You missed an impressive milestone last week, if you did not have one eye watching the news ticker.

The Associated Press, the largest newsgathering organization in the world, released a story about the ties between George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and Nazi Germany. It was their first report on this subject in more than 60 years.

Consider that fact in context. Imagine, for a moment, the small rainforest that was sacrificed so that newspaper pundits could share their insights about blow jobs and stained dresses, or any of the myriad of other Clinton scandals, however irrelevant or manufactured.

Now, three years into George W.’s presidency, the AP has finally troubled itself to report that the grandfather of our current president was aiding the Nazi effort from the mid-1920s all the way to 1942, at which point Prescott was managing German coal mining projects that relied on slave labor from Auschwitz.

The AP report relies extensively on the research of the New Hampshire Gazette’s John Buchanan. Buchanan’s work detailed how Prescott Bush first “served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine,” a German coal and steel magnate named Fritz Thyssen.

Prescott continued his profiteering in Nazi Germany even after FDR passed the Trading with the Enemy Act following the Pearl Harbor attacks. Prescott eventually amassed some $750,000 (about $5 million today) from his German ventures.

Finally, in 1942, the New York Tribune published an article on the Bush-Thyssen connections, dubbing Prescott “Hitler’s Angel.” The U.S. government immediately investigated the report and ended up seizing the bank Prescott had used to arrange 15 years worth of business deals with the Nazis.

This story, and the fact that it was completely ignored by the mainstream press for so long, is eerie in its own right. Given the ties being found between the Bush circle, Saudi royalty and the bin Laden family, and the mainstream media’s equally eerie reluctance to cover them, the Prescott Bush story is pretty damned disturbing.

Take, for example, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. He’s being sued by 9/11 victims and their families for personally approving millions of dollars of Saudi government funding for terrorist front groups, including al-Qaeda.

Defending bin Abdul Aziz is – get this – the law firm run by James Baker, who is George H. W. Bush’s longtime business partner and former Secretary of State.

Another suspicious story focused on monthly payments made to a close friend of the 9/11 hijackers in the name of Princess Haifa al-Faisal, the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. The payments went through Riggs Bank, which was founded in 1970 by Jonathan Bush, son of Prescott Bush.

Of course, Dubya definitely turned heads when he decided to censor 28 pages of the Congressional report on Sept. 11 – the 28 pages having to do with the Saudi government’s role in the attacks.

Without further investigation, it is impossible to know with certainty the actual nature of these interactions. They may be gruesome but relatively standard examples of war profiteering and careless greed, or they might indicate something worse.

Surely, with the right amount of public pressure, we citizens could demand that our elected officials explain the character of these highly suspect relationships. That won’t happen, though, until the “liberal media” starts reporting the information that we do know.

For all of us who truly want to get to the bottom of the Sept. 11 attacks, to understand why they happened so we can prevent similar attacks in the future, are we willing to sit by and let the media stay silent for another 60 years?