Is Oscar Wyatt a friend of the Bush family? I wonder:
There is good reason to believe that George [H. W.] Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas, in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston. In a recent letter to the Texas Monthly, Wyatt specifies that "when people speak of Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of Dresser Industries." "I hate it when people make statements about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just didn't happen that way," writes Mr. Wyatt... Dresser was a Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son "in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas." ... Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of 1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush biographers is very much open to doubt. here...
Looks as though the Bushes may have had reason to dislike him -- even go gunning for him:
By the late 1980's, Coastal was importing as much as 250,000 barrels of oil a day from Iraq. As these oil imports became more and more important to Coastal's operations, Mr. Wyatt became more outspoken in his opposition to any threatened or standing trade sanctions by the United States in the Middle East, including a move by Congress to impose restrictions on trade with Iraq after Mr. Hussein used poison gas against the Kurds. It was Mr. Wyatt's surprise trip to Baghdad in December 1990, however, that finally brought his relationship with Iraq into the spotlight. He met then with Mr. Hussein to negotiate the release of American hostages. The effort was opposed by the administration of George H. W. Bush, but Mr. Wyatt came home a hero and he wept at a meeting of the released hostages and their families. "It was not a stunt," said Bobby Parker, a drilling rig electrician who had been held for 128 days before being rescued. "Oscar Wyatt is just not that type of person." The hostages were safe, but ultimately, Mr. Wyatt's goal had not been fully achieved. He had hoped to prevent a military move by the United States on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, a war that, he said, the United States had no reason to start. It would be more than five years before Mr. Wyatt's ties to Iraq again raised eyebrows, when the first tanker laden with crude oil sailed out of Mina al-Bakr, Iraq's main export oil terminal, in December 1996, in Iraq's legal return to global oil markets... here...
For a long time I've followed the Oil-for-Food fallout with great skepticism which is shared by Marie Therese at News Hounds, who wrote last January:
It has been my contention all along that the voluminous coverage of the Oil-for-Food scandal by the reactionary media, coupled with the Senate hearings headed by by Sen. Norm Coleman, were part of a pre-emptive strike, carefully crafted and timed to soften the impact on conservative voters when it was revealed that prominent American individuals and companies were deeply involved in the Oil-for-Food scheme. Among the U.S. oil companies possibly implicated are ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, oil refiner Bayoil and oil field equipment supplier. They have been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors, along with the largest U.S. buyer of Iraqi oil, Houston businessman Oscar Wyatt and his former company, Coastal Oil, now owned by El Paso Inc. At one point, while still incontact with Mr. Vincent, Jack Kemp approached Colin Powell and Dick Cheney. I believe that the awful tsunami disaster forced the right-wing media to interrupt their massive assault on the the United Nations, Kofi and Kujo Annan, Benon Sevan, the French and the Russians, thereby throwing off their timetable. The heart-wrenching images from South Asia and the resultant improvement in the image of the United Nations has made it very difficult for them to re-activate the "hate-the-UN' campaign - although it would appear that they're still trying... here...
Lately, Oscar Wyatt has been a dedicated donor to Democratic candidates, particularly in 2002 and later.
What interests me is that all of the major oil companies were implicated in Oil-for-Food and the least-well-known, a contributor to Democratic causes and someone who could be unadoring when it comes to the Bush clan is the one who does the perp walk.
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