Shorrock: Hubris Unbound -- The Bush / Carlyle connection

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 14:29:07 -0400 (EDT)
To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Shorrock: Hubris Unbound -- The Bush / Carlyle connection

> From the Nation --
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030526&s=shorrock

Hubris Unbound
by Tim Shorrock

On May 2 President George W. Bush zoomed off the deck of the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln, where he had declared victory in Iraq following a
televised landing in a US Navy S-3B Viking jet. A few hours later, Bush
landed in California's Silicon Valley, where he abruptly changed the topic
of the day from triumphant war to sputtering economy.

Mindful of the slowdown in what was once a high-tech symbol of US economic
might, Bush's handlers carefully chose his stop in Santa Clara. The
President avoided the traditional walk-through at Intel, Cisco Systems or
Apple. Instead, as reported by David Sanger of the New York Times, Bush
"pulled into the well-protected grounds of United Defense Industries,
which produces the Bradley fighting vehicle, tanks and other equipment
that became familiar to television viewers watching the 350-mile race to
Baghdad last month."

There, standing before an array of weapons used in Iraq, Bush made his
stand for a $550 billion tax cut that Republicans pray will revive
investment, cut the deficit and bring back thousands of jobs lost over the
past eighteen months. He thanked the assembled United Defense workers for
their products, especially the Bradleys, which he boasted "were
responsible for a lot of tank kills" in Iraq.

But Sanger, along with every other reporter covering the speech, neglected
to mention a crucial fact about United Defense. It is majority-owned and
controlled by the Carlyle Group, the Washington, DC, merchant bank in
which Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, has a direct financial interest and
serves as a trusted adviser. Yet the American public was kept in the dark
about this relationship by the newspaper of record, along with the
Washington Post, CNN and every other major media outlet. To people who
follow these things, the silence was deafening.

"It's not irony anymore; its just shameless and brazen," said Dan Briody,
a New York journalist who broke one of the first stories about Bush's
connection to Carlyle. His new book, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret
World of the Carlyle Group, tells the story of Carlyle's rise from a lowly
buyout firm to the nation's tenth largest--and arguably most politically
connected--military contractor.

"I've been amazed at some of these arrangements that have taken place,
like the Halliburton situation," Briody said, referring to the oil
services company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that won a
government contract to stamp out oil fires in Iraq. "This Administration
keeps making decisions that benefit themselves and their friends, and I
don't see an end to it." The day we spoke, Representative Henry Waxman
released a US Army document disclosing that Halliburton's no-bid contract
was much broader than initially described, and included oil operations and
distribution that could increase the cost of the contract to $7 billion.

Briody's book on Carlyle, published by John Wiley & Sons, is an excellent
place to begin understanding the intertwining of business, lobbying and
foreign policy that define the twenty-first-century version of the
military industrial complex. A key chapter recounts Carlyle's 1997
acquisition of United Defense for the "fire-sale price" of $850 million
and documents how Carlyle spent more than $1.2 million on lobbyists, who
roamed Capitol Hill on behalf of United Defense and its weapons systems.

Among Carlyle's current holdings that Briody lists in an appendix are
Composite Structures, which makes metal parts for the AH-64 Apache
Helicopter; Lier Siegler Services, which provides logistics support and
maintenance for Army vehicles and Air Force jets; and USIS, which performs
background checks on millions of government and corporate employees and
stands to make a killing in the booming homeland security business.

With Bush preparing the American people for more battles ahead, "it's more
crucial than ever that the press pick up the scent of this story until we
make some change," Briody said. First and foremost, he argued, Bush Sr.
should resign from the Carlyle Group "because of the obvious conflict of
interest of working for a company that has such huge defense interests
while his son is waging these wars."

Chris Ullman, Carlyle's vice president for corporate communications,
rejected that idea. "Former President Bush's relationship with his son has
nothing to do with Carlyle or our investments," he said in an e-mail. "The
former president does not discuss Carlyle matters with his son; the
success of our firm rests on the hard work of our investment
professionals."

As for Briody's book, Ullman said: "Peel away the layers of factual errors
and the self-righteousness and all you're left with is baseless innuendo.
This book should be exposed for what it is, a compilation of recycled
conspiracy theories masquerading as investigative journalism."

That's something readers can judge for themselves. But does the mainstream
press really think the Bush-Carlyle connection is irrelevant? And in the
stories about Bush's speech at United Defense, did it simply fail to note
the company's connection with Carlyle, which can easily be made with a
quick search on Google? I put those questions to Sanger on his message
machine at the Times's Washington bureau, but he never returned my call.
Maybe next time he'll get it right.


Tim Shorrock is a Maryland freelance journalist who who grew up in Seoul
and Tokyo and has been reporting about Asia, globalization and finance for
more than twenty years, for many publications at home and abroad. He can
be reached at tshorrock51 () hotmail com

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