The Republican Who Would Challenge Bush
By Paul Krassner
A Call to Action for an Important Journalistic-historical Project
By John Buchanan
January 31, 2004
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| Satirist and author Paul Krassner - never one to parrot the official line - predicts the Buchanan campaign will ruffle a few feathers. |
Meet Reporter John Buchanan:
The Republican Who Is Challenging Bush!
By Paul Krassner
Although the facts about the Bush-family/Nazi connections have been whirling around in cyberspace for the past few years, a veteran reporter for 33 years named John Buchanan first broke the story in print. And now, he'll be running against George W. in the New Hampshire Republican primary on January 27, 2004.
In January 2003, Buchanan got involved in the anti-Iraq-war movement and started researching the war profiteering of the Bush administration by way of such companies as the Carlyle Group, Engineered Support Systems, Bio-Port, Halliburton, Bechtel, Wackenhut -- the Bush-Cheney cabal -- which ultimately led to a screenplay called 'Project Clear-Vision,' taken from the name of an actual CIA anthrax-biowarfare project that violated an international treaty Richard Nixon signed in 1972.
"The plot of the script," he told me, "was that the German principals of Bayer AG, which came out of I.G. Farben after WW II, blackmailed Daddy Bush with the 'Nazi past' of the family into allowing the anthrax letters to happen so sales of Cipro [an antibiotic used to treat anthrax] could save Bayer US from bankruptcy. I got a really hot-shot young turk agent in Hollywood who told me on September 2 that he could get a lot of money for the script if I could prove the Nazi past and publish the documentation. So, technically speaking, motivated more by sheer greed than patriotism, I set out to sell a movie script for millions of dollars by landing a huge scoop."
Revealed: Bush Family Connections to a Nazi Financier
He spent a few days at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, where he found "smoking gun" information in the personal papers of Averell Harriman, only to learn that the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, CNN -- even his hometown paper, the Miami Herald -- all refused to acknowledge his discovery.
His story ended up in the fortnightly New Hampshire Gazette, the oldest newspaper in America, founded in 1756. After his first article appeared in the Gazette on October 10, more than 60 websites around the globe picked up the story.
The Associated Press's Washington reporter, Jonathan Salant, went to the archives under Buchanan's direction and reconfirmed the documents. Then, in Buchanan's words, Salant "misreported them in a watered-down, inexplicably erroneous story that ran all over the world the weekend of October 17-19 -- in the Moscow Times, the (London) Guardian, Hindustan Times, Sydney Morning Herald, the Jerusalem Post and, in the US, Newsday, the Washington Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Kansas City Star, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, New Orleans Times-Picayune, among others.
"Meanwhile," says Buchanan, "the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, and CNN, not to mention the Miami Herald (whose official response to the AP story was to send the police to my apartment as a 'suspected terrorist sympathizer') stonewalled and still refused to look at the documents.
"After that, Joe Conason ... wrote a column in the New York Observer in which he dismissed my story as a 'smear' against George W. Bush. That set off a backlash that culminated in a Sunday Doonesbury 'Bush-Nazi?' cartoon that turned the scoop into pop culture.
"Finally, presidential historian and Daddy Bush official biographer Herbert Parmet came to my rescue in November 2003 with a major essay at the History News Network at George Mason University."
Enter the Founder of 'Earth Day'
I asked Buchanan how his decision to run for president came about.
"It wasn't my decision. My own friends and peers would have laughed -- as they did. Nevertheless, I was literally drafted by a living legend -- John McConnell, the 88-year-old founder of Earth Day, whose friends included 33 Nobel laureates and former UN Secretary General U Thant.
"McConnell called me on October 13 after he read my first Gazette article online, and told me he thought I was 'the kind of person who can change the world.' I didn't even know who he was in that first call, which lasted over an hour. Then, after I found out who he was, we talked some more and agreed to form a new political party based on a policy of peace, justice and care of the planet.
"A week later, as I was writing a platform, a group that included a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent and a Muslim author agreed that I should run -- but as a *Republican* -- as 'the truth candidate,' head-on against Bush. I agreed, on the condition that I would not be a politician, but a working journalist whose ideas and claims have grown out of a long career of writing about government, politics, business, the arts -- you name it. So, I have a unique perspective, in that I have nothing to lose and only have one responsibility, which is to tell the truth in response to every question I get."
His platform is Quixotically idealistic:- End the corporate reign in this country by getting corporations out of politics and government entirely;
- End war-profiteering by former government officials and Washington insiders, which leads to billions of dollars in secret profits that are banked offshore, without scrutiny;
- Reform the media.
What Does Buchanan Expect to Accomplish?
"Even though you'll be running as a Republican," I said, "and it's a given that you won't win, do you expect to help the Democrats defeat Bush by exposing his lies?"
"I submit that, based on the unreported facts, he is guilty of treason because of the sinister and long-standing relationship he and his family have with the Saudis and the bin Laden family -- both via the Carlyle Group and, prior to that, via Bush's Texas oil ventures in the '70s. I am running for president as a grand experiment to see whether the truth matters any more in this country -- and whether we can deal with it if it can be gotten out for open debate in a presidential election cycle.
"I am going to focus on 9/11 and how Bush & Co. have exploited it purely for financial gain -- and name the businesses and what they've made to date. We are talking in the billions of dollars being skimmed off by insiders like Halliburton. I will show that. I will raise the serious issue of unanswered questions about 9/11 and the ongoing cover-up. I am now supported by Ellen Mariani, the 9/11 widow who is suing Bush under the RICO statute.
"My question now is, 'Can a common citizen, armed with the truth and good ideas, get any attention at all in a presidential primary without the traditional political advantages of money and organization? To put it mildly, it is a journey into unknown territory. I intend to fight like a son-of-a-bitch to win. That means getting 10% of the vote in New Hampshire, which earns me one delegate. Then I'll go to the Republican Convention and try to shut it down.
"The real reason I'm running is to raise the question: 'Who owns the government, them (the white corporate elite) or us (we the people)?' If it is us, then we face a big challenge in terms of demonstrating that peacefully and legally under the Constitution. If it's 'them', then we should face up to that and accept the consequences. The real question, of course, is do people even really care at this point, having been lulled into silence (and a failure to even vote) by their material comforts?"
Buchanan is getting on ballots in other states, including Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Texas. At the College Convention in New Hampshire on January 7, he received a major ovation and is now considered the front runner of the fringe candidates.
Investigative satirist Paul Krassner is the former publisher of The Realist, one of the country's most influential satirical magazines. He is also author of five books, including Murder at the Conspiracy Convention, Krassner's website is: www.paulkrassner.com
©2004 Paul Krassner and the New York Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A Call to Action for an Important Journalistic-historical Project
By John Buchanan
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| Can Buchanan break the Bush-Cheney lock on the White House? Reporting from the New Hampshire primaries, Buchanan tells The-Edge: "We're on the verge of victory, as I got almost 1,000 votes and Gephardt only got 334 on the Democractic ballot. On a net cost-per-vote basis, I won in a landslide!" Credit: Photomontage by The-Edge. |
On September 17, I became the first journalist in US history to independently confirm and report in a reputable newspaper the Nazi past of the Bush family, via its 27-year business relationship with Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen from 1924 until 1951. Both Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, and George Herbert Walker, his maternal great-grandfather, were part of the partnership, under the banner of the private bank Brown Brothers Harriman.
Beginning in August 1942, those Nazi-front business assets were seized by the US government under The Trading with the Enemy Act. The seizures continued until 1951, when Thyssen, the financial architect of The Third Reich, died in Argentina. It was the liquidation of those Nazi assets after Thyssen's death that were the foundation of the Bush family fortune.
Who Reported the Story; Who Buried It?
Last March, Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a brief but shocking story that linked the Bush fortune directly to slave labor at Auschwitz. The US edition, as I reported in my first NHG story on October 10 spiked the story for reasons that have never been accounted for by Newsweek.
Since my discovery of the actual documents, many of which were only declassified and approved for public release on September 14 (four days before I got to the archives), virtually every major news organization in the US has refused to investigate the Bush-Nazi story or even examine the documents. The list includes The New York Times, ABC News, Washington Post, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Miami Herald, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Despite the failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge my historic scoop, Associated Press put the story out to the world over the weekend of October 17-19, and it ran in major international newspapers including The Guardian (UK), Jerusalem Times and Ha'aretz (Israel), Hindustan Times (India), Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and The Moscow Times (Russia).
However, liberal Bush-bashing columnist and author Joe Conason, author of Big Lies, dismissed the Nazi allegations as a smear against President George W. Bush in The New York Observer. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau then weighed in with a Sunday Doonesbury. The Moscow Times ran a Prescott Bush Nazi parody. Howard Kurtz addressed my reporting and lack of wider coverage in his Washington Post media column.
Then, on November 17, noted Presidential biographer and Bush biographer Herbert Parmet put things into perspective with an essay at The History News Network at George Mason University. Click Here for Report
"We need to do more," Parmet wrote, "than merely sift through the essence of Buchanan's assertions, as troubling as they may be, to appreciate the value of his labors, and wonder at the contribution to public knowledge of Steven Fowle's maverick newspaper."
Buchanan's Offer: 'Join the Debate'
Steve Fowle, the editor and publisher of The New Hampshire Gazette, and I are asking that interested journalists, editors, researchers and historians join us so that we, with our limited resources, can aggressively and accurately follow the Bush-Nazi story to its conclusion.
Specifically, we intend to prove the Bush family connection to slave labor at Auschwitz with documentary evidence and living sources. In addition, we intend to prove that the Bush family fortune did indeed originate as blood money from its support of totalitarian, non-Democratic regimes that included Hitler, the Bolsheviks, Mussolini and Stalin.
The even larger issue, however, is whether this newly confirmed information matters to the American people, the Congress and the media or not. We submit, based on the international reaction to date to my first three articles in the Gazette, that the American people have a right to know of this troubling and until now secret chapter of US history.
If you agree the story is important, we need your support in asking that Congress investigate the 60-year media cover-up of the Bush family history and its implications for the present and future.
If you do not agree the Bush-Nazi connection is important and relevant, please say so and state your reasoning. We welcome all opinions and points of view, on all sides of the debate.
Ultimately, it is the American people and the people of the world -- not the media or politicians -- who will determine whether this discovery is truly important or not. For myself, I believe it is vitally important and terribly relevant.
John Buchanan is an investigative reporter and presidential protest candidate. For more information on Buchanan, his articles and his campaign, check: http://johnbuchanan.org
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