Americans accused of brutal 'punishment' tactics against villagers, while British are condemned as too soft
By Patrick Cockburn in Dhuluaya
12 October 2003
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.
The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.
Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."
Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.
"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.
The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge.
Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death."
The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."
Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.
Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=452375
by John Buchanan
Documents in National Archives Prove
George W. Bush's Grandfather Traded
with Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor
WASHINGTON -- After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Department of the Treasury, 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 tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the front-page Herald-Tribune 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 U.S. "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 U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false information.
UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, 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 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 October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. 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).
The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.
Still No Story?
Since 1942, the information has not appeared in any U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.
The essence of the story has been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.
In the 1990s, former U.S. Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, now honorary president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, wrote a book and launched a web site (<>www.john-loftus.com) which did breakthrough reporting, including establishing the link between Prescott Bush, Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and forced labor at Auschwitz. Although the widely-respected Loftus established a successful international speaking career with his information, no U.S. newspaper or major TV news program acknowledged his decade of work, nor did he ever see many of the recently released documents.
Meanwhile, 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 September 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 September 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 March 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 U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. 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
In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. 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.
http://www.rense.com/general42/bshnazi.htm
Letter to the Editor
It's an interesting situation for Rush Limbaugh to admit that he is in fact - a drug addict. Normally one should feel compassion for him because of his situation, but Rush has made a career out of putting down the less fortunate and engaging in his daily moral masturbation ritual with his holier than thou listeners that one wonders if Rush deserves the same compassion due to someone who was less of a hypocrite. Should the liberals and the "femi-Nazis" feel compassion for Rush Limbaugh's sins?
The answer is - yes. I think this is a blessing and - if Rush is willing to come down off his high horse I would like to welcome him to the real world. Rush has made hundreds of millions of dollars spreading his message of hate and bigotry and now his career is over. I don't see how he can continue to be the voice of the morally superior having been addicted to narcotics.
I therefore want to be the first to extend my hand to Rush and ask him to come clean - tell the truth - and denounce your past. If you want the world to forgive you - you must first ask for forgiveness and turn away from the sins of your life and get real. There is a place for you in this world Rush - but it's a different place than where you have been. To receive compassion you must be willing to accept it.
So - on behalf of bleeding heart liberals - we wish you a full recovery and hope that you can turn your life around and become a normal and fully functional member of society. This can be an opportunity for growth and can result in you becoming a far better person. So - we stand with your conservative listeners to wish you the best in your recovery.
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I appeal to all readers to spread this message. I think it's high time we ended the hatred between "Liberals" and "Conservatives" words that are artificial and meaningless. It is stupid to fight over bullshit. Everyone wants what's right and what is best for humanity. It just so happens that we don't agree on the solution.
The world is in grave trouble right now and humanity can not afford to continue on the path of bullshit and illusion. It is time to get real. To look for real solutions to real problems. It is time to take responsibility and make this world a better place to live for everyone on the planet regardless of politics, race, religion, or ethnic origin.
As a white male bleeding heart liberal I make the fisrt move and challenge everyone to put your beliefs to the test of reality and to go with what's real.
Rush has a hard road ahead of him. He is about to come face to face with the real world in a way that he can't bullshit his way out of. If we can convert Rush to a realist we can do anything. Perhaps he will see the light the way brother David Brock did and turn away from the Dark Side and join the human race as a fully productive member of society.
Marc Perkel
First One
Church of Reality
Letter to the Editor
Vice President Dick Cheney is trying to sell the reason for the Iraq war based on 9-11. Cheney says, "Remember what we saw on the morning of 9/11. And knowing the nature of these enemies, we have as clear a responsibility as could ever fall to government,"
The problem with this is that Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11. Bin Laden - who is responsible - resides in Pakistan - who is our "ally" and is funded by Saudi Arabia - who is also our "ally". It seems to me that in order to protect the people of America from terrorism the Bush administration should first correctly identify who the enemy is.
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Bush and Cheney are caught in a perpetual loop as the have to continue to try to explain why we went to war with Iraq - why we are still there - and what we are currently doing there - and how we are going to get out. This game has no end.
Letter to the Editor
One would normally think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory would be a good sign for Bush and Republicans. But that may not be the case. Voters in California are fed up with business as usual and politicians who are under performers. The time has come to throw the bums out and that applies to all incumbents of both parties. America it tired of crap and are willing to vote for the "anyone else" candidate. Bush and Congress better figure out the reason we are in Iraq and why the economy has gone from record surpluses to record deficits before they face the voters in 2004.
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Maybe I'll run for state representative on the platform of limiting parking tickets to $25.
I just voted NO on the recall. I also voted for Cruz Bustamante. Big surprize. Trying to prevent yet another stolen exection but the fix is probably in. In Los Angeles they have the Republican controlled Daibold voting machines. The same ones that gave Al Gore a -16022 (minus 16022) total in one precinct of Seminole County in the 2000 election. The Republicans will surely have these machines rigged in favor of Arnold.
If Arnold gets elected I want to be the first to sign the next recall petition.
I did make a controversial vote. I voted YES on Prop. 53 which prohibits the collection by the covernment on most racial data. This data is most often used to support racist decisions in government hiring. I don't support discrimination based on race against any race including white people. If the government doesn't know what race someone is then they can't make a decision based on race.
It's been 40 years since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and it's about time that people of color get off the government tit. I do support affirmative action based on economic status - but not race.
Letter to the Editor
I think voters are focusing on Arnold Schwarzenegger's past when they should be focused on the future. It would be a mistake if this election were decided on the basis of whether or not the voters believe that Arnold groped women or praised Hitler or met with Enron executives during the blackouts. This election is about the future of California - not about Arnold's past.
What the voters of California need to decide is - what will the future be like. Who will be the best for the people of California? Our future is at stake and I would urge all voters to think about the future and vote responsibly.
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This is not a pro Arnold letter. This letter was carefully crafted to get published. It mentions 3 Arnold scandals but urges voters to consider the future. And I think considering the future is a good thing. But - the nutral tone is more likely to get published the day of the election.