Jeb Bush Linked to Cartel Money Laundering While Serving CIA

Wayne Madsen
Black Listed News

While Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb’s early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.

Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.
In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank’s president.

He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA’s Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Jeb Bush’s Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco’s Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

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WH Chef: Another Bush-Clinton Crime Family Murder?

Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Not so fast on ex-White House chef's "accidental" death while hiking

If any responsible law enforcement officer or journalist had made the effort to read the 2007 memoir of ex-White House chef Walter Scheib, “White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen,” which was written with Andrew Friedman, they might not have been so quick to accept the ruling that his death while hiking in the mountains near Taos, New Mexico was merely "accidental." Scheib, who was hired as White House executive chef and was well-liked by one 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was adamantly disliked by George W. Bush, the brother of Jeb Bush, another 2016 presidential candidate.

On June 13, Scheib started hiking the Yerba Linda trail in the Sangre de Cristo (literally, "blood of Christ") Mountains after parking his car at a lot at the trailhead.

His body was found in a river within the wilderness area on June 21. Scheib, who was previously twice married, was reported missing by his girlfriend. An autopsy revealed that Scheib drowned in a rain-swollen river. As with the suspicious deaths of other politically-connected individuals, including former CIA director William Colby, CIA agent John Paisley, and former Export-Import Bank chairman Phil Merrill, bodies found in the water normally result in inconclusive toxicology examinations conducted as part of the autopsy.

While Scheib wrote in his introductory Author's Note that he had no intention of dishing dirt on anyone he worked with during his eleven years as the "First Chef," it is clear that his time as a White House employee markedly changed when the Clintons left the White House in 2001 and the Bushes arrived.

Scheib wrote, "there's no so-called 'dirt' to be found about the First Families here, and no commenting on the personal or political challenges faced by either of the administrations I served."

While there was no "dirt" offered up in the Clintons -- the name Monica Lewinsky does not appear once -- there is enough on the high-browed haughtiness of Laura Bush, who practically personally approved every menu, always insisting on "country club food," and the simple-mindedness of Dubya to indicate that Scheib might have proven to be an embarrassment to the Bush family as Jeb Bush prepared to announce his White House bid.

Ex-White House chef Walter Scheib knew a lot about 9/11. And he suddenly died just as Jeb Bush was announcing he was running for president.

It is Scheib's personal recollections about what happened at the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001, that may have made him a target for Bush-style "silencing" in the weeks before Jeb Bush's announcement that he was running for the presidency. The Bush family, known as the "family that preys together," may have found Scheib's recollections of the Bush years from 2001 to February 2005, when, after Bush's re-election, he was unceremoniously fired by the trio of Laura Bush, White House social secretary and DC socialite Lea Berman -- the wife of GOP lobbyist Wayne Berman -- and a pretentious dandy named Kenneth Blasingame, Laura's good friend and her interior decorator from Texas, to be too much "insider information" that might prejudice the voting public's desire to have yet a third Bush occupy the White House.

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Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush: two sociopaths competing to be the next US president

Matt Carr
Stop the War Coalition 

The two frontrunners for next year's US presidential election are both committed to the same war policies that have been so disastrous for America and the world.

If you take seriously the premise that US military power is a force for international stability and global good,  then a number of events over the last two weeks ought to give pause for thought.  

In Kosovo, nearly 16 years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia, UNCHR reported that 10,000 people had filed for asylum in Hungary in a single month, and as many as 20,000 Kosovars are leaving the country each month to escape poverty, corruption and unemployment.

In Libya, the executions of Coptic Christians carried out by ISIL raise the prospect of the disintegration of Libya into a ‘Somalia on the Mediterranean’.  

In Afghanistan the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) announced that civilian casualties last year reached a new record.  That’s on top of the still ongoing implosion of Iraq, and Syria, and Ukraine, where the US has pursued less visible ‘regime change’ policies with no less catastrophic results.

In a sane and healthy democracy this legacy of civil war, state collapse, chaos and violence ought at the very least to raise an urgent debate about the strategic viability of militarism as a foreign policy instrument.

But there is little evidence of any such criticism and self-analysis in the two frontrunners for next year’s presidential elections.   Astonishingly – and depressingly – America is facing the prospect of a contest between members of the two families that governed America from 1989 to 2009, and which also presided over some of the disasters we are now witnessing.

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Jeb Bush claims 'I'm my own man', but he has a very familiar foreign policy team

Comment: The Bush dynasty is back (though in truth they never left) and it's Jeb's turn to enter the revolving door of  that quaint idea we wistfully call "elections." 

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" Perhaps the most controversial name on Mr Bush’s team sheet is Paul Wolfowitz, who worked for Reagan and for both Bush administrations, and who, as George W Bush’s deputy defence secretary, was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq."

The Independent 

In his first major foreign policy speech since mooting a 2016 presidential run, Jeb Bush sought to distance himself from the legacy of his brother, admitting mistakes were made in Iraq, and called for the world to “take out” Isis.

Noting the inevitable comparisons between himself and presidents George HW and George W Bush, the former governor of Florida said: “I love my father and my brother. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make. But I am my own man – and my views are shaped by my own thinking.”

He has previously backed the Iraq War but today he admitted that “there were mistakes made in Iraq for sure”. However, he credited his brother with sending a surge of troops that helped quell the insurgency at the time.

Mr Bush made the remarks at an event hosted by non-partisan think-tank the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was “lucky”, he said, to have a father and brother who both “shaped America’s foreign policy”. But, he went on, “every president inherits a changing world… and changing circumstances”.

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