Com­ment: The bril­liant new book Fam­ily of Secrets by Russ Baker ana­lyzes the BCCI imbroglio at great length. (It was the BCCI nexus that spawned the busi­ness rela­tion­ship between the Bush and Bin Laden families.)

Of course, the BCCI/James R. Bath con­cate­na­tion lies at the foun­da­tion of the inves­ti­ga­tion into the terror-funding appa­ra­tus that was exposed in the 3/20/2002 Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids.

That the BCCI milieu was not prop­erly inves­ti­gated might have some­thing to do with the iden­tity of the indi­vid­ual charged with scru­ti­niz­ing BCCI’s affairs for the Reagan-Bush administration.

Read a mini-review of the book.

. . . . Noth­ing, how­ever, was ever made of the Bush con­nec­tion to all this. [Khalid bin] Mahfouz’s ties to Jim Bath were not raised, and there­fore, nei­ther was Bath’s con­nec­tion to the Bush fam­ily. It is worth not­ing that the Trea­sury Depart­ment offi­cial respon­si­ble for scru­ti­niz­ing BCCI’s affairs in the Reagan-Bush admin­is­tra­tion was assis­tant sec­re­tary for enforce­ment John M. Walker Jr.–who hap­pened to be Poppy’s [George H.W. Bush’s] cousin. . . .” (Fam­ily of Secrets; p. 303.)