In a March 2002 interview with Pacifica radio in Berkeley, then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia made headlines. “Persons close to this administration,” she charged, referring to the Bush White House, “are poised to make huge profits off America’s new war.... An administration of questionable legitimacy has been given unprecedented power.” She went on to raise pointed questions about what the Bush team knew about the 9/11 tragedy before it occurred.
A firestorm of denunciation greeted her words, particularly from leading bourgeois circles. Senator Zell Miller of Georgia – a fellow Democrat – termed her “very dangerous and irresponsible.”
Actually, as this intriguing book amply demonstrates, “persons close to the Bush administration were in fact in a position to gain financially from the September 11 attacks.”
Specifically Congresswoman McKinney noted a major investment banking concern called the Carlyle Group. This fabulously profitable concern includes a rogues’ gallery of failed politicians and manipulators – former President George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker, former British Prime Minister John Major and former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. Louis Gerstner, former IBM chief executive, whose reign at that computer hardware firm is presently under federal investigation for financial trickery, now leads Carlyle.
Though the name “bin Laden” will forever live in infamy, “Carlyle had a relationship with the bin Ladens that began in the early 1990s.... Through Carlyle, the bin Laden family was in a position to make millions from the war being waged against their own brother.” Briody notes, “In the wake of the anthrax attacks,” Carlyle “scored a number of cleanup contracts with anthrax-infected buildings.” Carlyle does major business with both the Pentagon and Saudi Arabia, which means that it is a major player in the so-called “war on terrorism.”
As it turns out, Congresswoman McKinney was not that far off the mark, though the ferocity of the attack against her ultimately drove her from office.
Though revealing, this book is much too brief given the magnitude of the subject matter. Carlyle is a classic example of state monopoly capitalism, in that it exposes the revolving door that shuffles business executives into government posts – the most notorious being the failed oilman and present president, George W. Bush – then back to the private sector, all the while trading on contacts and inside information in the ongoing effort to “privatize” the public patrimony.
Nevertheless, this book is a significant step in the attempt to understand a critically important business that plays a major role in the political economy.
The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group By Dan Briody New York, John Wiley, 2003.
