Posted on 15-1-2002

Hell to Pay
by William Rivers Pitt*

Whichever part of the nation that never heard of the energy giant Enron
Corporation has recently been introduced to the company in odious context.
The story thus far is nothing less than astounding: Enron, a company valued
in the billions on Wall Street, suddenly filed for the largest bankruptcy
claim in the history of the known universe. 4,000 employees were abruptly
shown the door after having been barred from dumping the company stock,
meant to fund their retirement, while it was worth something. Meanwhile,
Enron executives in the know were able to dump the stock, back when it was
the gold standard on the Street, for a cool $1 billion.

Apparently, Enron was ailing for quite a long time. The aforementioned
executives were able to maintain the mirage of financial viability by
stuffing the debt into what are called 'off-balance-sheet partnerships.' In
essence, each of the executives built personal banking bunkers and hid what
has been revealed to be staggering Enron debts within them, keeping fact
that the company was hemorrhaging money off the publicly displayed balance
sheets. This maintained the company's credit rating, and allowed it to
continue doing business. This went on for four years, which means several
things. It means most of the Enron executives were aware of and/or actively
participating in this highly criminal and irresponsible activity. It means
the stockholders, including 4,000 loyal Enron employees, were lied to. It
probably means that the executives knew the stock value was doomed when
they bailed out and cashed in several months ago. It means they let their
employees lose the retirement funds they believed were growing within their
Enron stock portfolios. It means a lot of people got screwed by a pack of
sharp operators who didn't give a damn about anyone but themselves.

All this could simply be chalked up as yet another story of corporate greed
run amok, until the umbilical political and financial connections between
Bush and Enron are illuminated. Enron's capo, Kenneth Lay, was perhaps the
best financial friend George W. Bush has ever known. Lay and a number of
Enron employees essentially bankrolled Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign,
going so far as to lend Bush an Enron corporate jet for trips between
whistle stops. Before Bush got White House stars in his eyes, he worked
very closely with Enron on energy policy in Texas. This close connection
led to the Bush administration's hiring of a number of influential
individuals within Enron's orbit for important government positions:

- Thomas E. White, Bush's Secretary of the Army, was once Vice-Chairman of
Enron Energy Service, and held millions in Enron stock;

- Presidential Advisor Karl Rove owned as much as $250,000 in Enron stock;

- Economic adviser Larry Lindsay leapt straight from Enron to his current
White House job;

- Federal Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick did the same;

- SEC Chairman Harvey Pitts was hand-picked by Kenneth Lay for the
position, due to his notorious aversion to governmental regulation of any
kind.

There are some thirty one Bush administration officials who had a line item
for Enron in their stock portfolio, including Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. It is fair to say that the woebegone corporation held, and
continues to hold, enormous influence over the day-to-day machinations of
Federal government policy. One wonders if Bush's recent gutting of the
Clean Air Act, a decision designed to improve the fortunes of companies
like Enron, was the brainchild of people with deep connections to the
energy industry.

The trail of influence left by Enron leads also to the scabrous heart
ventricles of Vice President Dick Cheney, who admitted recently to six
separate meetings with Enron executives while formulating the Bush
administration's energy policy. Cheney, a former executive of the
Halliburton Petroleum interest, was in charge of creating this policy. For
reasons soon to be exposed by subpoena, Cheney refused to detail the
specifics of the creation of this policy, which included the multiple Enron
meetings. The General Accounting Office was preparing to sue Cheney to
reveal this information when the September 11th attacks took place. Those
subpoenas may be dusted off and mailed within a month. In the meantime, the
Justice Department is preparing a serious criminal investigation into the
collapse of Enron. The Democratically-controlled Senate is planning
hearings on the matter as well. Columnist Robert Scheer has referred to the
Bush administration's involvement in the Enron debacle as "Whitewater in
spades." One wonders if "Watergate" would be a more appropriate comparison.

Bush's own dealings within the energy industry carry a disturbingly
familiar echo to the Enron situation: once upon a time, he was a
high-ranking officer of a petroleum interest called Harken Oil. On June 22,
1990, Bush sold his Harken stock and made $848,560, earning him a 200%
profit. One week later, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly
earnings and its stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over
the next six months. Bush made a bundle while the other investors lost
millions. Harken was Enron in miniature, and might have served as a warning
to the American people if the press had chosen to pay any attention to it
during the 2000 Presidential campaign.

There is a school of thought, espoused primarily by Republicans, that any
investigation into potentially dishonorable or illegal actions by the Bush
administration is tantamount to treason. We are at war, undeclared though
it may be, and Bush must be free to prosecute this war vigorously, so as to
defend our freedom and bring the murderers of American civilians to
justice. If reports recently aired on CNN have any credence, however, Bush
and his people may well have to answer for actions that make the Enron
catastrophe look like a jaywalking offense, actions that led directly to
the incredible carnage in New York and Washington, D.C. In 1998, during the
Clinton administration, the U.S.-based energy concern Unocal canceled plans
to exploit massive natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan. They had planned
to run a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, where the natural gas
could have been processed for Asian and Western energy markets. The idea
was scuttled after Clinton ordered the cruise missile bombing of
Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack upon U.S. embassies in Africa
which were planned and executed by Osama bin Laden. The pipeline would have
had to pass through Afghanistan, and Unocal was given the message in
Technicolor by Clinton's people that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was not
to be given any sort of financial boon.

Apparently, the Bush administration found no moral dilemma in dealing with
the Taliban to get to the gas. Immediately upon their arrival in
Washington, a vigorous courtship of the Taliban was undertaken by Bush's
people. In fact, if former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler is to be
believed, the Bush administration had a vested interest in strengthening
and stabilizing the Taliban regime, because a stable regime would compel
investors to revive the Turkmenistan natural gas pipeline deal. The
Taliban, demon of the moment, was the Bush administration's idea of a
'stable' government. Stable enough, anyway, to see the pipeline through.
The connections between Bush and the Taliban became so close that the
Taliban went so far as to hire an expert on U.S. public relations named
Laila Helms, so as to smooth the way between the two regimes. Meetings
between the two nations continued at a high level, the last of which
occurred in August, scant weeks before the September 11th attacks. All of
these actions were taken to exploit the vast energy reserves in
Turkmenistan for the benefit of American energy corporations.

The cozy relationship between Bush and the Taliban frustrated the
investigative efforts of former Deputy Director of the FBI John O'Neill.
O'Neill was the FBI's chief bin Laden hunter, in charge of the
investigations into the bin Laden-connected bombings of the World Trade
Center in 1993, the destruction of an American troop barracks in Saudi
Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack upon
the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. O'Neill quit the FBI in protest two weeks before
the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. He did so because his
investigation was hindered by the Bush administration's connections to the
Taliban, and by the interests of American petroleum companies. O'Neill was
quoted as stating, "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism
were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in
it." After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as head of security for
the World Trade Center. He died on September 11th, 2001, trying to save
people trapped by the attack, when the towers came down on top of him. The
irony in this, simply, is horrifying. In essence, the Federal agent who
knew more about bin Laden than any living American was kept from
investigating terrorist threats against this country. He was hindered
because the Bush administration was desperate to cultivate the favor of the
Taliban, who held terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in great esteem, so
as to gain access to lucrative natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan.

If these allegations prove true, Bush and his friends allowed this affinity
to hamstring investigations that could have thwarted bin Laden's September
plans. If these allegations prove true, everything since September 11th has
been a massive cover-up operation in which American soldiers and thousands
of Afghan civilians have died. If these allegations prove true, the Bush
administration has the blood of thousands of American civilians on its
hands. If these allegations carry even the faintest whiff of credibility,
George W. Bush and members of his administration stand in taint of high
treason and murder.

On November 7th, 2000, a clear majority of Americans came to the conclusion
that George W. Bush was unfit to govern this nation. For a variety of dark
and controversial reasons, that conclusion was thrown over. Sometime soon,
if the media's electronic web continues to carry these sordid stories of
corruption, greed and death, the American people will come to fully
understand the consequences of that failed election. It is one thing to
coddle and court a corrupt energy company for political and financial gain.
It is quite another to coddle and court a murderous terrorist-supporting
regime, hindering anti-terrorism investigations in the process, for the
purpose of exploiting valuable natural resources. The former cost a number
of people their retirement funds. The latter has cost thousands of people
their lives. One is criminal. The other is abominable. George W. Bush is
deeply implicated in both. There will be hell to pay.


* www.willpitt.com/WillPitt.htm