One of the questions about the Bush National Guard service which I’ve never gotten a clear explaination on is why he failed to take the annual medical examination. His expensive flight training all went for naught because he didn’t take a physical. Strange.
Bush wasn’t the only pilot in his outfit to be grounded. Via Atrios there’s a a document posted which indicates that a James R. Bath was also suspended from flying . . . for failing to take a medical examination.
Was it a coincidence that Bush and Bath both declined physicals? I don’t know. But this wouldn’t be the last time the two would be linked:
In June 1977, Dubya formed his own drilling company, Arbusto Energy (“arbusto” means “bush” in Spanish), in Midland, Texas. Like his father before him, Dubya founded his oil business with the financial backing of investors, including James R. Bath, a Houston businessman whom Dubya apparently first met when they were in the same Texas Air National Guard unit. (Interestingly, both Dubya and Bath were both suspended from flying in August and September 1972, respectively, for “failure to accomplish annual medical examination.”)
Tax documents and other financial records show that Bath, an aircraft broker with controversial ties to Saudi Arabia sheiks, had invested $50,000 in Arbusto, granting him a 5 percent interest in two limited partnerships controlled by Dubya.
Time magazine described Bath in 1991 as “a deal broker whose alleged associations run from the CIA to a major shareholder and director of the Bank of Credit & Commerce.” BCCI, as it was more commonly known, closed its doors in July 1991 amid charges of multibillion-dollar fraud and global news reports that the financial institution had been heavily involved in drug money laundering, arms brokering, covert intelligence work, bribery of government officials and�here’s the kicker�aid to terrorists.
Bath was never directly implicated in the BCCI scandal, but according to The Outlaw Bank, an award-winning 1993 book by Time correspondents, Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Bath originally “made his fortune by investing money for [Sheikh Kalid bin] Mahfouz and another BCCI-connected Saudi, Sheikh bin Laden,” reportedly the brother of none other than Osama bin Laden, the man accused by the U.S. government of masterminding the August 1998 terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed more than 250 people.
According to court documents, Bath swore that in 1977 he represented four prominent and wealthy Saudi Arabians as a trustee and used his name on their investments in the United States. In return, he received a 5 percent interest in their deals. Time reporters Beaty and Gwynne suggest in their book that the $50,000 Bath invested in Dubya’s Arbusto Energy drilling company may have belonged to Bath’s Saudi clients since the Houston businessman “had no substantial money of his own at the time.”
. . .
So, folks, the Middle Eastern oil money used to underwrite the first business venture of our future president of the United States, may have been derived at least in part from the family fortune of Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Granted, this stuff took place before the bin Laden name became synonymous with terrorism, but it does highlight the ties between the Bush family, the bin Ladens, and the Saudis power structure.
Who was it that was whisked out of America right after 9/11? Which country was redacted out of the Congressional 9/11 report?
Oh yeah.