Sources interviewed for this article said that Mr. Bush spends at least eight hours of each day at the Preston Hollow Shopping Center, a popular retail destination near his home in suburban Dallas. “Other than that chimichanga lunch he doesn’t really have a set routine,” said one source. “Sometimes he’ll hang around Lenscrafters trying on glasses or head over to Abercrombie & Fitch and watch the girls fold pants. Last week I saw him inside Pottery Barn sleeping in a leather recliner.”

But some mall employees are beginning to complain about the former president. “The other day I was taking a smoke break near the fountain and he just kept asking me stupid stuff like, ‘Guess how fast I could get a hot dog in the White House,’” said Amber Kaul, who works part-time at the T-Mobile kiosk. “So finally I’m like, ‘I dunno, ten minutes?’ And he’s all like ‘more like two minutes’ and then he snaps his fingers and gives me this cocky look like I’m supposed to care.” Donna Simpson, a barista at the mall Starbucks, said the former president is often a distraction from her work. “He sits down over there with a pencil and a piece of paper and supposedly starts working on his ‘Freedom Institute,’” said Ms. Simpson. “But after about five minutes he comes over, takes a seat at the counter and starts telling how there’s Milk Duds on Air Force One or how Dick Cheney has a glass eye. I’m like, ‘Dude, there’s about 50 people in line right now, go away!’”

Nestor Martinez, a 20-year-old mall security guard, confirmed that on at least two occasions he’s had to speak to the former president about his behavior. “We started getting complaints that he was hanging around the men’s room asking guys if they wanted to have their picture taken with him,” said Mr. Martinez. “When I told him to stop, he said, ‘Let’s go sort it out over a game of Donkey Kong.’ So after my shift we went over to the arcade and I beat him in a best of three. Then he got all pissy and said Donkey Kong sucks anyways.”

Two sources have confirmed that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was recently enlisted by friends and former aides to speak to Mr. Bush about the situation. “She asked him point blank if it was true that he’d spent an entire afternoon doing nothing but riding up and down the escalators,” said the source. “The president got really defensive and refused to give Condi a straight answer.”

When the president left office nearly three years ago, it was announced that he would establish a “Freedom Institute” and work full-time toward promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world. But some close friends and former advisors admit privately that Mr. Bush has not made progress on either front. “He told me he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to confronting tyranny,” said one prominent GOP fundraiser. “I’m not sure how you do that by hanging around the mall challenging strangers to games of Ms. Pac-Man.”

In response to questions about the president’s schedule, a spokesman released the following statement. “The president continues to work towards advancing freedom around the world.”

While logic suggests mounting casualties should be a reason to end wars, the “sunk cost” phenomenon posits that the more casualties a nation suffers during a war, the more that nation is psychologically committed to the war. The idea is that because we simply don’t want to face the possibility that our countrymen “died in vain,” our natural instinct is to not only push away evidence that they died for lies (WMD), misguided theories (the Vietnam “domino” effect) or petty personal vendettas (“this is the guy who tried to kill my dad!”), we also are prone to “stay the course” for that elusive victory that will supposedly make all the blood and pain and suffering worth it. As Sen. Barack Obama said in criticizing the Bush administration in 2007, the sunk-cost phenomenon basically says, “We’re doubling down; we’re going to keep on going … because now we’ve got a lot in the pot and we can’t afford to lose what we put in the pot.”

Behavioral economists have long hypothesized about this psychological pathology in many different parts of human interaction. In investing, it’s called “throwing good money after bad.” In casino gambling, it’s refusing to cut your losses, and instead trying to big-bet your way back to profitability. I could go on with examples, but you know what I’m talking about because you’ve seen it in your own life.

Until now, the “sunk-cost” impulse was seen as entirely reflexive — a natural human reaction hard-wired into our brains and therefore determinative of our politics, whether we like it or not. But this week, a social psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis published the results of a study that is “thought to be the first non-anecdotal demonstration of the ‘activation’ of the sunk-cost effect”–and how that activation can be entirely manufactured.

Here’s the crux of their findings:

Subjects were put into two groups; in one they were asked to solve three decisions, all related to sunk-cost effects; in the other, they solved three different problems, not related to sunk costs …

Those participants exposed to the sunk-cost scenarios unknowingly were being primed to think of the aversiveness of throwing away previous investments, what Lambert calls “the don’t-waste” goal.

In Phase II of the experiment, all subjects were assigned one of two short reading assignments: One assignment was about war casualties, the other about the weather. Next, all subjects took an attitude questionnaire of 25 generic questions about the particular war. Lambert and his group found that those subjects exposed to the don’t-waste goal who read the story about war casualties tended to be significantly more in favor of the war than those controls who weren’t primed the same way.

Considering this, we see that standard calls by politicians to “stay the course” lest we “allow our youngsters to die in vain” are less reflections of the country’s natural psyche than sophisticated efforts to artificially “prime” that psyche for an emotional lurch toward a desired pro-war policy position.

With the Obama administration now threatening to break its Iraq withdrawal promises, and with the Afghanistan war still going strong in the face of record casualties, this priming remains powerful. Though the current president (to his credit) isn’t explicitly referencing the “sunk-cost” effect in his rhetoric, that effect still defines our emotional reactions to yet more militarist status quo.

For conservative warmongers, that emotional reaction means remaining steadfastly behind these conflicts, painful consequences be damned. For liberals and independents naturally suspicious of the wars, it means opposing the conflicts in theory (as polls show the country does), but giving up the kind of intense protests and activism that marked those early war years before the costs and casualties skyrocketed — that is, before the huge costs were “sunk” into the endeavors.

The result is exactly the neoconservatives’ original desired effect — a kind of passive preference for “stay the course.” Indeed, we are now so programmed to see news of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan as reason to continue those wars — so fearful of “losing” our investment of blood and treasure — that we barely even discuss what “winning” actually means.

That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in my book “9-11,” written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap,’ as the French foreign minister put it.”

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.

The First 9/11

Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered.

In “9-11,” I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty,” an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists — call them “the Kandahar boys” — who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11″: September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” — an anachronistic holdover from World War II — to “internal security,” a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles.

In the recently published Cambridge University “History of the Cold War,” Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,” including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state.

The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.

From Kidnapping and Torture to Assassination

All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalization of an American vision of commercial prosperity.” There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.

The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W. Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.

On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.

There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition — except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White House.

A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made clear to the military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”

The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges.” Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing — an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the U.S. raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial,” contrasting Schmidt with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel… that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way.’”

The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The U.S. is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.”

Robertson usefully reminds us that “[i]t was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden — the Nazi leadership — the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride… the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”

Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks,” presumably one reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the U.S. government and/or Israel were behind 9/11,” while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the U.S. or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks,” could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan.”

What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaida.”

There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilized societies — and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorized investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.

There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.

Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.

Crimes of Aggression

It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognized in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hezbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organized operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque — one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency.” Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.

One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the U.S. exploited the opportunity instead of mobilizing the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and U.S. intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalized parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam.” As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.

It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq — that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.

To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.

Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” — the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.

We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were laboring to turn it into an “earthly paradise.” And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.

We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.

The Imperial Mentality and 9/11

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch.” The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine — “already… a de facto rule of international relations,” according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison — which revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists.”

Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.” Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror — for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations,” no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and the murder of its criminal presidents.

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the U.S. is self-immunized against international law and conventions — as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.

It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” — the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands.

The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism,” were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.

Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.

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Neil claims to have 30 years in the energy industry, though at least 10 people from the Texas oil patch I spoke with said they had never heard of him playing any notable role in the energy business. Of the former first sibling, one international oil executive and consultant said, “I can’t imagine anything he could bring to the table.”

Yet Bush, who declined comment for this story, seems to have no trouble staying busy and prosperous. Chinese firms hire him to try to open doors in Africa, and U.S. companies retain him to do the same in Central Asia. Neil is also the founder and CEO of a number of small energy companies — it’s not clear exactly what they do or if he has financial backers — and lives a life of ease and comfort in Houston, where he resides with his second wife in a luxury condo and regularly graces the social pages.

He travels far in search of deals. As the chairman of Houston-based TX Oil, Neil met with Turkmenistan’s crackpot Stalinist dictator, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, in an effort to gain offshore oil concessions in the Caspian Sea. The tightly controlled state media claimed that he brought a letter from former President George H.W. Bush wishing “sound health and successes” to Berdymukhammedov, and thanking him for inviting Neil “to your beautiful country and for receiving him personally despite your heavy work load.”

In November 2010, Neil returned to the country for the Turkmenistan International Oil and Gas Conference, and TX Oil hosted the event’s closing cocktail party. “The oil business is in the Bush family bloodline,” he declared, according to an account in an energy industry publication, Nefte Compass.

TX Oil is still reportedly in the running for Turkmen concessions, alongside brand name competitors like Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Not everyone seems happy about Bush’s potential involvement. “It is the eastern tradition to receive all guests with open arms,” said a story in News Central Asia. “However, as independent observers we would recommend that the government of Turkmenistan should consider carefully before committing to any proposals brought by Neil Bush. For one thing, [his company] is a virtually unknown entity … On top of that, he has a history of questionable business practices.”

Indeed, he does. Neil first distinguished himself when the Silverado Savings and Loan of Denver went belly up in 1988 at a time when his father was finishing a second term as Ronald Reagan’s vice president. While serving on the S & L’s board of directors, Neil voted to approve $100 million in loans to two of his business partners — he somehow neglected to mention the relationships to fellow board members — who both subsequently went bankrupt. This adventure in socialized capitalism cost U.S. taxpayers $1.3 billion.

One of the loan recipients was JNB International, an energy exploration company Neil founded with $100 out of his own pocket, and somewhat larger sums from two Denver real estate moguls. “Tell him Neil Bush called,” he reportedly told a secretary when leaving a message for a Denver oilman during this period. “You know, the vice president’s son.”

The family safety net spared Neil from the full consequences of his misdeeds. In regard to Silverado, federal investigators found “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The younger Bush was banned from banking and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine at a civil trial, but a Republican fundraiser held on his behalf helped ease the sting of settling that debt.

Neil went on to found a gas-exploration company called Apex Energy with $2.3 million from Bush-family friend Louis Marx Jr. Neil, who put up $3,000 of his money, received $300,000 in salary over the next two years, at which point Apex went broke. Little gas was ever found.

Next up came a brief stint at TransMedia Communications, owned by a cable TV baron who had raised more than $300,000 for George H.W. Bush. Neil’s annual pay was $60,000 and his job description was daunting: “learn the business.” In 1993, two years after the conclusion of the first Gulf War, the emir of Kuwait flew Bush Sr. over on his private plane for a ceremony honoring him for leading the coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein. Neil and former Secretary of State James Baker traveled along to try to arrange a power plant deal for Enron, which never happened.

The post-Silverado years proved dark for Neil, so it was fortunate that another family friend, Jamal Daniel, stepped in to help out. A Syrian-American fixer with substantial interests in the international energy business and beyond, Daniel has close ties to the ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Daniel, who lives in Houston, was a major donor to the presidential campaigns of both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., and to the latter’s 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign. In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, he and other Bush administration cronies set up New Bridge Strategies LLC to advise companies seeking business in post-Saddam Iraq. The consulting firm didn’t work out so well — probably because few businesses cared to invest in war-torn Iraq — though the Paris-based newsletter Intelligence Online reported in June that Daniel had invested in an oil deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, so the invasion wasn’t a total loss for him. (There is no indication that Neil had any role in the investment.)

Daniel treats Neil like next of kin. Over the years, he has paid for Neil’s family to take a trip to Disneyland Paris and bought Neil and his wife, Sharon, a $380,000 cottage in Maine. Neil also married his second wife, Maria, at Daniel’s Houston mansion.

In return, Neil has occasionally exerted himself. Back in the late-1990s, Daniel made Neil co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation and paid him $60,000 annually for a few hours of work per week. Separately, Daniel and other Bush Family Friends financially backed Neil’s education company, Ignite! Much of the firm’s business was obtained through sole-source contracts from school districts in Texas. In 2006, his mother donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that it be earmarked to buy Ignite! products for local schools that took in hurricane evacuees.

Yet for all the handouts from the Bush family network, Neil’s ventures still failed to generate much profit. His famously nasty 2003 divorce proceedings with Sharon revealed that he was essentially broke. At the time, a well-placed source told me, he drove a minivan owned by his mother. The proceedings also revealed that on at least three business trips to Asia, women Neil didn’t know came into his hotel room unbidden and had sex with him. The practice, he acknowledged, seemed “very unusual.”

“You don’t think he was picked to be part of all of those business deals because he was so brilliant, do you?” Marshall Davis Brown, Sharon Bush’s attorney, asked when I met him at his Houston office. “He had a big hat but no horse.”

Neil has received relatively little press attention since his divorce, though he has been living well. In February 2005, Mexican magnate Jaime Camil hosted a 50th birthday party for Neil at his estate in Acapulco. The Houston Chronicle reported that two dozen Houstonians flew down for the festivities. “Saturday night, the host-with-the-most pulled out the stops at his expansive villa,” wrote the newspaper’s society columnist. “A lavish fireworks display topped off a night that included a 16-piece mariachi band, dancers from Mexico City’s Ballet Folklorico and gourmet fare.”

The truth is, failure has been very good to Neil. He currently resides in a $1.6 million, six-bedroom, five-bathroom condominium located near Houston’s upscale West Oaks Mall. He has in recent years set up at least 10 firms in Houston and Austin, according to incorporation records filed with the Texas secretary of state’s office. His companies have generic names like GCC Source Point, Global XS2, BTZ Holdings and ATX Oil, and it’s hard to find out much about them since they are registered as limited liability companies (and hence little public disclosure is required), mostly don’t have websites and almost never turn up in news accounts. If he has consummated any deals through these firms, they were probably not big.

One of Neil’s firms is registered at an address that doesn’t exist and several are registered at his condo, including a firm called Nexus Energy, which actually operates from (or at least has an office at) an oil firm headed by his current wife’s ex-husband, Robert Andrews. Neil established Nexus in late 2008 “to pursue business opportunities both overseas and in the United States,” according to a corporate profile it has distributed. “[Neil has] cultivated many relationships among private business people and large energy related enterprises in Asia and the Middle East. Nexus seeks to leverage these relationships to act on behalf of a client or partner company.” In November 2009, Neil represented Nexus at an energy conference in New Orleans, at which Karl Rove tagged along.

Firms from China regularly retain Neil, which isn’t surprising given the deep ties his family has there. Bush Sr. was appointed as U.S. liaison in Beijing under President Gerald Ford, and during his presidency sought greatly expanded trade with Beijing while downplaying human rights concerns. George W. Bush also forged a close relationship with China, and Neil’s deceased uncle, Prescott Bush Jr., was a close friend of former premier Jiang Zemin and did a good deal of business there.

In March of this year, Bush Sr., wife Barbara and Neil had dinner at the residence of the Chinese consul general in Houston. The Chinese government expressed hope in a written statement that the Bushes would “continue playing an important role in making contributions to … the friendship between the two peoples.” For their part the Bush family said the visit felt “like home,” and expressed special pleasure at being served “their favorite Beijing Roasted Duck.” The consul general and the Bushes also “exchanged views on China-U.S. relations … and other issues of their common interest.”

These sorts of ties have surely contributed to Neil’s list of Chinese clients, mainly companies seeking natural resource deals in Africa, including Shougang Holdings, a state-owned steel giant. In 2009, Neil led a delegation of the company’s officials to Liberia, where Shougang was seeking an iron ore mining concession. The Neil connection didn’t help: An Israeli firm ultimately won out.

The same year Neil traveled to Ghana with executives from oil giant Sinopec, the world’s seventh largest firm and a major competitor of U.S. companies. Neil managed to get meetings with top local political leaders. A source familiar with Bush’s efforts said that he opened doors in Ghana with the help of his friend Chris Wilmot, a businessman originally from Ghana who now lives in Houston. “Chris has the ties in Ghana that go all the way to the top,” this person told me. “Neil was riding on his coattails over there.” To no avail. Neil’s clients didn’t get the deal they were angling for.

On a weekday morning, I stopped by TX Oil’s headquarters in a bland office building on Westheimer Road in Houston. New Age music played from a Bose system in the reception area, which was decorated with a cowboy painting, an aquarium and a leather sofa. The office wasn’t bristling with activity, and the secretary told me no one would be available to talk to me about TX Oil.

“Is there a brochure or any information you can give me?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she replied with a cool smile.

Why do companies keep hiring Neil? It can’t be for his business acumen. More likely, his employers write checks out of friendship, loyalty and interest in currying favor with his family’s business and political network. In a reflection of the declining value of the Bush family name in the age of Obama, Neil does not seem to command the fees he once did.

In 2002, he received payments of $2 million in stock and $10,000 per board meeting from Grace Semiconductor — a firm backed by the son of Jiang Zemin — even though he knew nothing at all about semiconductors. Last December he was named a director of China Timber Resources Group, which has forest resources in Guyana and China. Neil’s director’s fee is a mere $1,200 a month, which the company said “was determined with reference to his experience, scope of work, level of involvement, seniority as well as the prevailing market conditions.” Ouch.

It’s getting tougher to be a fixer who can’t fix much.

Ken Silverstein is an Open Society Institute fellow and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine.

Salon.com’s War Room Secret Vice Presidential Correspondence Recovery Team tracked down the letter by following an elaborate series of clues Cheney placed around Washington, D.C. We reveal the contents of Cheney’s secret letter of resignation below:

The Office of the Vice President
March 15, 2001

Dear Mr. President:

If you’re reading this, it means one of the following things has happened:

• I’ve had a debilitating heart attack and am unable to function.
• I’m on the lam, likely somewhere in South America, because they finally found out about the incident in 1973.
• I became irradiated at a secret energy task force meeting and have grown to 10 times my original size, losing, in the process, my very humanity.
• I went to Mexico with Lynne and “pulled a William S. Burroughs.”
• I’m locked in my man-size safe.

And so I voluntarily and of my own accord hereby tender my resignation from the Office of the Vice President of the United States, effective immediately … on the following conditions:

• Check the man-size safe.
• Don’t you dare replace me with that sonuvabitch Hagel.
• In fact, just replace me with David Addington.

There’s nothing I regret more than leaving you, Mr. President, without the sage counsel of your trusted vice president, besides the 1973 thing, but America must move forward in what I am assuming is a time of great national grief at my untimely departure from office. I know you’ll do fine in my absence, but there are some things you should know.

The key to the Resolute Desk’s top-right drawer is in the kitchen behind Barney’s food. Torture is legal. If America is attacked by terrorists, Saddam Hussein is responsible. Pat Leahy can go fuck himself. Colin Powell is wrong about whatever he just advised you to do. So is Condi, probably. And Ashcroft, unless he was talking about porn or something. There’s nothing the American government can do that the private sector — specifically the Halliburton portion of the private sector — can’t do better and more efficiently. If you really really want to wiretap someone you probably don’t need a warrant. If you ever get stuck writing a state of the union, just say something about a manned mission to Mars. Make sure the Justice Department is only hiring and retaining good conservative U.S. attorneys. Don’t try to use the coffee machine in the Cabinet Room. It doesn’t work right and also you’re the president, you shouldn’t be making your own coffee.

I think that about sums up all the possible advice I would’ve given you had I remained capable of fulfilling my duties for the entirety of your time in office. (Did I mention that torture is legal?)

One last, personal note: There’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll be remembered as one of the best, most effective presidents America’s ever known, but just in case it looks like there is some doubt of that, try to make sure everything is as fucked up as possible on your way out of office. The American people, in their infinite wisdom, will pretty much forget it was your fault within six months of the next poor bastard taking over.

Sincerely,

Richard Cheney

P.S. If you find the time, have someone shoot Harry Whittington in the face. He knows what he did.