the Army, was at the centre of the Enron controversy, generating $500 million in phony profits and personally selling $12 million of stock just before the company went bust, the charge sheet is long. Vice President Dick Cheney is first. As CEO at Halliburton until 2000 he oversaw some highly creative accounting of the Enron mould, massive losses magically becoming massive profits. Capitalising heavily during the Presidential campaign on the “great success story” of Halliburton under his leadership, Cheney then sold his shares on taking public office, making a whopping $18.5 million profit. Sixty days later the company announced its massive problems – shares dropped by 11% in the first day - which included being under a grand jury investigation for over-billing the government, and the revelation that the company was facing liability for a completely underestimated string of asbestos claims. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently investigating Halliburton. As yet, they have not interviewed Cheney.Why not? Well, one theory gaining popularity this week is the relationship of the enforcement agencies to the Bush administration. The SEC is headed by Harvey Pitt, who was a private securities lawyer for several Wall Street corporate giants before being appointed to the SEC by – no prizes for guessing – George W. Bush. He was headhunted by the Bush transition team, led by Dick Cheney, after the Supreme Court awarded victory in the Presidential elections to the Bush-Cheney ticket.

Senator Joseph Lieberman joined the likes of Dick Gephart in calling for Pitt’s removal, on the grounds that he was of dubious independence. The White House hit back. “[Pitt] was put in place to clean up a mess, and he’s working hard to do that,” the President said. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans agreed, saying Pitt “is doing a terrific job.” When asked about the possibility that Bush was too cozy with big business, Evans replied, “I totally reject that. I know this President well and I know that he’s angry.” Evans is a former oil company chief executive, and a childhood friend of Bush’s.

Meanwhile, Bush’s top man on corporate crime has a dodgy record all of his own. Larry Thompson, deputy attorney general and head of a newly appointed multiagency corporate-crime task force, was a board member of Providian Financial Corp. and chairman of its audit and compliance committee from 1997 until being appointed to his current job last year. On appointment, and so as to comply with ethics laws, Thompson sold $5 million of personal stock in Providian. Soon after that the problems at Providian emerged (inflated financial results, insider trading and the breaking of consumer-protection rules), and the company stock price collapsed. The company, which targets people with low incomes and bad credit histories, was forced to pay more than $400 million to settle allegations of consumer and securities fraud. “The deputy attorney general is proud of his service on the board of Providian,” said his spokesman. “He only became aware of the fraud issues when regulators began to make inquiries.”

And finally (for now), Bush’s claim that he was fully “vetted” by the SEC in relation to his 1990 sale of Harken stock (just before the company announced huge losses, partly brought on by a phony sale of a subsidiary in 1989). Bush was a director of Harken and member of the audit committee, but was never interviewed by the SEC, who took no action against him. “There’s not there there,” Bush bizarrely explained last weekOn 18 October 1993, Bush’s lawyer, Robert Jordan, received a letter from the SEC saying, “no enforcement action is contemplated”, but that this “must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated.” The SEC Chairman at the time was Richard Breeden, an appointee and good friend of Bush’s father, President George Bush. The SEC’s general counsel (responsible for making decisions about legal action) was James Doty, who had previously been the personal lawyer of none other than George W. Bush, and represented Bush in his infamous and questionable purchase of the Texas Rangers baseball team, his highly lucrative post-Harken venture. This notorious business acquisition involved, in the words of William Eastland, a leading Republican in Arlington and Bush delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention, “using public money for private purposes”, as the city of Arlington raised $200 million in taxes to build a stadium that was then handed over to Bush and his partners. A number of lawsuits were taken out against the Bush group, portaying a “shocking and sordid tale” in which wealthy businessmen “threatened and traded their way into an unprecedented takeover of government power and private property in an awesome display of greed and avarice”, in a deal which “can only be described as astounding, unprecedented and blatantly illegal.” As well as acquiring the baseball club, Bush and his pals seized (free of charge) private land, as the government routinely condemned whatever they had their eye on, and the business boys took to speculating on it. As Paul Krugman points out in a different NYT column, soon after this, Bush ran successfully for the Texas governorship on the ticket of self-reliance over reliance on government. Then, as governor, Bush resold the Rangers. Amazingly, his share was only worth $2.3 million, but his partners chose to give up some of their profits to their favourite buddy, and his windfall suddenly fattened to $14.9 million. Businessmen with business interests paying off the incumbent governor of the state? Surely not.

Oh, and to complete the picture. Bush was represented in his (Harken) SEC case by Robert Jordan. Jordan had been law partner with James Doty. Jordan now serves as Bush’s ambassador to oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Most likely, it doesn’t end there.

(Sources: International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post)

Iraq signals

As speculation continues to mount over a possible US strike on Iraq (a Pentagon planning document released last week seemed to point to an air and ground assault early next year, involving 250,000 American troops), different signals continue to come from all angles.

A recent PBS documentary in the US included the claims of an unidentified Iraqi defector who says he saw bin Laden in Baghdad in July 1998. Soon after the alleged visit, al-Qaida blew up two US embassies in East Africa. Fuel to the fire.

Since last year, Bush has been expounding “regime change” in Iraq, a member of his three-pronged “axis of evil”. But what does “regime change” mean? There are signs of frustration within the US press over the past few weeks about the continuing vague threats spilling from the White House, which, it has been argued, do little more than add to the public’s fear.

Iraq’s continuing refusal to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors has the American hawks sharpening their claws. Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post fumes at the way “the world has treated the transformation of Iraq into a giant laboratory for terrorism and crimes against humanity with silence, forgetfulness and complicity.” Momentum builds with a call that “We should not miss the forest by looking only at the trees.” 09/11 stirred the sleeping giant. Time to act.

Meanwhile, taking a different line, Thomas Friedman in the New York Times says that, “For too many years the United States has treated the Arab world as just a big, dumb gas station… It’s time for Americans to stop kidding themselves. Getting rid of the Osamas, Saddams and Arafats is necessary, but it’s hardly sufficient… [The] United States has liberal Arab partners for change. It’s time to team up with them, and not just with the bums who got them into this mess.”

Last month Ahmed Chalabi, Saddam’s opponent in exile, was welcomed by Tehran for political discussions. But how much military action will be required to turn the leadership over? In an editorial last week, the NYT said that an Afghanistan-style mission, in which air strikes pave the way for US special forces and the Iraqi opposition on the ground, is an “option that has apparently now been discarded”. But in the last few days, reports suggested that President Bush had signed a presidential directive authorising the CIA to step up covert action in Iraq and encourage a coup against the Iraqi leader.

Meanwhile, in London this week a meeting took place between former Iraqi military officers who have defected over the last twenty-three years of Saddam’s rule, and leading figures from Iraqi opposition groups in Europe and the US. The subject under discussion? How to remove Saddam.

Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, the US-financed London-based opposition umbrella group, explained, “We are sending a message to the Iraqi military that there is life for them after Saddam, that they must not fear change.” The big conclusion seemed to be that the Iraqi military and officer corps. is full of hatred for Saddam, might be persuaded to join a coup, and could virtually be relied on to defect to an invading force. “The army will defect, even those closest to Saddam,” said Colonel Hamed Ziadi. “The country is dismembered under the surface. Everything is weak.”

According to the NYT, present at the meeting (as well as Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan (potential launching pad for US strikes on Iraq), brother of the late King Hussein) were “American officials from several agencies, including the State Department, the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff”. Richard Boucher, State Department Spokesman, said the US was not financing the meeting, but that it was “a useful tool in helping the Iraqi community move closer to the goal of a better future for the Iraqi people after Saddam Hussein.”

Take your partners…

The first summit of the new African Union wound up in party mode last week.

allAfrica.com quotes the Herald of Harare as witnessing “a rare display of joy” as the Heads of State took the dance floor at a private banquet in Durban’s International Centre, and “became masters of the African Union jive”.

The South African paper The Star reported that “under a simulated night sky in a banquet hall” the Darius Brubeck Quartet, launching into an up-tempo version of Meadow-lands, teased the Heads of State to the floor.

First up, setting the example, were UN General-Secretary Kofi Annan and South African First Lady Zanele Mbeki. With a soft-shoe shuffle, they encouraged the others to join them as Bernard Aysia played the saxophone on the song Tshona.

With the dance floor congested, heads of state formed clusters around the head table. One cluster consisted of former South African president De Klerk, his wife Elita, Speaker of Parliament Frene Ginwala (who, according to The Star “showed she was up there with the best when it came to AU jive”). The circle was completed by Mvelaphanda Holdings chief Tokyo Sexwale, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, and “other ANC heavyweights”.

Finally, and “after some prompting” from Jutice Minister Penuell Maduna, Zimbabwean President Mugabe “broke into dance with the First Lady, Cde Grace Mugabe, Buthelezi, Maduan and several other dignitaries.”

Said one reveller as the throng said goodbye to the Organisation of African Unity and ushered in the new African Union, “There are some unlikely dance partners. But the good thing is that they all want to learn the new steps.”

(Other) Quotes of the week

“The people of this region deserve peace and development, not the suffering imposed on them by terrorist thugs who are outside the pale of the civilised world.”
US Secretary of State Colin Powell responding to the massacre of 27 Hindus in Kashmir on Sunday.

“It’s reluctant. It’s shifting. It’s inconsistent – and to some measure disengaged globally. It’s reactive, not proactive. Up until 9/11 it was singularly unilateral. Since then it is less so, but not as forceful and encompassing as I think Amercia’s Foreign Policy ought to be at this moment. Not as bold and not as visionary.”
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, offering a critique of his President’s conduct of foreign policy.

“Ah, bon?”
President Jacques Chirac, responding to the news that Maxime Brunerie, a neo-Nazi, had fired a shot in an effort to assassinate him at the Bastille Day parade on Sunday.

Contact the Diary editor: dominic.hilton@opendemocracy.net