Why do people say such TERRIBLE things about the Bush Family?

I dunno - perhaps, just maybe, because they've done terrible things?

Kitty Kelley's forthcoming book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, could revist some of the clan's open and unspoken secrets, such as "alleged sex offenses against minors by Dubya's father." I say "revisit," but in fact this will be a new one for most Americans. Because no scandal in American history was disappeared more efficiently than that of the Franklin Credit Union. Despite the salacious mix of sex and violence in high places, few have ever heard of it. Why, I wonder, would that be?

In the 1980s, a man named Lawrence King launched a credit union in Omaha and quickly became one of the most prominent black Republicans in America. He sang the national anthem at two Republican National Conventions. He was a friend of powerful state and national figures, including billionaire Warren Buffett (Buffett hosted the King's 10th anniversary party and sat on the board of Franklin's parent company) and then-Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.

King also happened to be an abusive paedophile, who ran an adolescent sex ring out of his office that enjoyed the protection of US security and intelligence apparatus, which exploited children lured from the neighbouring Boys' Town as both a honeytrap to blackmail vulnerable parties and as a reward for faithful assets.

King is serving 15 years for fraud, some of it related to Iran/Contra money laundering, and recently lost a million dollar lawsuit filed by Paul Bonacci, one of his former child prostitutes who took a midnight tour of the White House organized through the office of the Vice President. Judge Warren Urbom found that King

continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonment, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to "scavenge" for children to be a part of the defendant King's sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous sexual contacts with the defendant King and others and participate in deviate sexual games and masochistic orgies with other minor children.

It seems too horrible to have happened. So - did it? Goddamn right it did. But Poppy mixed up with a child sex ring? The allegation is too outrageous to process. So the screen slides across the mind, and it's as though we never heard about it, let alone that it ever occured.

The Nebraska State legislature retained investigator Gary Caradori to sort through allegations of a paedophile ring run out of the Franklin Credit Union, which implicated not only some of the most powerful figures in the state, but high officials in Washington as well.

Caradori travelled to Chicago to gather testimony and evidence of a child prostitution ring which implicated senior Republicans both in the state and in DC, and operated with the knowledge of Vice President Bush (a number of the teens placed Bush at sex parties) and the protection of intelligence agencies, all tied to King's credit union. He'd taken along his young son, who wanted to see the 1990 All-Star Game.

Before returning to Nebraska, Caradori called the committee chief, Senator Loran Schmit, to say he had the smoking gun. "We've got them! There's no way they can get out of it now!" He would be bringing home photographic evidence supporting the fantastic though reluctant testimony of the victimized teens. En route, his small plane exploded in midair, killing both him and his son. A farmer witnessed a flash of light and heard an explosion. That report made the early news, but subsequent stories said the plane exploded on impact. The wreckage was removed to a military base and ruled an accident, though the cause was not determined. His briefcase was never recovered.

Though both Caradori and Schmit had received numerous death threats, Caradori believed they were in the clear. He'd assured the Senator "It's unlikely that they would kill you or me, Loran, because that would be too obvious. But then again, you never know." In the Nebraska statehouse later the day of Caradori's death, Schmit told reporters "There were a lot of people in this state who wanted to see Gary dead. They got their wish."

Former CIA Director William Colby was quietly hired by the Nebraska legislature's committee to look into the investigator's death. Colby warned his friend, author, lawyer and former State Senator John DeCamp to stay away, or he could end up dead as well, because "sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful."

Craig Spence might have concurred. Spence was a Republican Washington-based lobbyist and business associate of King who ran his own call-boy operation, and helped organize the after-hours White House tour. In The Washington Times of August 9, 1989, Spence "hinted the tours were arranged by top level" persons, including Vice President Bush's National Security Advisor Donald Gregg, whose name also figures prominently in the October Surprise story. The Times adds that "Spence, according to friends, was also carrying out homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA."

Spence might have concurred. He was found dead in a hotel in Boston four months after the call-boy story broke, his death ruled a suicide.

And what about Bush, besides the High Weirdness of his office rewarding adolescent prostitutes with a midnight White House tour? From DeCamp's The Franklin Cover-Up, recounting the testimony of Nelly Patterson Webb:

Nelly first brought up (GHW) Bush in 1986, when she told Julie Walters about the sex parties she was flown to in Washington and Chicago. She saw Bush at two of these parties, she said, one in each city.

Nelly also told Walters that one frequent party-goer with King was a boy named 'Brent,' the one who was 'flown to another city somewhere' after a falling out with King. Walters did not have the time to cross-check this information with the life of Brandt Thomas, the Boys Town resident who had moved in with Larry King. Franklin credit union files contained a letter signed by King, in his capacity as Youth Affairs Committee advisor for the National Black Republican Council, listing Thomas as one of two national contact people for NBRC campus chapters.

Three years later, with an investigation of abuse by King and the Webbs finally underway, Nelly was interviewed again. Speaking to Franklin committee detective Jerry Lowe, she repeated her account of the Chicago party, and said that Bush and the two men he arrived with appeared to have left the affair with a young black man she called 'Bandit.'...

Bush's name surfaced again in Lowe's May 1989 review of reports by Thomas Vlahoulis from the state attorney general's office: "both Kimberly and Nelly brought up the name of George Bush and indicated that they had both met him." There is a psychologist in Omaha who used to work for the CIA. In response to a direct question by an Omaha psychiatrist regarding George Bush's private life, this psychologist reported hearing rumors when Bush was head of the CIA, that correspond directly with the inferences made by Nelly Webb, and commented to the psychiatrist, 'But how do you investigate your boss?'"

And from the "Omaha" chapter of Webster Tarpley's unauthorized (no kidding) biography of Poppy:

Sound crazy? Not to Steve Bowman, an Omaha businessman who is compiling a book about the Franklin money and sex scandal. 'We do have some credible witnesses who say that "Yes, George Bush does have a problem.".... Child abuse has become one of the epidemics of the 1990s,' Bowman told GQ....

Mrs. Julie Walters, now a housewife in the Midwest, confirmed that in 1986 she had interviewed the alleged child prostitute, Lisa, who told her about Mr. Bush. Lisa and her sister Tracey were temporarily living at the time in the home of Kathleen Sorenson, another foster parent. Mrs. Walters explained that at first she was very surprised. But Lisa, who came from a very underprivileged background with no knowledge of political affairs, gave minute details of her attendance at political meetings around the country."

From Julie Walters' 50-page handwritten report:

3/25/86. Met with Kathleen and Lisa for about 2 hours in Blair questioning Lisa for more details about sexual abuse.... Lisa admitted to being used as a prostitute by Larry King when she was on trips with his family. She started going on trips when she was in 10th grade. Besides herself and Larry there was also Mrs. King, their son, Prince, and 2-3 other couples. They traveled in Larry's private plane, Lisa said that at these trip parties, which Larry hosted, she sat naked 'looking pretty and innocent' and guests could engage in any sexual activity they wanted (but penetration was not allowed) with her.... Lisa said she first met V.P. George Bush at the Republican Convention (that Larry King sang the national anthem at) and saw him again at a Washington, D.C. party that Larry hosted. At that party, Lisa saw no women ('make-up was perfect--you had to check their legs to make sure they weren't a woman').

Why do people say such terrible things about the Bush family? I dunno. Perhaps, just maybe, they're all lying.

But the great privilege of respectable men is the license to commit outrageous crimes, because to allege them capable of such acts is, to many, inconceivable.

Say, that reminds me - ever heard of Margie Schoedinger?

For more regarding the Franklin story, see this archive of articles pertaining to the Franklin Cover-Up.

Also:

The Franklin Credit Union Sex Ring Scandal

George Bush, The CIA, Mind Control & Child Abuse

The Washington Child-Sex Ring Cover-Up

Amazon link to John DeCamp's The Franklin Cover-Up.

To download a pirated copy of Yorkshire Television's documentary of the Franklin case, Conspiracy of Silence, and to read how it was kept off American television, go here.