THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1993
April
US foils apparent assassination attempt on former president Bush
- April: Saddam Hussein reportedly sends an assassination squad to kill former president Bush in Kuwait,
Islamist terrorism
but American intelligence and security forces foil the plot. In retaliation, Clinton orders a missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad (see below). Many Republicans, unaware of (or oblivious to) the attempted assassination, use the missile attack to criticize Clinton. As later items in this site will show, the evidence of the Hussein-backed assassination plot is circumstantial and shaky. (BBC) - April: Ex-President Bush is joined by sons Neil and Marvin, along with ex-Chief of Staff John Sununu, ex-Bush cabinet member James Baker, and Thomas Kelly, who was Bush's director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, for a trip to Kuwait.
Bush family
Ostensibly the trip is for the ex-president to accept an honorary degree from the University of Kuwait and an award from the Emir, Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah. Baker comes along to cement deals for Houston energy firm Enron; along with Bush family friend Robert Mosbacher, Baker becomes a major figure in Enron's efforts to develop global energy deals. Both Baker and Mosbacher secretly make millions off the deals. In a later trip with Baker to help convince the Kuwaitis to accept an Enron contract to rebuild the Ushaiba power plant, damaged in the Gulf War, Marvin Bush comes along to represent a variety of US defense firms trying to sell goods to the Kuwaiti Defense Ministry. Neil Bush is along to sell anti-pollution equipment to Kuwaiti oil contractors. An executive with the company Neil Bush represents claims that there is "no conflict of interest. ...We're just capitalizing on whatever good feelings exist." Neil will later return to Kuwait City and, with the help of Baker, attempt to secure a management contract with the Ministry of Electricity and Water for a consortium made up of Enron officials and foreign representatives, and would have had the Kuwaiti government paying a management fee to a Kuwaiti company that was owned in part by a private company set up in the Caribbean or some other tax haven. "The offshore firm would have various owners, in Europe and elsewhere, one of which would be a company in which Neil Bush had an interest," reports Seymour Hersh. A financial analyst terms the scheme ingenious: "If you looked at one of the contracts, how in the hell would you know that Bush was in it?" (Austin Chronicle, Kevin Phillips) - Historian Kevin Phillips writes of the sons of George H.W. Bush that they have continued the family tradition.
Bush family
Marvin worked in Boston's financial sector until taking over the hedge fund section at Virginia's Winston Partners. Neil dodged a serious jail sentence over Silverado Savings and Loan, and went into investments with his Interlink Management Corporation. Jeb wound up in Miami doing his own investment business with his IntrAmerican Investments, and ended up doing real estate deals with known Mafia connections and savings and loan institutions that went suspiciously belly-up after funnelling large amounts of cash into Jeb's and his Cosa Nostra partners' pockets. And George W. spent most of his time digging dry holes and pouring millions of his partners' dollars down them. "[W]henever he drilled a dry hole," said one wit, "someone always filled it up with money for him." He originally intended to be a stockbroker. His Houston friend Doug Hannah said, "He wanted to be rich. He wanted to be a stockbroker because his great-uncle and uncle were stockbrokers.... George and I would sit around in the summertime, in the evening, and dream about opening our own stock brokerage firm. We all wanted to be partners." A secretary at his first oil firm, Arbusto, said she believed he was more interested in lining up new investors than actually finding oil. "My suspicion was that he enjoyed raising money more," she remembers. (Kevin Phillips) - April: Chevron, with the help of board member Condoleezza Rice, lands a $20 billion deal with Kazakhstan to develop the Tengiz oil fields. (Laura Flanders)
- April: The Pentagon approves the sale of a jet from the US military stockpile in Arizona to Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden
Among other uses, this jet transported missiles from Pakistan to Somalia that are used to kill American special forces members in Somalia, as well as for initial training for what would become known as "Operation Bojinka." The Pentagon provides no information as to why it would sell an American jet to a known terrorist. (CCR) - April: The Pentagon releases a report on the possibility of future terrorist attacks on US soil,Terror 2000.
Islamist terrorism
The report fails to mention the possibility of a jetliner being hijacked and used to crash into a major building or national landmark, though the possibility was discussed in earnest by the panel of experts who produced the report. Apparently the section was forcibly deleted by the Department of Defense. One of the panel members later writes about the possibility in The Futurist magazine. (CCR)
Branch Davidian debacle in Waco, Texas
- April 19: In Waco, Texas, a 51-day standoff between law enforcement officials and the Branch Davidian religious cult ends tragically, with the cult's compound burning to the ground during an armed assault by FBI, ATF and law enforcement officers, and 79 cult members dying inside, including 22 children and cult leader David Koresh.
Domestic terrorism
An investigation finds that Attorney General Janet Reno was negligent for authorizing the FBI to assault the compound, but does not find that the assault caused the fire, which was most likely started by cult leaders inside the compound. - Many far-right American extremists will take the Waco debacle, along with the 1990 Ruby Ridge incident, as evidence that the "Zionist Occupation Government" (ZOG) is preparing to take over the citizenry and begin exterminating or enslaving all non-Jewish citizens under the sinister auspices of the United Nations. For the extremist Christian right, Waco is their Holocaust. These fires are inflamed by propaganda disseminated by the National Rifle Association, which continually warns its members of the impending Clintonite-Jewish "police state." According to the NRA's Wayne LaPierre in a fund-raising letter of April 13, 1995 (six days before the Oklahoma City bombing), Clinton has given "jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us." The GOP, in its efforts to cast the Clintons as modern-day despots, uses the rhetoric for its own ends, warning Americans of the government's plans to implant subdermal computer ID chips, of squadrons of black helicopters suddenly appearing over one's house, of cryptic messages written on the back of street signs (supposedly there to guide foreign troops on their route towards targets of opportunity), of gangs of foreign thugs in blue UN helmets goosestepping through suburban neighborhoods, and even of nefarious mind-control broadcasts sent over the airwaves. The GOP will use the July 1995 suicide of Vince Foster to further these delusions among their listeners. Representative William Dannemeyer, a Republican who warned his audience about "the homosexual's dangerous agenda," publicizes the "Clinton Body Count," an ever-growing list of people supposedly murdered, or ordered murdered, by the Clintons; the list includes four ATF agents killed in Waco, supposedly former Clinton bodyguards who "knew too much" and were supposedly killed by "friendly" fire. (Naturally, the facts of their deaths are quite different, and none of the agents were, in fact, ever associated with the Clintons.) The list is concocted by Linda Thompson, the self-styled "acting adjunct general" of the "Unorganized Militia of the United States. Her outfit, the American Justice Federation, offers for sale treatises such as Waco: The Big Lie and The Traitor Files, which links the Clintons to a Marxist terrorist group. Sources such as Thompson will be mainstreamed by the likes of Matt Drudge, Lucianne Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Richard Mellon Scaife (with the later complicity of, among others, the New York Times and the Washington Post) as part of their attempt to drag down the Clinton administration. (CNN, Mark Crispin Miller)
