Deep Politics Forum

How The Bush Family Made Its Fortune From The Nazis – The Dutch Connection
23rd October 2010


By John Loftus

For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen’s simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed utterly.

Why? Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.

The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen’s reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920′s remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire…but the Bush family as well. It was a secret Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave.

It was a secret that would lead former US intelligence agent William Gowen, now pushing 80, to the very doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The Gowens are no strangers to controversy or nobility. His father was one of President Roosevelt’s diplomatic emissaries to Pope Pius XII, leading a futile attempt to persuade the Vatican to denounce Hitler’s treatment of Jews. It was his son, William Gowen, who served in Rome after World War II as a Nazi hunter and investigator with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. It was Agent Gowen who first discovered the secret Vatican Ratline for smuggling Nazis in 1949. It was also the same William Gowen who began to uncover the secret Dutch pipeline for smuggling Nazi money in 1999.

A half-century earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling the allied investigators that he had no interest in foreign companies, that Hitler had turned on him and seized most of his property. His remaining assets were mostly in the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany (which he knew were a write-off anyway). His distant (and disliked) relatives in neutral nations like Holland were the actual owners of a substantial percentage of the remaining German industrial base. As innocent victims of the Third Reich, they were lobbying the allied occupation governments in Germany, demanding restitution of the property that had been seized from them by the Nazis.

Under the rules of the Allied occupation of Germany, all property owned by citizens of a neutral nation which had been seized by the Nazis had to be returned to the neutral citizens upon proper presentation of documents showing proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts of neutral parties, particularly in Holland, were claiming ownership of various pieces of the Thyssen empire. In his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and waited to be released from prison while members of the Dutch royal family and the Dutch intelligence service reassembled his pre-war holdings for him.

The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich. But somehow the allied investigations kept going nowhere, the intelligence leads all seemed to dry up.

If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank’s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles’ client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles’s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

Several decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R. Murrow’s colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money laundering. Manning’s manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles’ throat: his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by name, albeit in passing. Dulles volunteered to help the unsuspecting Manning with his manuscript, and sent him on a wild goose chase, searching for Martin Bormann in South America.

Without knowing that he had been deliberately sidetracked, Manning wrote a forward to his book personally thanking Allen Dulles for his “assurance that I was “on the right track, and should keep going.’” Dulles sent Manning and his manuscript off into the swamps of obscurity. The same “search for Martin Bormann”scam was also used to successfully discredit Ladislas Farago, another American journalist probing too far into the laundering of Nazi money. American investigators had to be sent anywhere but Holland.

And so the Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book “The Secret War Against the Jews.”As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman, and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family’s holding company for a number of other entities, including the “Holland American Trading Company.”

It was a matter of public record that the Bush holdings were seized by the US government after the Nazis overran Holland. In 1951, the Bush’s reclaimed Union Bank from the US Alien Property Custodian, along with their “neutral” Dutch assets. I did not realize it, but I had stumbled across a very large piece of the missing Dutch connection. Bush’s ownership of the Holland-American investment company was the missing link to Manning’s earlier research in the Thyssen investigative files. In 1981, Manning had written:

“Thyssen’s first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late 1930's] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation to be credited to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in 1916 by August Thyssen Senior.”

In this one obscure paragraph, in a little known book, Manning had unwittingly documented two intriguing points: 1) The Bush’s Union Bank had apparently bought the same corporate stock that the Thyssens were selling as part of their Nazi money laundering, and 2) the Rotterdam Bank, far from being a neutral Dutch institution, was founded by Fritz Thyssen’s father. In hindsight, Manning and I had uncovered different ends of the Dutch connection.

After reading the excerpt in my book about the Bush’s ownership of the Holland-American trading Company, retired US intelligence agent William Gowen began to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Mr. Gowen knew every c orner of Europe from his days as a diplomat’s son, an American intelligence agent, and a newspaperman. William Gowen deserves sole credit for uncovering the mystery of how the Nazi industrialists hid their money from the Allies at the end of World War II.

In 1999, Mr. Gowen traveled to Europe, at his own expense, to meet a former member of Dutch intelligence who had detailed inside information about the Rotterdam bank. The scrupulous Gowen took a written statement and then had his source read and correct it for error. Here, in summary form, is how the Nazis hid their money in America.

After World War I, August Thyssen had been badly burned by the loss of assets under the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. He was determined that it would never happen again. One of his sons would join the Nazis; the other would be neutral. No matter who won the next war, the Thyssen family would survive with their industrial empire intact. Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazis in 1923; his younger brother married into Hungarian nobility and changed his name to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Baron later claimed Hungarian as well as Dutch citizenship. In public, he pretended to detest his Nazi brother, but in private they met at secret board meetings in Germany to coordinate their operations. If one brother were threatened with loss of property, he would transfer his holdings to the other.

To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920′s — The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen “sold” the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they investigated the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Fritz Thyssen was suspected by Hitler’s auditors of being a tax fraud and of illegally transferring his wealth outside the Third Reich. The Nazi auditors were right: Thyssen felt that Hitler’s economic policies would dilute his wealth through ruinous war inflation. He had been smuggling his war profits out through Holland. But the Rotterdam vaults were empty of clues to where the money had gone. The Nazis did not know that all of the documents evidencing secret Thyssen ownership had been quietly shipped back to the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, under the friendly supervision of Baron Kurt Von Schroeder. Thyssen spent the rest of the war under VIP house arrest. He had fooled Hitler, hidden his immense profits, and now it was time to fool the Americans with same shell game.

As soon as Berlin fell to the allies, it was time to ship the documents back to Rotterdam so that the “neutral” bank could claim ownership under the friendly supervision of Allen Dulles, who, as the OSS intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin, was well placed to handle any troublesome investigations. Unfortunately, the August Thyssen Bank had been bombed during the war, and the documents were buried in the underground vaults beneath the rubble. Worse, the vaults lay in the Soviet Zone of Berlin.

According to Gowen’s source, Prince Bernhard commanded a unit of Dutch intelligence, which dug up the incriminating corporate papers in 1945 and brought them back to the “neutral” bank in Rotterdam. The pretext was that the Nazis had stolen the crown jewels of his wife, Princess Juliana, and the Russians gave the Dutch permission to dig up the vault and retrieve them. Operation Juliana was a Dutch fraud on the Allies who searched high and low for the missing pieces of the Thyssen fortune.

In 1945, the former Dutch manager of the Rotterdam bank resumed control only to discover that he was sitting on a huge pile of hidden Nazi assets. In 1947, the manager threatened to inform Dutch authorities, and was immediately fired by the Thyssens. The somewhat naive bank manager then fled to New York City where he intended to talk to Union Bank director Prescott Bush. As Gowen’s Dutch source recalled, the manager intended “to reveal [to Prescott Bush] the truth about Baron Heinrich and the Rotterdam Bank, [in order that] some or all of the Thyssen interests in the Thyssen Group might be seized and confiscated as German enemy property. “The manager’s body was found in New York two weeks later.

Similarly, in 1996 a Dutch journalist Eddy Roever went to London to interview the Baron, who was neighbors with Margaret Thatcher. Roever’s body was discovered two days later. Perhaps, Gowen remarked dryly, it was only a coincidence that both healthy men had died of heart attacks immediately after trying to uncover the truth about the Thyssens.

Neither Gowen nor his Dutch source knew about the corroborating evidence in the Alien Property Custodian archives or in the OMGUS archives. Together, the two separate sets of US files overlap each other and directly corroborate Gowen’s source. The first set of archives confirms absolutely that the Union Banking Corporation in New York was owned by the Rotterdam Bank. The second set (quoted by Manning) confirms that the Rotterdam Bank in turn was owned by the Thyssens.

It is not surprising that these two American agencies never shared their Thyssen files. As the noted historian Burton Hersh documented:

“The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [German] interests against the custodian.”

No wonder Allen Dulles had sent Paul Manning on a wild goose chase to South America. He was very close to uncovering the fact that the Bush’s bank in New York City was secretly owned by the Nazis, before during and after WWII. Once Thyssen ownership of the Union Banking Corporation is proven, it makes out a prima facie case of treason against the Dulles and Bush families for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.

PART TWO

The first key fact to be proven in any criminal case is that the Thyssen family secretly owned the Bush’s Bank. Apart from Gowen’s source, and the twin American files, a third set of corroboration comes from the Thyssen family themselves. In 1979, the present Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza (Fritz Thyssen’s nephew) prepared a written family history to be shared with his top management. A copy of this thirty-page tome entitled “The History of the Thyssen Family and Their Activities”was provided by Gowen’s source. It contains the following Thyssen admissions:

“Thus, at the beginning of World War II the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart had become the holding of my father’s companies – a Dutch firm whose only shareholder was a Hungarian citizen..Prior to 1929, it held the shares of .the August Thyssen Bank, and also American subsidiaries and the Union Banking Corporation, New York.The shares of all the affiliates were [in 1945] with the August Thyssen Bank in the East Sector of Berlin, from where I was able to have them transferred into the West at the last moment”

“After the war the Dutch government ordered an investigation into the status of the holding company and, pending the result, appointed a Dutch former general manager of my father who turned against our family.. In that same year, 1947, I returned to Germany for the first time after the war, disguised as a Dutch driver in military uniform, to establish contact with our German directors”

“The banking department of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which also functioned as the Group’s holding company, merged in 1970 with Nederlandse Credietbank N.V. which increased its capital. The Group received 25 percent.The Chase Manhattan Bank holds 31%. The name Thyssen-Bornemisza Group was selected for the new holding company.”

“The situation of the Group gradually began to be resolved but it was not until 1955 that the German companies were freed from Allied control and subsequently disentangled. Fortunately, the companies in the group suffered little from dismantling. At last we were in a position to concentrate on purely economic problems — the reconstruction and extension of the companies and the expansion of the organization.”

Thus the twin US Archives, Gowen’s Dutch source, and the Thyssen family history all independently confirm that President Bush’s father and grandfather served on the board of a bank that was secretly owned by the leading Nazi industrialists. The Bush connection to these American institutions is a matter of public record. What no one knew, until Gowen’s brilliant research opened the door, was that the Thyssens were the secret employers of the Bush family.

But what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen’s giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother’s investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family stewardship.

When war broke out was Prescott Bush stricken with a case of Waldheimers disease, a sudden amnesia about his Nazi past? Or did he really believe that our friendly Dutch allies owned the Union Banking Corporation and its parent bank in Rotterdam? It should be recalled that in January 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to “cloak” his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war?

It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II?

The enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 is the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks’ books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies.

The Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank in.

Moreover, the size of their compensation is commensurate with their risk as Nazi money launderers. In 1951, Prescott Bush and his father in law each received one share of Union Bank stock, worth $750,000 each. One and a half million dollars was a lot of money in 1951. But then, from the Thyssen point of view, buying the Bushes was the best bargain of the war.

The bottom line is harsh: It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920′s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush’s bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family’s complicity. ___

John Loftus, a Fox News contributor, is a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.

First published September, 2000

http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_...nazis.html

The other half of this story

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...h--EU.html

Quote:Revealed: The secret report that shows how the Nazis planned a Fourth Reich ...in the EU

By ADAM LEBOR
Last updated at 10:30 PM on 9th May 2009

The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.
The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany's post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis' return to power and work for a 'strong German empire'. In other words: the Fourth Reich.

Plotters: SS chief Heinrich Himmler with Max Faust, engineer with Nazi-backed company I. G. Farben
The three-page, closely typed report, marked 'Secret', copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany's economy by sending money through Switzerland.
They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.
The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire - but not just German.
The Red House Report, which was unearthed from US intelligence files, was the inspiration for my thriller The Budapest Protocol.
The book opens in 1944 as the Red Army advances on the besieged city, then jumps to the present day, during the election campaign for the first president of Europe. The European Union superstate is revealed as a front for a sinister conspiracy, one rooted in the last days of the Second World War.
But as I researched and wrote the novel, I realised that some of the Red House Report had become fact.
Nazi Germany did export massive amounts of capital through neutral countries. German businesses did set up a network of front companies abroad. The German economy did soon recover after 1945.
The Third Reich was defeated militarily, but powerful Nazi-era bankers, industrialists and civil servants, reborn as democrats, soon prospered in the new West Germany. There they worked for a new cause: European economic and political integration.
Is it possible that the Fourth Reich those Nazi industrialists foresaw has, in some part at least, come to pass?
The Red House Report was written by a French spy who was at the meeting in Strasbourg in 1944 - and it paints an extraordinary picture.
The industrialists gathered at the Maison Rouge Hotel waited expectantly as SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr Scheid began the meeting. Scheid held one of the highest ranks in the SS, equivalent to Lieutenant General. He cut an imposing figure in his tailored grey-green uniform and high, peaked cap with silver braiding. Guards were posted outside and the room had been searched for microphones.

Death camp: Auschwitz, where tens of thousands of slave labourers died working in a factory run by German firm I. G. Farben
There was a sharp intake of breath as he began to speak. German industry must realise that the war cannot be won, he declared. 'It must take steps in preparation for a post-war commercial campaign.' Such defeatist talk was treasonous - enough to earn a visit to the Gestapo's cellars, followed by a one-way trip to a concentration camp.
But Scheid had been given special licence to speak the truth – the future of the Reich was at stake. He ordered the industrialists to 'make contacts and alliances with foreign firms, but this must be done individually and without attracting any suspicion'.
The industrialists were to borrow substantial sums from foreign countries after the war.
They were especially to exploit the finances of those German firms that had already been used as fronts for economic penetration abroad, said Scheid, citing the American partners of the steel giant Krupp as well as Zeiss, Leica and the Hamburg-America Line shipping company.
But as most of the industrialists left the meeting, a handful were beckoned into another smaller gathering, presided over by Dr Bosse of the Armaments Ministry. There were secrets to be shared with the elite of the elite.
Bosse explained how, even though the Nazi Party had informed the industrialists that the war was lost, resistance against the Allies would continue until a guarantee of German unity could be obtained. He then laid out the secret three-stage strategy for the Fourth Reich.
In stage one, the industrialists were to 'prepare themselves to finance the Nazi Party, which would be forced to go underground as a Maquis', using the term for the French resistance.
Stage two would see the government allocating large sums to German industrialists to establish a 'secure post-war foundation in foreign countries', while 'existing financial reserves must be placed at the disposal of the party so that a strong German empire can be created after the defeat'.
In stage three, German businesses would set up a 'sleeper' network of agents abroad through front companies, which were to be covers for military research and intelligence, until the Nazis returned to power.
'The existence of these is to be known only by very few people in each industry and by chiefs of the Nazi Party,' Bosse announced.
'Each office will have a liaison agent with the party. As soon as the party becomes strong enough to re-establish its control over Germany, the industrialists will be paid for their effort and co-operation by concessions and orders.'

Extraordinary revelations: The 1944 Red House Report, detailing 'plans of German industrialists to engage in underground activity'
The exported funds were to be channelled through two banks in Zurich, or via agencies in Switzerland which bought property in Switzerland for German concerns, for a five per cent commission.
The Nazis had been covertly sending funds through neutral countries for years.
Swiss banks, in particular the Swiss National Bank, accepted gold looted from the treasuries of Nazi-occupied countries. They accepted assets and property titles taken from Jewish businessmen in Germany and occupied countries, and supplied the foreign currency that the Nazis needed to buy vital war materials.
Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis had been closely monitored by Allied intelligence.
The Red House Report's author notes: 'Previously, exports of capital by German industrialists to neutral countries had to be accomplished rather surreptitiously and by means of special influence.
'Now the Nazi Party stands behind the industrialists and urges them to save themselves by getting funds outside Germany and at the same time advance the party's plans for its post-war operations.'
The order to export foreign capital was technically illegal in Nazi Germany, but by the summer of 1944 the law did not matter.
More than two months after D-Day, the Nazis were being squeezed by the Allies from the west and the Soviets from the east. Hitler had been badly wounded in an assassination attempt. The Nazi leadership was nervous, fractious and quarrelling.
During the war years the SS had built up a gigantic economic empire, based on plunder and murder, and they planned to keep it.
A meeting such as that at the Maison Rouge would need the protection of the SS, according to Dr Adam Tooze of Cambridge University, author of Wages of Destruction: The Making And Breaking Of The Nazi Economy.
He says: 'By 1944 any discussion of post-war planning was banned. It was extremely dangerous to do that in public. But the SS was thinking in the long-term. If you are trying to establish a workable coalition after the war, the only safe place to do it is under the auspices of the apparatus of terror.'
Shrewd SS leaders such as Otto Ohlendorf were already thinking ahead.
As commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which operated on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1942, Ohlendorf was responsible for the murder of 90,000 men, women and children.
A highly educated, intelligent lawyer and economist, Ohlendorf showed great concern for the psychological welfare of his extermination squad's gunmen: he ordered that several of them should fire simultaneously at their victims, so as to avoid any feelings of personal responsibility.
By the winter of 1943 he was transferred to the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf's ostensible job was focusing on export trade, but his real priority was preserving the SS's massive pan-European economic empire after Germany's defeat.
Ohlendorf, who was later hanged at Nuremberg, took particular interest in the work of a German economist called Ludwig Erhard. Erhard had written a lengthy manuscript on the transition to a post-war economy after Germany's defeat. This was dangerous, especially as his name had been mentioned in connection with resistance groups.
But Ohlendorf, who was also chief of the SD, the Nazi domestic security service, protected Erhard as he agreed with his views on stabilising the post-war German economy. Ohlendorf himself was protected by Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS.
Ohlendorf and Erhard feared a bout of hyper-inflation, such as the one that had destroyed the German economy in the Twenties. Such a catastrophe would render the SS's economic empire almost worthless.
The two men agreed that the post-war priority was rapid monetary stabilisation through a stable currency unit, but they realised this would have to be enforced by a friendly occupying power, as no post-war German state would have enough legitimacy to introduce a currency that would have any value.
That unit would become the Deutschmark, which was introduced in 1948. It was an astonishing success and it kick-started the German economy. With a stable currency, Germany was once again an attractive trading partner.
The German industrial conglomerates could rapidly rebuild their economic empires across Europe.
War had been extraordinarily profitable for the German economy. By 1948 - despite six years of conflict, Allied bombing and post-war reparations payments - the capital stock of assets such as equipment and buildings was larger than in 1936, thanks mainly to the armaments boom.
Erhard pondered how German industry could expand its reach across the shattered European continent. The answer was through supranationalism - the voluntary surrender of national sovereignty to an international body.
Germany and France were the drivers behind the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the precursor to the European Union. The ECSC was the first supranational organisation, established in April 1951 by six European states. It created a common market for coal and steel which it regulated. This set a vital precedent for the steady erosion of national sovereignty, a process that continues today.
But before the common market could be set up, the Nazi industrialists had to be pardoned, and Nazi bankers and officials reintegrated. In 1957, John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner for Germany, issued an amnesty for industrialists convicted of war crimes.
The two most powerful Nazi industrialists, Alfried Krupp of Krupp Industries and Friedrich Flick, whose Flick Group eventually owned a 40 per cent stake in Daimler-Benz, were released from prison after serving barely three years.
Krupp and Flick had been central figures in the Nazi economy. Their companies used slave labourers like cattle, to be worked to death.
The Krupp company soon became one of Europe's leading industrial combines.
The Flick Group also quickly built up a new pan-European business empire. Friedrich Flick remained unrepentant about his wartime record and refused to pay a single Deutschmark in compensation until his death in July 1972 at the age of 90, when he left a fortune of more than $1billion, the equivalent of £400million at the time.
'For many leading industrial figures close to the Nazi regime, Europe became a cover for pursuing German national interests after the defeat of Hitler,' says historian Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, an adviser to Jewish former slave labourers.
'The continuity of the economy of Germany and the economies of post-war Europe is striking. Some of the leading figures in the Nazi economy became leading builders of the European Union.'
Numerous household names had exploited slave and forced labourers including BMW, Siemens and Volkswagen, which produced munitions and the V1 rocket.
Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Many concentration camps were attached to dedicated factories where company officials worked hand-in-hand with the SS officers overseeing the camps.
Like Krupp and Flick, Hermann Abs, post-war Germany's most powerful banker, had prospered in the Third Reich. Dapper, elegant and diplomatic, Abs joined the board of Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank, in 1937. As the Nazi empire expanded, Deutsche Bank enthusiastically 'Aryanised' Austrian and Czechoslovak banks that were owned by Jews.
By 1942, Abs held 40 directorships, a quarter of which were in countries occupied by the Nazis. Many of these Aryanised companies used slave labour and by 1943 Deutsche Bank's wealth had quadrupled.
Abs also sat on the supervisory board of I.G. Farben, as Deutsche Bank's representative. I.G. Farben was one of Nazi Germany's most powerful companies, formed out of a union of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and subsidiaries in the Twenties.
It was so deeply entwined with the SS and the Nazis that it ran its own slave labour camp at Auschwitz, known as Auschwitz III, where tens of thousands of Jews and other prisoners died producing artificial rubber.
When they could work no longer, or were verbraucht (used up) in the Nazis' chilling term, they were moved to Birkenau. There they were gassed using Zyklon B, the patent for which was owned by I.G. Farben.
But like all good businessmen, I.G. Farben's bosses hedged their bets.
During the war the company had financed Ludwig Erhard's research. After the war, 24 I.G. Farben executives were indicted for war crimes over Auschwitz III - but only twelve of the 24 were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one-and-a-half to eight years. I.G. Farben got away with mass murder.
Abs was one of the most important figures in Germany's post-war reconstruction. It was largely thanks to him that, just as the Red House Report exhorted, a 'strong German empire' was indeed rebuilt, one which formed the basis of today's European Union.
Abs was put in charge of allocating Marshall Aid - reconstruction funds - to German industry. By 1948 he was effectively managing Germany's economic recovery.
Crucially, Abs was also a member of the European League for Economic Co-operation, an elite intellectual pressure group set up in 1946. The league was dedicated to the establishment of a common market, the precursor of the European Union.
Its members included industrialists and financiers and it developed policies that are strikingly familiar today - on monetary integration and common transport, energy and welfare systems.
When Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, took power in 1949, Abs was his most important financial adviser.
Behind the scenes Abs was working hard for Deutsche Bank to be allowed to reconstitute itself after decentralisation. In 1957 he succeeded and he returned to his former employer.
That same year the six members of the ECSC signed the Treaty of Rome, which set up the European Economic Community. The treaty further liberalised trade and established increasingly powerful supranational institutions including the European Parliament and European Commission.
Like Abs, Ludwig Erhard flourished in post-war Germany. Adenauer made Erhard Germany's first post-war economics minister. In 1963 Erhard succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor for three years.
But the German economic miracle – so vital to the idea of a new Europe - was built on mass murder. The number of slave and forced labourers who died while employed by German companies in the Nazi era was 2,700,000.
Some sporadic compensation payments were made but German industry agreed a conclusive, global settlement only in 2000, with a £3billion compensation fund. There was no admission of legal liability and the individual compensation was paltry.
A slave labourer would receive 15,000 Deutschmarks (about £5,000), a forced labourer 5,000 (about £1,600). Any claimant accepting the deal had to undertake not to launch any further legal action.
To put this sum of money into perspective, in 2001 Volkswagen alone made profits of £1.8billion.
Next month, 27 European Union member states vote in the biggest transnational election in history. Europe now enjoys peace and stability. Germany is a democracy, once again home to a substantial Jewish community. The Holocaust is seared into national memory.
But the Red House Report is a bridge from a sunny present to a dark past. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, once said: 'In 50 years' time nobody will think of nation states.'
For now, the nation state endures. But these three typewritten pages are a reminder that today's drive towards a European federal state is inexorably tangled up with the plans of the SS and German industrialists for a Fourth Reich - an economic rather than military imperium.
• The Budapest Protocol, Adam LeBor's thriller inspired by the Red House Report, is published by Reportage Press.

It should not be overlooked that it was a post WWII aim of the US to help birth the fledgling European Union into being. To this end the CIA were deployed to overcome European domestic resistance to this new entity.

It is deplorable that the US press allowed George Bush and then his son become presidents. Loftus' work has been well known since the mid eighties when he was a Justice Department Attorney in Rockland MA. hunting Nazis.
The Bush- Nazi connection has been known for decades, yet the press ignores it.

No wonder this is such a fascist nation. We get the government we deserve.
Americans are so dummed down that only pop culture matters. Passes for "news".

Great to see John Loftus still writing. He has long been one of my heros.

Dawn

Dawn Meredith Wrote:It is deplorable that the US press allowed George Bush and then his son become presidents. Loftus' work has been well known since the mid eighties when he was a Justice Department Attorney in Rockland MA. hunting Nazis.
The Bush- Nazi connection has been known for decades, yet the press ignores it.

No wonder this is such a fascist nation. We get the government we deserve.
Americans are so dummed down that only pop culture matters. Passes for "news".

Great to see John Loftus still writing. He has long been one of my heros.

Dawn

"All the 'news' that fits their masters Myth, they print" - and NOTHING else! It is just part of the propaganda apparatus (no not every reporter, but every Publisher in MSM and those that own and pull the strings; call the 'tunes'). Loftus is great and anything by him is worth reading and owning. My real fear is who they have planned to replace Obama. Obama was needed [by their planning] to reverse the growing distaste for W and his fascist policies; after Obama someone 10X worse than W will come in in a landslide....very clever....very ominous! I hope I'm wrong. I think not.

It's worth noting that Loftus is rabidly pro-Israel, and fully supports the Neocon agenda. He gives Bush Jr. a pardon on the nazi issue because, according to Loftus, Bush Jr. seperated himself from his Dad's oil crony (nazi-aiding) friends.

Quote:
The International Intelligence Summit is a program of the Intelligence and Homeland Security Education Center (IHEC), a privately funded "charity" that undertakes education programs aimed at helping fight the war on terror. Originally incorporated in 1995 as the International Holocaust Education Center, the IHEC claims that it expanded its mission after 9/11 from "fighting racism to fighting terrorism."

The Intelligence Summit sponsors an annual forum of intelligence and military experts to discuss international intelligence, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism. According to its website, "The purpose of the Summit is to provide an opportunity for the international intelligence community to listen to and learn from each other, and to share ideas in the common war against terrorism. The Summit's Advisory Council includes Generals, a former senior FBI official, a former senior Mossad officer, and the former Chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee."

The summit says that it "recruits active serving members of the government, like Harold Rhode of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to serve as neutral moderators" for its sessions. Rhode has been repeatedly identified with the neoconservative clique in the Pentagon that has promoted the Iraq War and action against Iran. According to respected Mideast commentator Juan Cole: Rhode is a "longtime Middle East specialist in the Defense Department, who has cultivated far right pro-Likud cronies for many years, more or less establishing a cell within the Department of Defense" (August 29, 2004).

The president of the International Intelligence Summit is John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor who claims to have "once held some of the highest security clearances in the world with special access to NATO Cosmic, CIA codeword, and Top Secret Nuclear files." Although Loftus is an ardent supporter of the Bush administration's "global war on terror," he stands outside the inner circles of the administration because of his contentious views, including his writings about the Bush family's history of purported business relations with the Nazis.

In The Secret War Against the Jews (1994), one of his four books, Loftus claims that the Bush clan made its fortune through direct and indirect dealings with the Nazis starting in the 1920s and continuing into the first years of World War II, a contention he has made elsewhere. In an article on his website, Loftus writes: "The Bush family's scandal is that they funded Hitler and profited from the Holocaust" (October 31, 2003). In the same article, Loftus says that President George W. Bush is "not the sharpest tool in the shed, but has a good heart and the good sense not to follow in his father's footsteps." According to Loftus, "'W' has some good people around him who keep a firewall in the White House against his father's oil cronies."

Members of the summit's advisory council appear to be a mishmash of former intelligence/military officers and other intelligence experts, many of whom are linked to neoconservative and other right-wing institutes and pressure groups that call for a more aggressive war on terrorism and for closer intelligence and military links with Israel. Several, including Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, Clare Lopez, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, are principals of the Iran Policy Committee, a hardline group in Washington that calls for regime change in Iran through support of the Iraq-based People's Freedom Fighters (MEK).

Lopez, who was an operations officer with the CIA for two decades, went to work in the private sector as a threat assessment expert for HawkEye Systems and Chugach Systems Integration. She is also an associate with the conservative Middle East Institute. Thomas McInerney established the consulting firm Government Reform Through Technology (GRTT) in 2000. From 1996 to 1999, McInerney was chief executive officer and president of Business Executives for National Security (BENS); he was previously vice president of command and control for Loral Defense Systems-Eagan. McInerney and Vallely coauthored the 2004 book Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, published by Regnery, a right-wing publishing house. Vallely is the chairman of the Military Committee of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy. Both McInerney and Vallely are on the board of the American Center for Democracy.

Cowan is the co-founder and chief executive of wvc3, Inc., a private contractor that provides security and intelligence services to the U.S. government and corporations. The company claims: "No other company, large or small, possesses the in-depth understanding of terrorism or the many nuances of domestic security."

Other members of the Intelligence Summit's advisory council include Yossef Bodansky, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Pauline Neville-Jones (former chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee), Richard Marcinko (author and former Navy SEAL), Yoram Hessel (former senior Israeli Mossad officer), Brigitte Gabriel (founder of American Congress for Truth, which fights "Islamic totalitarianism"), Steve Pomerantz (former FBI counterterrorism director), Bahukutumbi Raman (former counterterrorism chief, India), Tashbih Sayyed (adjunct fellow at Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), Oded Shoham (Israel Defense Forces), and Wayne Simmons (former CIA operative).

Bodansky, born in Israel, is a "world terrorism analyst" at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies in Houston and the author of the 1999 book, Osama Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. According to the right-wing WorldNetDaily, the book "documents numerous contacts and meetings between bin Laden's agents and agents of Hussein. In addition, Bodansky, the U.S. Congress' top terrorism adviser, said the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida predated the September 11 attacks by a decade, and continued thereafter" (June 18, 2004). The soundly refuted bin Laden-Hussein connection is also a running theme of the Intelligence Summit.

Ehrenfeld, also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, is the founder of the American Center for Democracy, which focuses on the connections between narcotrafficking, corruption, and terrorism.

The Intelligence Summit has close links to and receives major funding from Michael Cherney, an expatriate Russian business tycoon who has been accused by the Russian and Israeli governments of having numerous ties to international organized crime and of having been connected to assassinations of rivals. Since 1995, Cherney has lived in Israel, where he is under police investigation for alleged involvement in the international dealings of the Russian mafia. In an Intelligence Summit brief, "The Framing of Michael Cherney," Loftus concludes: "Mr. Cherney does not, nor ever did, present a danger to American national security. To the contrary, his good character and extensive contributions to the U.S. war on terror are well known."

Ehrenfeld, who has built her reputation on linking organized crime and terrorism, also jumped to Cherney's defense in a June 11, 2006 article in FrontPageMag.com, entitled "Inviting Enemies and Rejecting Friends," in which she condemned the State Department for having "repeatedly denied visas to an Israeli billionaire" who is "an ally in the U.S. War on Terror." Ehrenfeld, who points out that Cherney was invited to the United States to receive the International Summit's first Service Award, claims that the State Department caved in to an "international smear offensive."

In early 2006, two former CIA directors, John Deutch and James Woolsey, resigned from their positions at the Intelligence Summit, according to a report in the New York Sun. Loftus claims that both men left as the result of a pressure campaign by the Directorate of Intelligence to punish the summit for releasing secret recordings of Saddam Hussein and his advisers. However, Deutch and Woolsey say they left the Intelligence Summit after learning incriminating information about Cherney. The tapes in question, recorded in the mid-1990s, have been cited by Intelligence Summit members and neoconservatives outside government as evidence that Iraq was planning terrorist operations using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte's office said, however, that while the tapes contain fascinating information, there was nothing on them that contradicted the findings of the Iraq Survey Group.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profi...nce_Summit

Thanks for that Peter. Worth noting.

Peter Dawson Wrote:It's worth noting that Loftus is rabidly pro-Israel, and fully supports the Neocon agenda. He gives Bush Jr. a pardon on the nazi issue because, according to Loftus, Bush Jr. seperated himself from his Dad's oil crony (nazi-aiding) friends.

Quote:
The International Intelligence Summit is a program of the Intelligence and Homeland Security Education Center (IHEC), a privately funded "charity" that undertakes education programs aimed at helping fight the war on terror. Originally incorporated in 1995 as the International Holocaust Education Center, the IHEC claims that it expanded its mission after 9/11 from "fighting racism to fighting terrorism."

The Intelligence Summit sponsors an annual forum of intelligence and military experts to discuss international intelligence, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism. According to its website, "The purpose of the Summit is to provide an opportunity for the international intelligence community to listen to and learn from each other, and to share ideas in the common war against terrorism. The Summit's Advisory Council includes Generals, a former senior FBI official, a former senior Mossad officer, and the former Chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee."

The summit says that it "recruits active serving members of the government, like Harold Rhode of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to serve as neutral moderators" for its sessions. Rhode has been repeatedly identified with the neoconservative clique in the Pentagon that has promoted the Iraq War and action against Iran. According to respected Mideast commentator Juan Cole: Rhode is a "longtime Middle East specialist in the Defense Department, who has cultivated far right pro-Likud cronies for many years, more or less establishing a cell within the Department of Defense" (August 29, 2004).

The president of the International Intelligence Summit is John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor who claims to have "once held some of the highest security clearances in the world with special access to NATO Cosmic, CIA codeword, and Top Secret Nuclear files." Although Loftus is an ardent supporter of the Bush administration's "global war on terror," he stands outside the inner circles of the administration because of his contentious views, including his writings about the Bush family's history of purported business relations with the Nazis.

In The Secret War Against the Jews (1994), one of his four books, Loftus claims that the Bush clan made its fortune through direct and indirect dealings with the Nazis starting in the 1920s and continuing into the first years of World War II, a contention he has made elsewhere. In an article on his website, Loftus writes: "The Bush family's scandal is that they funded Hitler and profited from the Holocaust" (October 31, 2003). In the same article, Loftus says that President George W. Bush is "not the sharpest tool in the shed, but has a good heart and the good sense not to follow in his father's footsteps." According to Loftus, "'W' has some good people around him who keep a firewall in the White House against his father's oil cronies."

Members of the summit's advisory council appear to be a mishmash of former intelligence/military officers and other intelligence experts, many of whom are linked to neoconservative and other right-wing institutes and pressure groups that call for a more aggressive war on terrorism and for closer intelligence and military links with Israel. Several, including Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, Clare Lopez, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, are principals of the Iran Policy Committee, a hardline group in Washington that calls for regime change in Iran through support of the Iraq-based People's Freedom Fighters (MEK).

Lopez, who was an operations officer with the CIA for two decades, went to work in the private sector as a threat assessment expert for HawkEye Systems and Chugach Systems Integration. She is also an associate with the conservative Middle East Institute. Thomas McInerney established the consulting firm Government Reform Through Technology (GRTT) in 2000. From 1996 to 1999, McInerney was chief executive officer and president of Business Executives for National Security (BENS); he was previously vice president of command and control for Loral Defense Systems-Eagan. McInerney and Vallely coauthored the 2004 book Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, published by Regnery, a right-wing publishing house. Vallely is the chairman of the Military Committee of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy. Both McInerney and Vallely are on the board of the American Center for Democracy.

Cowan is the co-founder and chief executive of wvc3, Inc., a private contractor that provides security and intelligence services to the U.S. government and corporations. The company claims: "No other company, large or small, possesses the in-depth understanding of terrorism or the many nuances of domestic security."

Other members of the Intelligence Summit's advisory council include Yossef Bodansky, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Pauline Neville-Jones (former chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee), Richard Marcinko (author and former Navy SEAL), Yoram Hessel (former senior Israeli Mossad officer), Brigitte Gabriel (founder of American Congress for Truth, which fights "Islamic totalitarianism"), Steve Pomerantz (former FBI counterterrorism director), Bahukutumbi Raman (former counterterrorism chief, India), Tashbih Sayyed (adjunct fellow at Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), Oded Shoham (Israel Defense Forces), and Wayne Simmons (former CIA operative).

Bodansky, born in Israel, is a "world terrorism analyst" at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies in Houston and the author of the 1999 book, Osama Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. According to the right-wing WorldNetDaily, the book "documents numerous contacts and meetings between bin Laden's agents and agents of Hussein. In addition, Bodansky, the U.S. Congress' top terrorism adviser, said the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida predated the September 11 attacks by a decade, and continued thereafter" (June 18, 2004). The soundly refuted bin Laden-Hussein connection is also a running theme of the Intelligence Summit.

Ehrenfeld, also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, is the founder of the American Center for Democracy, which focuses on the connections between narcotrafficking, corruption, and terrorism.

The Intelligence Summit has close links to and receives major funding from Michael Cherney, an expatriate Russian business tycoon who has been accused by the Russian and Israeli governments of having numerous ties to international organized crime and of having been connected to assassinations of rivals. Since 1995, Cherney has lived in Israel, where he is under police investigation for alleged involvement in the international dealings of the Russian mafia. In an Intelligence Summit brief, "The Framing of Michael Cherney," Loftus concludes: "Mr. Cherney does not, nor ever did, present a danger to American national security. To the contrary, his good character and extensive contributions to the U.S. war on terror are well known."

Ehrenfeld, who has built her reputation on linking organized crime and terrorism, also jumped to Cherney's defense in a June 11, 2006 article in FrontPageMag.com, entitled "Inviting Enemies and Rejecting Friends," in which she condemned the State Department for having "repeatedly denied visas to an Israeli billionaire" who is "an ally in the U.S. War on Terror." Ehrenfeld, who points out that Cherney was invited to the United States to receive the International Summit's first Service Award, claims that the State Department caved in to an "international smear offensive."

In early 2006, two former CIA directors, John Deutch and James Woolsey, resigned from their positions at the Intelligence Summit, according to a report in the New York Sun. Loftus claims that both men left as the result of a pressure campaign by the Directorate of Intelligence to punish the summit for releasing secret recordings of Saddam Hussein and his advisers. However, Deutch and Woolsey say they left the Intelligence Summit after learning incriminating information about Cherney. The tapes in question, recorded in the mid-1990s, have been cited by Intelligence Summit members and neoconservatives outside government as evidence that Iraq was planning terrorist operations using weapons of mass destruction against the United States. A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte's office said, however, that while the tapes contain fascinating information, there was nothing on them that contradicted the findings of the Iraq Survey Group.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profi...nce_Summit

Oh, my! Wow! Am I disappointed in Loftus! Well, then, he is only good for his early works....he must have senile dementia or the American Myth equivalent [no one can distinguish between them - symptoms the same ]

Yes, Loftus's book "The Secret War Against the Jews" showed where his personal feelings rested. I was in contact with Loftus a long while back and found him to be difficult, insular and less than forthcoming than I would have expected.

I personally prefer Paul Manning for an accurate insight into the post war Nazi power and financial structure. And it is, therefore, interesting that Loftus has unnecessarily taken a side-swipe at Manning (and Lladislas Farago by having Dulles send them "on a wild goose chase" to find Bormann in South America) in the opening article of this thread. The picture created is that Manning, who was a highly respected journalist in his own right, only had one source (Dulles), and his/their book is therefore somehow unsafe ----- whereas Manning had many sources who provided insight into the Bormann Brotherhood -- and their post war financial clout -- including the supposedly long-dead Gestapo Mueller, Bormann's right hand man.

The fact is that the Bormann goose chase was far more important, imo, than the Thyssen angle by a a quite large factor - especially in terms of the finances that Bormann had available to him - as opposed to the finances of one major Nazi industrialist.

So a valid question to ask is who is sending who on a wild goose chase?

I'm a big fan of the John Loftus interview excerpted in the Alex Jones film TERRORSTORM. I notice that Trine Day has a Loftus reprint due out very shortly.

Quote:Loftus writes: "The Bush family's scandal is that they funded Hitler and profited from the Holocaust" (October 31, 2003). In the same article, Loftus says that President George W. Bush is "not the sharpest tool in the shed, but has a good heart and the good sense not to follow in his father's footsteps." According to Loftus, "'W' has some good people around him who keep a firewall in the White House against his father's oil cronies."

Loftus' statement about George W Bush is, at face value, one of the most naive utterances that I have ever read.

Loftus is not a naive man.

So, we're Through the Looking Glass, where nothing is as it seems.

We are possibly viewing the visible traces of otherwise invisible competition between elite factions.

Alternately, tracks are being laid in the snow in case they are needed in future scenarios.

Within the Drago framework of Mechanic - Facilitator - Sponsor:

Sponsor: "My Facilitator friend is my Valuable friend. Until he is my Dangerous enemy. And must be given up. Disposed of."

As the Thyssen history shows, elite players, Sponsors if you will, like to have all bases covered and plant seeds, many of which will wither and die, to further this ultimate aim.

Thomas Pynchon's (complex) narrator in Gravity's Rainbow articulated it perfectly: "It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."

The Art of the Master Magicians is to tell us where to look, what to think and how to feel.

The Magicians choose the rabbit and the hat, and steer our gaze away from the trapdoor at the centre of the stage.

The rare insightful soul whose curiosity leads to the strange anamoly, lurking, protruding, brooding, centre stage receives a one-way descent into Oblivion.....