Seems to be a skimming or kickback scheme by defense contractors, some new and others more established, with ties to Republican Congressmen.
This seems to be another side of the mafia, corporate raiding and terrorist-money network that Abramoff and others have set up to feed the Republican Party Money Machine. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/122311/72 Hard to say which side of the scandal is more appalling.
In the case of the Bush family, these crimes go back generations to Prescott's management of Union Trust Bank, the US subsidiary of the German bank that funneled money to the Nazi Party during the 1930s.
Their modus operandi hasn't changed at all. Now, his grandsons and their cronies are involved in funneling money from abroad into the GOP and back out to fund various terrorist fronts.
The extreme far right was never purged from American politics, and took over the Republican Party after World War Two under the guise of anti-Communism.
The Bush-Dulles clique is the same GOP cabal that engineered the rise of the Nazi Party from Wall Street law firms with Ford Motor Co. and Standard Oil money during the 1920s and 1930s. They went on to foment and profit from the Cold War, and later to sponsor and manipulate al-Qaeda in the hope of taking over Saudi Arabia.
Time for some too-long delayed housecleaning in the United States. What a delicious irony it would be if leading Republican Party functionaries were prosecuted under the Patriot Act.
And then there's Abramoff. Being housed within the DC office of Greenberg Traurig, LLP, a Miami-based Republican law firm, gave Abramoff and his partners additional insulation, including (arguably) attorney-client privilege on its most sensitive arrangements.
This follows the old spook model of operating out of international law firms, a device that goes back to John Foster and Allen Dulles' old Wall Street firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, which was the CIA before the United States had an external intelligence service. Sullivan & Cromwell's exploits with the Republican Party go back to the 1890s, when a huge bribe to RNC Chair Mark Hannah netted Congressional approval for a public bond offering that handed S&C's partners and clients the cost of buying out French investors who had started the Panama Canal project after the TR Roosevelt Administration sent American battleships to grab Panama from Colombia, which territory Panama was then part of.
C&S went on to represent the "merchants of death", defense contractors who overcharged the US for arms during WWI, and it was later the law firm that represented German banking interests -- the US subsidiary Union Trust Bank managed by Prescott Bush -- who funneled money to Hitler that financed the Nazi Party.
Beginning to see an historical pattern here?
Mark