Talk about a small world! At about 2:30 in the afternoon of March 30, 1981, it became positively microscopic.
Crouching on the sidewalk in front of the Washington Hilton, a young man who modeled himself on Robert DeNiro's not-so-right Travis Bickle character from the movie, Taxi Driver, drew a bead on the new president. Steadying his .22-caliber pistol in both hands, John Hinckley, Jr., began firing explosive "devastator" bullets at Ronald Reagan. In the ensuing pandemonium, the sixth slug found its mark.
Apparently, before Secret Service agents could muscle the elderly president into his bulletproof limo, a shot had ricocheted off the armored sedan's fender, plowing into Reagan's armpit and puncturing the Gipper's lung. Had Hinckley scored a more direct hit that day, Vice President George Bush almost certainly would have ascended to the presidency, sloughing off his second-banana status eight years ahead of schedule.
Small world, indeed. For that very same day, John Hinckley's older brother, Scott, had a dinner date with an old friend of the family: Neil Bush, son of the vice president. What some saw as merely an odd coincidence prompted more conspiratorially attuned eyebrows to arch like divining rods. After all, what are the odds of the president's constitutional successor and the president's would-be assassin knowing each other? Probably zero.
But the Bushes and Hinckleys went way back, to Texas of the 1960s, where both George Bush and John Hinckley, Sr., had amassed personal fortunes in the booming oil industry. Both were blue bloods who circulated in the same privileged circles, which the transplanted aristocrats liked to call their "Texas Raj."
Of course, socializing with the prominent family of a would-be assassin is hardly a hanging offense. Still, in the foggy nebula of a forming conspiracy hypothesis, circumstantial details have a way of radiating suspicious import:
In the NBC special reports aired immediately after the shooting, correspondent Judy Woodruff said that at least one shot was fired from the hotel, above Reagan's limousine. She later elaborated, saying a Secret Service agent had fired that shot from the hotel overhang. Could Reagan's wound have been inflicted by friendly fire? Or, more ominously, did Woodruff glimpse a bona fide "second gunman" - a la JFK in Dealey Plaza? Either way, Woodruff's account might explain how a slug managed to strike Reagan when his limo's bulletproof door stood between him and Hinckley. Sizing up the Hinckley-Bush nexus, conspiracy researcher John Judge has theoretically dubbed this "the shot from the Bushy knoll."
According to conspiratologist Barbara Honegger, White House correspondent Sarah McClendon made the somewhat more subjective comment that Reagan's Secret Service retinue wasn't in its "usual tight formation" around Reagan in front of the Hilton. Were the Gipper's bodyguards out to throw the game?
Then there was Hinckley, himself. The Jodie Foster obsessed space cadet had been prescribed psychoactive drugs by a hometown psychiatrist. According to press reports, at the time of the shooting he was dosed with Valium. Before targeting Reagan (supposedly to gain the "fame" that would redeem him in the eyes of Foster and the world), Hinckley had stalked Senator Ted Kennedy and President Jimmy Carter. He devoured books on Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin (suspected by many conspiracy researchers to have been hypnotically programmed), and Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace. Theorists ask the inevitable questions: Was Hinckley a mind-controlled assassin, a Manchurian Candidate programmed to "terminate with extreme prejudice"? They point to the CIA's longtime obsession with mind control and the fact that during the 1980 presidential primaries, Bush - the former director of Central Intelligence - enjoyed the zealous support of Agency regulars, who preferred their former boss to Reagan.
For an antisocial pariah, Hinckley sure got around. In October 1980, he had flown to Nebraska in an attempt to contact a member of the American Nazi Party. Columnist Jack Anderson later claimed that Hinckley had ties to an American faction of the pro-Khomeini "Islamic Guerrilla Army." According to conspiracy author Barbara Honegger, a member of that group told Anderson he had warned the Secret Service about Hinckley's designs on Reagan - two months before the shooting. If Anderson's source is to be believed, the Secret Service did nothing to stop the Jihad-happy gunman.
The day after his Nazi-seeking mission, Hinckley flew to Nashville to stalk Jimmy Carter, but was arrested at the airport when authorities discovered three handguns in his suitcase. Oddly, after only five hours in custody, this unstable character - who had attempted to transport weapons across state lines and into a city soon to be visited by the president of the United States - was fined and released without further ado. Even more oddly, the authorities apparently didn't bother to examine his journal, which in Dear Diary fashion, detailed Hinckley's plans to kill Carter. Was this a case of bumbling negligence or something more ominous?
Finally, a pall of suspicion quite naturally fell over George "Poppy" Bush, the preppy achiever and future president whose spooky pedigree was longer than a Texas limo. Bush's father Prescott Bush, Sr., had served as an army intelligence operative during World War I. Perhaps determined to prove himself a chip off the old block, George, like father Bush before him, joined Skull and Bones, the elite Yale "society" that weaned more than a few powerhouse polls, Wall Street lions, and CIA superstars. Of course, everyone knows that much later in his life, Bush leap-grogged the career spies and became director of the CIA, where he deftly curtailed congressional investigations into various Agency misdeeds that had begun to ooze into public view following the wildcat gusher that was Watergate.
Of course, there is circumstantial evidence - denied by Bush - that he did in fact pay his dues to the Agency long before becoming its head honcho spook. As a young oilman, Bush founded Zapata Offshore Oil Company, which according to one former CIA operative, was used by the Agency as a front for clandestine operations during the early 1960s. "I know [Bush] was involved [with the CIA] in the Caribbean," the ex-CIA man told the Nation in 1988.
Interestingly, according to retired colonel Fletcher Prouty, who acted as liaison between the Pentagon and CIA during the 1961 Bay Pigs invasion, that disastrous operation was code-named Zapata, while two Navy ships assigned to the attacking armada had been rechristened Houston and Barbara. Could these have been sentimental references to Bush's adopted home and the future First Lady?
More evidence that George Bush had been a spook with portfolio as far back as the early 1960s would surface during the 1988 presidential campaign. Joseph McBride, writing in the Nation, caused a stir when he reported on an interesting FBI memorandum signed by director J. Edgar Hoover, addressed to the State Department, dated November 28, 1963, and bearing the subject heading, "Assassination of President John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963." In it, Hoover reports that the FBI had briefed "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" about the reaction of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami to the assassination. Twenty-five years after Hoover sent his memo, Bush would deny that it referred to him. "Must be another George Bush," a campaign flack muttered.
The CIA agreed, and, breaking with its longstanding policy of "neither confirming nor denying" the identity of its personnel, claimed that the employee referred to in the memo was "apparently" one George William Bush, who had left the CIA in 1964. Journalist McBride managed to track down the less famous Bush, who acknowledged that he had in fact worked for the CIA for about six months in 1964-1964. But he certainly wasn't the George Bush of the memo, he said, because as a short-term "lowly researcher and analyst" he had never been briefed by the FBI or any other government agency, for that matter. "Is that the other George Bush?" he asked.
Indeed, there's another espionage link between George Herbert Walker Bush and outré characters orbiting the assassination of JFK. When Lee Harvey Oswald moved to Texas, the socially maladroit young man made an unlikely friend in the suave Baron George De Mohrenschildt, a White Russian emigré connected to the oil industry and, some suspect, the CIA. In 1978, Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, called on De Mohrenshildt to question him about his unlikely friendship with Oswald. The baron's daughter told Fonzi that De Mohrenshildt wasn't home, so the investigator left his business card and said he'd call again. Later that day, Fonzi learned that De Mohrenshildt had returned home, gone upstairs, and lethally blasted his head with a .20-guage shotgun. (That is, if he wasn't "suicided.") When the police found him, the police found him, the Baron had Fonzi's card in his pocket. In De Mohrenshildt's address book, Fonzi found this entry: "George H. W. (Poppy) 1412 Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland."
If George Bush - the Skull and Bonesman who moved with equal ease among Eastern elites, Western oil tycoons, and Republican Party bosses - had also been a lifelong member of that fusty men's club of veteran intelligence operatives, his later fraternizing with the like of Manuel Noriega, the Iran-Contra boys, Bay of Pigs/Watergate godfather Dick Nixon, and "new Hitler" Saddam Hussein would certainly make a lot more sense.
Of course, Bush's potentially Janus-faced background doesn't prove anything about the Hinckley hit. But it does suggest an underrated capacity and talent for deception, which is what keeps conspiracy trackers focused on the Bushy Knoll.
So where was George, the future conspiracy president, on the day of Hinckley's dirty deed? Out of town, on official vice presidential business. Hmm.
OK, you could probably demolish the whole Bush-Hinckley theory by posing a simple question: Assuming the vice president had "foreknowledge," why on earth would Poppy's son risk meeting with a Hinckley sibling on the very day of the coup? Then again, we are talking about Neil Bush, whose common-sense deficit would later embarrass Dad when the Savings and Loan scandal made him its official poster child.
http://www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/reagan.html
Book - Conspiracy theories in American History...
http://books.google.com/books?id=qMIDrggs8TsC&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=ronald+reagan+cia+assassination+attempt&source=bl&ots=teedTYDkv4&sig=090DOVrm7jiXkYxgxGUO4HiNEz4&hl=en&ei=sE4TSt3RBJSc8wSluZn9Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8
This is the extraordinary story of a dinner date
that was scheduled to happen on March 31st 1981, the day of the strange assassination attempt on the life of former President Ronald Reagan. What should have been the biggest story of the 1980's seems to have been wiped clean from history, systematically prevented from ever again being mentioned by corporate media.
Held at the home of Neil Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, who himself was the very ambitious former CIA director and current Vice President, the guest of honor at the dinner party (which was quickly cancelled after news of the failed attempt on the life of the President), was Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley, the man who just that afternoon shot President Ronald Reagan, coming one half-inch from killing him.
A half-inch from putting George H.W. Bush, into the White House.
The Bush team's response to this chilling revelation on the planned dinner date was to barricade themselves behind a wall of the biggest PR Firms in the nation and issue the following statement "This horrible coincidence has been devastating to the Bush Family. Our condolences go out to all involved. And we hope to get the matter behind us as soon as possible." (sic)
As the story goes, the Bush Team decided to pawn it off as, of all things, "bad coincidence." In the days that followed, Washington whitewashed the story, backroom deals were struck, the spin doctors went into action, and an army of PR agents descended onto Washington to wipe clean from history this awful blemish, which might be "misinterpreted" should it ever get out.
Misinterpreted? Yes, because since 1970 both George Bush Sr. and John Hinckley Sr. were friends and fellow oil industrialists in Texas and Colorado, and Hinckley had given substantial sums of money to the failed 1980 Bush Presidential campaign. In 1978 Neil Bush lived in Lubbock, Texas while managing his brother George Jr's (our President) failed campaign for Congress. John Hinckley Jr. lived in Lubbock that year as well.
Coincidence? Apparently so. We are also supposed to believe that John Hinckley, Jr. was mentally disturbed, and, as the Bush story went, shot Reagan to please actress Jodie Foster, and his Uncle George had absolutely nothing to do with the entire incident, even indirectly and unwittingly.
Allegedly, the only mention of it to appear on national television was a brief comment by NBC's John Chancellor who was absolutely floored by the revelation and mentioned it during his newscast against the demands of NBC management. NBC quickly jumped in and censored it. The revelation was never mentioned again in any mainstream media outlet.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread413914/pg1
In 1991, author Kitty Kelly published an unauthorized biography of former First Lady Nancy Reagan. There was one major incident mentioned in Kelly's best-selling book that was censored by 99.99% of the American newsmedia: the alleged arrest of the vice president of the United States for DWI.
Kelly told SPY magazine (a satirical collection of humor covering the rich, powerful and famous), "That was something nobody mentioned. I don't know why. That one incident is cold—you've got a date in the book. And I interviewed people who were in that dinner party. . . . The book was thouroughly vetted by the publisher's lawyers. I have that story on tape, and yes, I had to give up the source's name to the lawyers." SPY noted that when it came to Kelly's biography of the First Lady: "Just about everything that mattered, and much that didn't, was quoted somewhere [by the media]—except for one wholly ignored little anecdote on page 507."
Kelly wrote:
"To certain friends, Nancy had peddled the story of 'George and his girlfriend' that had been told to her about the evening of March 18, 1981, when some of 'the group' were having dinner at Lion d'Or in Washington, D.C. 'Suddenly there was a great commotion,' recalled one of the five dinner guests, 'as the security men accompanying the Secretary of State [Alexander Haig] and the Attorney General [Willian French Smith] converged on our table. They started jabbering into their walkie-talkies, and then whispered to Haig and Smith, who both jumped up and left the restaurant. The two men returned about forty-five minutes later, laughing their heads off. They said they had had to bail out George Bush, who'd been in a traffic accident with his girlfriend. Bush had not wanted the incident to appear on the police blotter, so he had his security men contact Haig and Smith. They took care of things for him, and then came back to dinner."
Note that police officers never arrest a driver after a traffic crash unless the driver either (1) kills someone (or a group of people), or (2) the driver is suspected of drunk driving/drugged driving (DWI/DUI). Since the White House dinner guests were "laughing their heads off," it is presumably safe to interpolate the vice president's crash did not involve dead bodies (even though Haig—as a 4-star general during the Vietnam War/"police action"—presumably doesn't care about dead bodies).
Less than two weeks later, Nancy's husband Ronald was shot by John Hinkley, as were three presidential aides.
http://www.geocities.com/prohibition_us/dui.html
For Bush, the vice presidency was not an end in itself, but merely another stage in the ascent towards the pinnacle of the federal bureaucracy, the White House. With the help of his Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network, Bush had now reached the point where but a single human life stood between him and the presidency.
Ronald Reagan was 70 years old when he took office, the oldest man ever to be inaugurated as president. His mind wandered; long fits of slumber crept over his cognitive faculties. On some days he may have kept bankers' hours with his papers and briefing books and meetings in the Oval Office, but he needed a long nap most afternoons and became distraught if he could not have one. His custom was to delegate all administrative decisions to the cabinet members, to the executive departments and agencies. Policy questions were delegated to the White House staff, who prepared the options and then guided Reagan's decisions among the pre-defined options. This was the staff that composed not just Reagan's speeches, but the script of his entire life: for normally every word that Reagan spoke in meetings and conferences, every line down to and including "Good morning, Senator," every word was typed on three by five file cards from which the Reagan would read.
Foreign leaders like the cunning Francois Mitterrand professed shock over Reagan's refusal to depart from the vaguest generalities in response to impromptu questions; Mitterrand had attempted to invite Reagan to a private tete-a-tete, but he had been overruled by Reagan's staff. French Foreign Minister Cheysson lamented that the exchanges had been "shallow." When asked for decisions in the National Security Council, Reagan would often respond with his favorite story about black welfare mothers chiselling the government out of money; aides would then interpret that as approval of the options they were putting forward.
But sometimes Reagan was capable of lucudity, and even of inspired greatness, in the way a thunderstorm can momentarily illuminate a darkling countryside; these moments often involved direct personal impressions or feelings. Reagan's instinctive contempt for Bush after the Nashua Telegraph debate was one of his better moments. Reagan's greatest moment of conceptual clarity came in his televsion speech of March 23, 1983 on the Strategic Defense Initiative, a concept that had been drummed into the Washington bureaucracy through the indefatigable efforts of Lyndon LaRouche and a few others. The idea of defending against nuclear missles, of not accepting mutually assured destruction, and of using such a program as a science driver for rapid technological renewal was something Reagan permanently grasped and held onto even under intense pressure in Hofdie House in Reykjavik in October, 1986 during the summit with Gorbachov. In addition, during the early years of Reagan's first term, there were enough Reaganite loyalists, typified by William Clark, in the administration to cause much trouble for the Bushmen. But as the years went by, the few men like Clark that Reagan had brought with him from California would be ground up by endless bureaucratic warfare, and their replacements, like McFarlane at the NSC, would come more and more from the ranks of the Kissingerians. Unfortunately Reagan never developed a plan to make the SDI an irreversible political and budgetary reality, and this critical shortcoming grew out of Reagan's failed economic policies, which never substantially departed from Carter's.
But apart from rare moments like the SDI, Reagan tended to drift. Don Regan called it "the guesswork presidency;" for Al Haig, frustrated in his own lust for power, it was government by an all-powerful staff. Who were the staff? At first it was thought that Reagan would take most of his advice from his old friend Edwin Meese, his close associate from California days, loyal and devoted to Reagan, and sporting his Adam Smith tie. But it was soon evident that the White House was really run by a troika: Meese, Michael Deaver, and James Baker III, Bush's man.
Deaver's specialty was demagogic image-mongering. Deaver's images were made for television; they were edifying symbols without content, and took advantage of the fact that Reagan so perfectly embodied the national ideology of the Americans that most of them could not help liking him; he was the ideal figurehead. Deaver had another important job, for Reagan, as everybody knows, was uxorious: Nancy Reagan, the narrow-minded, vain, petty starlet was the one the president called "Mommy." Nancy was the mamba of the White House, the social-climbing arriviste of capital society, an evil-tongued presence on a thousand telephones a week complaining about the indignities she thought she was subjected to, always obsessed by public opinion and making Ronnie look good in the most ephemeral short term. Deaver was like a eunuch of the Topkapi harem, responsible for managing the humors of the sultan's leading odalisque.
Nancy was a potential problem for Bush; she did not like him; perhaps she sensed that he was organizing a putsch against Ronnie. "He's a nice man and very capable. But he's no Ronnie. He comes across as a 'wimp.'I don't think he can make it. He's a nice man, but his image is against him. It isn't macho enough." [fn 1] So spoke Nancy Reagan to her astrologer, Joan Quigley, in the White House in April, 1985. That could have been a very serious problem indeed, and that was where James Baker came in.
If Deaver played the eunuch for Nancy, Baker was to impersonate her squire and champion. In Nancy's provincial view, Baker was a sartorially elegant, old money aristocrat and charmeur. His assignment for the Bush machine was to ingratiate himself with the adolescent old lady with flattery and schmooze, and Nancy appears to have been entranced by Baker's Princeton Ivy Club veneer --those ties! Those suits!
Deaver gravitated by instinct towards Baker; Deaver tells us in his memoirs that he was a supporter of Bush for vice president at the Detroit convention. This meant that Baker-Deaver became the dominant force over Ron and over Nancy; George Bush, in other words, already had an edge in the bureaucratic infighting.
Thus it was that White House press secretary James Brady could say in early March, 1981: "Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings." [fn 2]
Even before the inauguration, James Baker had told a group of experienced Republican political operatives in Houston that Reagan was only interested in the public and symbolic aspects of the presidency, and that he had asked the Bush people to come in and take over the actual running of day to day government affairs. That was, of course, the self-interested view of the Bushmen. There were reports in the Bush camp that Reagan would quit after a year or two and let Bush entrench himself as the incumbent before the 1984 election. Later, after 1984, there were even more frequent rumors that Reagan would resign in favor of Bush. It did not happen, showing that Reagan was not the pushover that the Bushmen liked to pretend.
During the first months of the Reagan Administration, Bush found himself locked in a power struggle with Gen. Alexander Haig, whom Reagan had appointed to be Secretary of State. Haig was a real threat to the Bushmen. Haig was first of all a Kissinger clone with credentials to rival Bush's own; Haig had worked on Henry's staff during the Nixon years; he had been the White House chief of staff who had eased Nixon out the door with no trial, but with an imminent pardon. Haig's gifts of intrigue were considerable. And Haig was just as devoted to the Zionist neoconservatives as Bush was, with powerful ties in the direction of the Anti-Defamation League. It was, althogether, a challenge not to be taken lightly. Haig thought that he had been a rival to Bush for the vice-presidency at the Detroit convention, and perhaps he had been.
Inexorably, the Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks went into action against Haig. The idea was to paint him as a power-hungry megalomaniac bent on dominating the administration of the weak figurehead Reagan. This would then be supplemented by a vicious campaign of leaking by Baker and Deaver designed to play Reagan against Haig and vice-versa, until the rival to Bush could be eliminated.
The wrecking operation against Haig started during his confirmation hearings, during which he had to answer more questions about Watergate than Bush had faced in 1975, when the facts were much more recent. Senator Tsongas was wired in: Tsongas, motivating his negative vote against Haig's confirmation, told the nominee: "You are going to dominate this administration, if I may say so. You are by far the strongest personality that's going to be in there." [fn 3]
Three weeks into the new administration, Haig concluded that "someone in the White House staff was attempting to communicate with me through the press," by a process of constant leakage, including leakage of the contents of secret diplomatic papers. Haig protested to Meese, NSC chief Richard Allen, Baker, and Bush. Shortly thereafter, Haig noted that "Baker's messengers sent rumors of my imminent departure or dismissal murmuring through the press." Soon "'a senior presidential aide' was quoted in a syndicated column as saying, 'We will get this man [Haig] under control.'" [fn 4] It took a long time for Baker and Bush to drive Haig out of the administration. Ultimately it was Haig's attempted mediation of the Malvinas crisis in April, 1982 that weakened Haig to the point that he could be finished off. His fall was specifically determined by his action in giving Ariel Sharon a secret carte blanche for the Israeli government to invade Lebanon, including the city of Beirut. Reagan was justifiably enraged. Shortly before his ouster, Haig got a report of a White House meeting during which Baker was reported to have said, "Haig is going to go, and quickly, and we are going to make it happen." [fn 5]
Haig's principal bureaucratic ploy during the first weeks of the Reagan administration was his submission to Reagan on the day of his inauguration of a draft executive order to organize the National Security Counbcil and interagency tasks forces, including the crisis staffs, according to Haig's wishes. Haig refers to this document as National Security Decision Directive 1 (NSDD 1), and laments that it was never signed in its original form, and that no comparable directive for structuring the NSC interagency groups was signed for over a year. Ultimately a document called NSDD 2 would be signed, formalizing the establishment of a Special Situation Group (SSG) crisis management staff chaired by Bush. Haig's draft would have made the Secretary of State the Chairman of the SSG crisis staff in conformity with Haig's demand to be recognized as Reagan's "vicar of foreign policy." This was unacceptable to Bush, who made sure with the help of Baker and probably also Deaver that Haig's draft of NSDD 1 would never be signed.
Haig writes about this bureaucratic struggle as the battle for the IG's (Interagency Groups) and SIG's (Special or Senior Interagency Groups), generally populated by undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries within the NSC framework. As Haig points out, these Kissingerian structures are the locus of much real power, especially under a weak president like Reagan. Haig notes that "in organizational terms, the key to the system is the substructure of SIG's and IG's in which the fundamentals of policy (domestic and foreign) are decided. On instructions from the President, the IG's (as I will call the whole lot, for the sake of convenience), can summon up all the human and informational resources of the federal government, study specific issues, and develop policy options and recommendations. [...] IG chairmanships are parceled out to State and other departments and agencies according to their interests and their influence. As Kissinger, that canny veteran of marches and countermarches in the faculty of Harvard University, recognized, he who controls the key IG's controls the flow of options to the President and, therefore, to a degree, controls policy." [fn 6]
The struggle between Haig and Bush culminated towards the end of Reagan's first hundred days in office. Haig was chafing because the White House staff, meaning Baker, was denying him acess to the president. Haig's NSDD 1 had still not been signed. The, on Sunday, March 22, Haig's attention was called to an elaborate leak to reporter Martin Schram that had appeared that day in the Washington Post under the headline "WHITE HOUSE REVAMPS TOP POLICY ROLES; Bush to Head Crisis Management." Haig's attention was drawn to the following paragraphs:
* Partly in an effort to bring harmony to the Reagan high command, it has been decided that Vice President George Bush will be placed in charge of a new structure for national security crisis management, according to senior presidential assistants. This assignment will amount to an unprecedented role for a vice president in modern times. In the Carter administration, the crisis management structure was chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser. [...]
On a broader, policy-making level, senior White House officials were unhappy with what they felt to be ill-timed and ill-considered actions by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. that placed the brightest spotlight on El Salvador at a time when the administration was trying to focus maximum attention on Reagan's economic proposals. [...]
Bush's stature, by virtue of job title and experience, was cited as the reason that he was chosen to chair meetings in the Situation Room in time of crisis. Principal officials involved in crisis management will be the secretaries of state and defense, the Central Intelligence Agency director, the national security adviser, Meese, and Baker, officials said, adding that the structure has not been fully devised nor the presidential directive written.
Reagan officials emphasized that Bush, a former director of the CIA and former United Nations Ambassador, would be able to preserve White House control over crisis management without irritating Haig, who they stressed was probably the most experienced and able of all other officials who could serve in that function.
"The reason for this [choice of Bush] is that the secretary of state might wish he were chairing the crisis management structure," said one Reagan official, "but it is pretty hard to argue with the vice president being in charge." [fn 7]
Lower down on the page was a smaller article entitled "Anatomy of a Washington Rumor," to which we will return.
Haig says that he called Ed Meese at the White House to check the truth of this report, and that Meese replied that there was no truth to it. Haig went to see Reagan at the White House. Reagan was concerned about the leak, and reassured Haig: "I want you to know that the story in the Post is a fabrication. It means that George would sit in for me in the NSC in my absence, and that's all it means. It doesn't affect your authority in any way." Haig also says that he received a further call from Reagan assuring him that his authority was not to be diminished in the slightest.
But later the same afternoon, White House press secretary James Brady read the following statement to the press:
* I am confirming today the President's decision to have the Vice President chair the Administration's "crisis management" team, as a part of the National Security Council system....President Reagan's choice of the Vice President was guided in large measure by the fact that management of crises has traditionally--and appropriately-- been done in the White House. [fn 8]
Haig says he then drew up his letter of resignation, but hesitated to sign it. He called Bush to complain: "The American people can't be served by this. It's an impossible situation for you and me to be in. Of course, you chair the NSC in the President's absence. We didn't need to say it. This is all mischief. Why the hell did they do this without discussing it with me." Haig went on: "I have been dealt with duplicitiously, George. The President has been used. I need a public reaffirmation of my role or I can't stay here." Can it be that Haig was so naive that he did not realize that Bush was his ruthless rival and the source of many of his problems? Haig undoubtedly knew, but chose not to say so in memoirs written after he had been defeated. For Haig also knew that Bush was vindictive. Haig does note that he was convinced that Meese was not part of the cabal out to get him. Haig had further conversations with Reagan during these days, which often seemed to have cleared up the confusion, but which in retrospect were never conclusive. In the meantime, George Bush had seized control of the Special Situation Group, which would take control of the Executive Branch in time of crisis or national emergency. It was a superb starting point for a coup d'etat.
The other article in the Washington Post of Sunday, March 22 was also a harbinger of things soon to come. This piece was entitled "Anatomy of a Washington Rumor," and the rumor it traced was that "Vice President George Bush had been nicked by a bullet in a predawn shooting outside a townhouse somewhere on Capitol Hill." According to this story, the source of the rumor in question was a young woman artist living on Capitol Hill who had rushed into the street on the evening of February 22 when she heard the sound of a traffic accident near her home. There she was met a by a police officer whom she had met previously, on the occasion of the murder a few weeks earlier of a young Supreme Court Librarian in the same spot. According to the woman artist, the policeman told her: "The vice president was shot today." When the woman artist tried to check on this story with the news media, the article alleged, the rumor took on a life of its own and became an inchoate news story, with Jack Anderson and others trying to verify it.
Vice President Bush was reportedly very angry when he was told about the rumor: "Peter Teeley, the vice president's press secretary, told Bush of the inquiries. The vice president was incredulous and was as angry as Teeley had ever seen him. 'Jesus, this is the craziest thing I have ever heard,' he said. Bush though the whole thing was silly. 'You should call Barbara,' he told Teeley, ' and let her know what this is all about." Why would Bush be so angry about a spurious report?
As reporters dug deeper into the alleged shooting, one asked a Secret Service contact if there had been any recent shooting incidents monitored by his agency. "The answer came back. On March 8, as a motorcade drove west on Canal Road, officers had heard a 'popping sound' from a 'steep, rocky cliff' on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. But it had been President Reagan's motorcade, not Bush's. And the noises never proved to be gunfire." [fn 9] Had there been an attempt to assassinate Reagan, or to intimidate him? In any case Senator Howard Baker, the GOP majority leader at that time, was overheard making jokes about the allegedly discredited Rumor at a weekend party, and this was duly noted in the Washinton Post of March 25.
In the midst of the Bush-Baker cabal's relentless drive to seize control over the Reagan administration, John Warnock Hinckley Jr. carried out his attempt to assassinate President Reagan on the afternoon of March 30, 1981. George Bush was visiting Texas that day. Bush was flying from Fort Worth to Austin in his Air Force Two Boeing 707. In Fort Worth, Bush had unveiled a plaque at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the old Hotel Texas, designating it as a national historic site. This was the hotel, coincidentally, in which John F. Kennedy had spent the last night of his life, before going on to Dallas the next day, November 22, 1963. Here was a sinister symbolism!
In Austin Bush was scheduled to deliver an address to a joint session of the Texas state legislature. It was Al Haig who called Bush in the clear and told him that the President had been shot, while forwarding the details of Reagan's condition, insofar as they were known, by scrambler as a classified message. Haig was in touch with James Baker III, who was close to Reagan at George Washington University hospital. Bush's man in the White House situation room was Admiral Dan Murphy, who was standing right next to Haig. Bush agreed with Haig's estimate that he ought to return to Washington at once. But first his plane needed to be refueled, so it landed at Carswell Air Force Base near Austin.
Refueling took about forty minutes; during this time Bush talked on board the plane with Texas Governor William Clements, his wife, Rita, and Texas Secretary of State George Strake. Texas Congressman Jim Wright was also travelling on Bush's plane that day, as were Congressmen Bill Archer of Houston and Jim Collins of Dallas. Bush's top aide Chase Untermeyer was also with the party on Air Force Two. [fn 10]
Bush says that his flight from Carswell to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington took about two and one half hours, and that he arrived at Andrews at abouit 6:40 PM. Bush says he was told by Ed Meese that the operation to remove the bullet that had struck Reagan was a success, and that the president was likely to survive. Bush's customary procedure was to land at Andrews and then take a helicopter to the vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue. His aides Ed Pollard and John Matheny suggested that he would save time by going by helicopter directly to the White House south lawn, where he could arrive in time to be shown on the 7 PM Eastern time evening news broadcasts. Bush makes much oif the fact that he refused to do this, allegeedly on the symbolic grounds that "Only the President lands on the south lawn."
Back at the White House, the principal cabinet officers had assembled in the situation room and had been running a crisis management committee during the afternoon. Haig says he was at first adamant that a conspiracy, if discovered, should be ruthlessly exposed: "It was essential that we get the facts and publish them quickly. Rumor must not be allowed to breed on this tragedy. Remembering the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, I said to Woody Goldberg, 'No matter what the truth is about this shooting, the American people must know it." [fn 11] But the truth has never been established.
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's memoir of that afternoon reminds us of two highly relevant facts. The first is that a "NORAD [North American Air Defense Command] exercise with a simulated incoming missle attack had been planned for the next day." Weinberger agreed with General David Jones, the chiarman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this exercise should be cancelled. [fn 12]
Weinberger also recalls that the group in the Situation Room was informed by James Baker that "there had been a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] exercise scheduled for the next day on presidential succession, with the general title 'Nine Lives.' By an immediate consensus, it was agreed that exercise should also be cancelled." [fn 13]
As Weinberger further recalls, "at almost exactly 7:00, the Vice President came to the Situation Room and very calmly assumed the chair at the head of the table." [fn 14] According to Weinberger, the first item discussed was the need for someonme to sign the Dairy Price Support Bill the next day so as to reassure the public. Bush asked Weinberger for a report on the status of US forces, which Weinberger furnished.
Another eyewitness of these transactions was Don Regan, whom the Tower Board later made the fall-guy for Bush's Iran-contra escapades. Regan records that "the Vice President arrived with Ed Meese, who had met him when he landed to fill him in on the details. George asked for a condition report: 1) on the President; 2) on the other wounded; 3) on the assailant; 4) on the international scene. [...] After the reports were given and it was determined that there were no international complications and no domestic conspiracy, it was decided that the US government would carry on business as usual. The Vice President would go on TV from the White House to reassure the nation and to demonstrate that he was in charge." [fn 15]
As Weinberger recounts the same moments: "[Attorney General Bill French Smith] then reported that all FBI reports concurred with the information I had received; that the shooting was a completely isolated incident and that the assassin, John Hinckley, with a previous record in Nashville, seemed to be a 'Bremmer' type, a reference to the attempted assassin of George Wallace." [fn 16]
Those who were not watching carefully here may have missed the fact that just a few minutes after George Bush had walked into the room, he had presided over the sweeping under the rug of the decisive question regarding Hinckley and his actions: was Hinckley a part of a conspiracy, domestic or international? Not more than five hours after the attempt to kill Reagan, on the basis of the most fragmentary early reports, before Hinckley had been properly questioned, and before a full investigation had been carried out, a group of cabinet officers chaired by George Bush had ruled out a priori any conspiracy. Haig, whose memoirs talk most about the possibility of a conspiracy, does not seem to have objected to this incredible decision.
From that moment on, "no conspiracy" became the official doctrine of the US regime, for the moment a Bush regime, and the most massivew efforts were undertaken to stifle any suggestion to the contrary. The iron curtain came down on the truth about Hinckley.
http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook/bush17.html
Sidenote: DWIs...
http://www.geocities.com/green_party_dwi_jokes/greendwijokes.html
The father in that family, John W. Hinkley Sr., was also the president of the board for World Vision. World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and "good work" operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there. From it's inception, it was rabidly anti-Communist and it focused on refugee populations of people running from countries that had been taken over by Communism. This was from the fifties on.
World Vision had a hand in the movement of the Cubans into the United States and other refugees of revolutionary regimes. When you're a refugee you're cut loose, basically, and pretty much fair game to be manipulated by whoever is willing to give you a hand because you don't have a home or any place to stay and somebody has got to accept you.
World Vision was able to recruit out of these mercenary populations, people who could be politically turned to their intelligence purposes. World Vision served as a penetration force -- not as visible as the military actually going in or the CIA going in -- going in as missionaries and working among the people.
This link between missionary and intelligence for capitalistic infiltration operations goes way back. It was part of the internationalism with the Rockefellers. It's talked about in a book called Thy Will Be Done[4] about Rockefeller, Venezuela, and Latin American Oil, the Summer Linguistic Institute, World Vision and others. But they operated in this way for a long time.
They were paid by the CIA for a long time during the Vietnam war and went into SE Asia -- Cambodia and Laos. Throughout Vietnam they were given U.S. military equipment to use. They still maintain a budget under USAID, which was just (Agency for International Development), which was just a pass-over in order to give the CIA more cover. They ran operations through USAID. The current cover replacing that is the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which is supposed to be how we're exporting democracy around the world.
But of course, we're exporting exactly the kind of corrupt democracy we have here, which is rigged and manipulated elections and press manipulation in order to keep in power or put in power the people that we want to be in those countries for the purpose of having our investments protected and milking what we can out of the resources and the labor available in any of those countries.
World Vision was part of that scheme and they did some nasty things. They ran the refugee camp in Sabra-Shatilla where the fascist Phalange were allowed in to kill the Palestinians. Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland syndicate mobster, had building operations and construction stuff going on in Miami that the anti-Castro Cubans were hired to take part in. They meld them in -- and so they recruit from them, whoever they can.
They ran the Cuban and Thai refugee camps in the United States. Mark David Chapman -- who eventually shot John Lennon -- worked at the Thai refugee camps out in Arkansas that World Vision operated there. They ran these camps brutally, forcing people into political education against Castro, refusing to feed people, beating people -- by many reports -- and bringing in Alpha 66 and Omega 7 people (the worst of the killing teams -- or murder squads -- of the anti-Castro Cubans in the United States) to run the camps in Florida, Fort Chafey in Arkansas and other places where the Cuban exiles were. These people came in and there were eventually riots in the Cuban refugee camps against their treatment there. This according to legitimate refugee charity workers and organizations that I have spoken to.
http://www.geocities.com/prohibition_us/dui.html
The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. . . . But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration. . . . There are different loyalties. That was clear in a number of instances.
One was when Bush helped to get Haig appointed as Secretary of State. The entire Cabinet staff underneath him was already pre-appointed and he wasn't allowed to pick or choose any of them, or fire any of them. So it was like he was a figure head put up at the head of this agency that he wasn't really allowed to run. Then just a few days before the shooting of Reagan, there was a switch where Bush replaced Haig as the head of an emergency preparedness committee or unit that they had at the White House. The press was asking Bush right after he was appointed in place of Haig -- this was just three days before the shooting -- `What constitutes an emergency for the purpose of this special office?' And Bush said, "The president will know it when he sees it." I think he meant that he -- Reagan -- would know it when he saw it lying on the ground dying.
This I believe was a coup. The black box disappeared for several hours. . . There was that kind of transition-of-power going on -- who was actually going to control things and there were switch-overs about the Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, again, not having code books aboard on March 31, 81 like they didn't on November 22, 63. This was a classic transition-of-power situation.
All of this was to give us an early signal that this is one of their jobs. But at the same time none of Hinkley's bullets hit Reagan and that was clear from Reagan's lack of this kind of reaction. Reagan gets to the car still standing. He is pushed into the car by McCarthy. He's got some pain in his rib, which he thinks McCarthy caused by pushing him in and eventually coughs up a little blood. But even when he finally gets down to G.W. [George Washington University] Hospital, he is still standing when comes in and walks into the hospital and they put him on the gurney. He's not at all in the same shape as everyone else that's hit by Hinkley's 38.
Then the official story changes after three or four hours and Hinkley supposedly had a 22. I went through the ABC footage and you can actually see the replacement of the 22 and the pick-up of the 38 by a Secret Service agent.
There is also a weapon near Brady's head that one of the Secret Service guys drops. That's how they explain the 38, saying that it was a confusion because it was really the Secret Service guy's gun. I believe, Hinkley was firing a 38. Hinkley damaged everybody but Reagan, also put holes in the car and the building across the street. But he only had six rounds and each one of those is explained and then a seventh round has to explain the wound in Reagan.
Reagan's wound is so minimal that it doesn't match either a 22 or a 38. It is described as a little thin razor line when they finally get his clothes off. They think he's having a heart attack -- actually his lung had collapsed because of the thing penetrating him. Then finally a nurse sees a little line of blood underneath his left arm pit. She determines that something has gone in but it's a little razor cut. They know what a bullet hole looks there in the emergency room at G.W.U.. They get them all the time.
They do poke around until they finally find this thing in the x-ray. They try three times to get it out and finally pull it out and it is a little disc, a flattened disc, that was described as `thin as a dime' and `razor-edged.' This fits the profile of these aerodynamic discs that are used by the intelligence agencies in weapons that the Church Committee showed during the time that they did their testimony. They are fired with a CO2 (carbon dioxide) cartridge, so they are relatively silent. They just make a little puff. They have an accuracy up to a great length. They can be fired out of a regular gun or even out of these little tubes with the CO2 cartridge at the back. They also can be loaded with toxins.
One of the uses they had for them was making them out of plastic and filling them with shellfish toxin which goes in and makes a razor split in the skin which wouldn't be noticed during an autopsy. The x-ray won't pull up the plastic and the shellfish toxin, once it gets into any part of the bloodstream, will cause a heart attack within 30 seconds. Very lethal -- several milligrams of the shellfish toxin is enough of a dose. Whether this thing had a poison load in it or not, who knows? But it didn't immediately kill him so if it did have such a load, it didn't work. It didn't shoot off.
It bounced off of his rib. It would have cut into his aorta but bounced on his rib and missed the aorta by a quarter of an inch and went into the lung instead. But they did finally get it out. The lung was collapsed from it but they got him stabilized.
Meanwhile, all night, there were people trying to move him back to the Bethesda. Because when the car takes off from the Hilton where the shooting happens, they're screaming `Rawhide is okay' into the radio. Rawhide is the code name for Reagan. They're radioing back according to McCarthy, `Rawhide is okay, Rawhide is okay.' But I don't think he is supposed to be okay. I think he was supposed to have been killed there and they've got a problem.
So the car goes up to Connecticut Avenue and if they were going to go to G.W.U. Hospital, they needed to either go straight across down Florida to 21st and then (it's close) around a little traffic circle. Or they could have gone left further down to M Street and then turned across M to 21st.
McCarthy's story is that they went under the bridge at M Street and then he coughed up some blood and then they realized he'd been hit and they said `get to the nearest hospital.' But they still didn't even turn on M, which they could have easily done. They went all the way down to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue -- four or five more blocks. Then they turned to the right from 17th over to 21st and then came back up to 21st until they hit G.W.U. Hospital, which is going along three sides of a triangle instead of just cutting across. So if you're in a hurry -- the president's in an emergency -- you take the quickest route.
But what McCarthy says in his book is that when the car went up to Connecticut Avenue, that they went right and went toward the White House. If you turn right on Connecticut off of T, where they were, you're not going towards the White House, you're headed north toward Bethesda Hospital and out Connecticut Ave.
That was confirmed for me later when ABC News had on the doctor who was the head of the trauma room after they had the press conference with the doctors. The head of the trauma room was there with the news anchor. The newscaster said `I understand that there were people that wanted to move President Reagan out to Bethesda Naval Hospital after he had come into your trauma room.' And the doctor said, `Yes, there were people.' There were reports that it was Secret Service up to as late as 6 a.m. the next morning, insisting to move him. But in fact, he wasn't moved and it was because this trauma room doctor said, `When someone comes into my trauma room in that condition, I don't care who they are -- President of the United States or not -- they are not going to be moved.' He doesn't understand that he saved Reagan's life.
If they had gotten Reagan to Bethesda, they could have finished the job there and then done the same phony autopsy they did on John F. Kennedy at Bethesda Hospital. But instead, this trauma room doctor intervened and kept Reagan there and then Reagan recovered in relatively safety and security.
There was a strange incident that Mae Russell noticed that they brought blood in to him. First, it is unusual for them to bring blood because the Secret Service already knows when they travel to a city what hospital has blood and what the closest one is. They make sure that the hospitals nearby where the president travels, and those DC hospitals, have enough blood of his type in storage. It was unusual, first, that they didn't have enough and secondly, this vehicle that arrived to bring the blood wasn't anything formal from the pictures. It looked like some kind of a van where somebody had painted a red cross on the back of it but it clearly was not an official vehicle. Mae thought that tainted blood might've been brought in and caused Reagan problems later with cancer or other things.
Generally, his care there was certainly better than what would have happened to him. Interestingly enough, when the ABC News Anchor asked the doctor this and he said, `In my trauma room, they are going to stay there and we're not going to move him.' The response of the news anchor was, `No matter how much the Navy yells?' The doctor said, `That's right. No matter how much the Navy yells.' The question that we have to ask, `What is the Navy yelling about moving the president for after he's been shot?'
Meanwhile, Brady, who's lying on the ground, and still on the ground five minutes after Reagan takes off, ends up getting to G.W.U. before Reagan does. Reagan's on his way to Bethesda. Brady, who takes five extra minutes to even get the ambulance in to load him, gets to G.W.U. and is taken in on a stretcher surrounded by Secret Service agents. That became confused with Reagan. In the first hour, they said Reagan was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead, Brady was shot, he wasn't shot, he was dead, he wasn't dead. The stories went back and forth on the news about who had been shot and who was alive or dead. Nothing was clear. And then that Reagan had gone in to the hospital on a stretcher and then another story that Reagan had walked in on his own.
The problem was that Reagan didn't get back to G.W.U. until after Brady was there, like a good 15-to-20 minutes later before Reagan finally shows up and does walk in. They finally start dealing with him because he does have a collapsed lung but he isn't shot to the extent that he can't move. But that's what confused the story as to what condition Reagan was in. At first, I wondered if they were buying time or what was happening.
But it is very significant, I think, that Reagan was taken somewhere else and then turned around. I think the timing of the turn around relates to a huge fight that they later admitted broke out in the situation room at the White House in the emergency between the Reagan loyalists and the Bush loyalists in the administration.
http://www.geocities.com/prohibition_us/dui.html
Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering—an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.
The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan’s White House.
Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s.
Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore.
When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts.
At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.
The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.
The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.
Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history," the commission concluded.
The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.
The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.
"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people," he added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/272.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_Guatemala.html
The CIA worked in conjunction with William Casey’s World Vision organization for One World Order. The Clinton, Mena Arkansas drug scandal was sufficiently covered up as a deal between Clinton and the senior Bush as it was the Mena airfield that was running the drugs, weapons and cash for Ollie North. Why now, do you suppose it was Bush who had a great motivation to hand off to Rhodes man and Rothschild backer Bill Clinton and now for Clinton to hand off to George W. Bush? Peas in a pod perhaps? Vince Foster who it was claimed committed suicide knew all of the details, Bill Clinton could not trust him to remain silent, nor could CIA friend Bush.
USAID otherwise known as the front World Vision made sure that the currency aid to Nicaragua jumped from 1.5 million dollars to 74 million dollars for the secured agreement to keep it quiet.
The Rothschild BCCI, laundered the money to Noriega’s family. You betcha, Noriega never said a word. Then as standard, double crossed him into prison in the US. The people involved in the Drug, money and weapons scheme world wide was known as (not a surprise) as the "Golden Triangle"
David "Moses" Berg the head of a cult club and severe anti-semite, once stated that God is a pimp. It was Berg who was summoned by Barbara Bush to sing and entertain at the White House in 1992. Berg later fled to Libya, wonder why? He died in 1994. Berg was a noted Pedofile.
It was a close family friend of George H. Bush, Robert Mcauley who was secretly financing the Contras.
Money, which was supposed to go into poor countries for poor children. Money, which was taken from you. Money, which was given to Pat Robertson.
Ronald Reagan was used by the CIA , smart Bush, all the while honestly unknowing. It was George H. Bush who began the deals. It was smart Ollie North who would not talk, thus he would not die.
George W. Bush Statement 1/2/2001
What my cabinet shows is that I am not afraid to surround my self with strong and competent people. A good Executive is one that understands how to recruit people and to delegate authority and responsibility.
The Chinese embassy had to be accidentally bombed, why we had to re-pay our electors, i.e., military complex, create tension with the chinese, keep the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans from gaining too much UN power. Why we had to sell our weapons to Tiawan, Korea, Israel. We had to develop a market which was lost during the fall of the wall and the demise of the cold war. Why, we have to help the our friends, the CEOS of all of those pyramid powered companies which will elect us president of the United States!
Look carefully and you will find that the common denominator of George " Shrub" Bush’s cabinet are all involved in Pharmaceutical- Oil- Weapons- and eugenics.
http://antimisandry.com/conspiracy-theories/iron-triangle-corruption-american-politics-12655.html
In the third week of October 1980, GEORGE BUSH (Skull & Bones member and later U.S. President) and RICHARD ALLEN as Casey’s representative met with the agents of the Iranian Hizbollah extremists at the Hotel Raphael in Paris. There it was agreed that the U.S. would transport arms to Iran via Israel and that the Iranians would free the hostages the moment Reagan was declared President. The first arms delivery was to take place two weeks later (in March 1981). [Really?]
The CIA’s sabotage of Desert One planned by themselves was successful. The rescue mission failed and Carter was replaced by Reagan. The hostages were freed and the first arms delivery via Israel was made. Between July 24 and 27, 1981, the Israeli arms dealer Yaacov Nimrodi signed a 135 million dollar contract with Iran for the delivery of 50 land missiles, 50 mobile missiles and 68 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles.
Another deal that became known was that made by the Swiss arms dealer Stuart Allen McCafferty, who flew 360 tons of M-48 tank spares to Iran in a CI-44 freight plane chartered from the Argentine airline company Aereo Rioplatense. The whole thing cost them 27 million US$ and they made two successful flights from Israel to Iran. On July 18, 1983 the plane was shot down over Soviet Armenia by a Russian MIG-25 on its return flight from the third delivery.
These arms deals would hardly have been possible without GEORGE BUSH and Richard Allen.
In this case, too, the official media reports were far removed from what really occurred.
[H: You should be ready, willing and able to see the foundation being laid for the PLAN for unlimited money which ultimately ends up as the asset held now by GAIA. This sucked in the very resource that could “back” such a major plan as presented by Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and under the total control of documents proving up the program as to participants and FUNDS – i.e., also gold backing where necessary until gold could be phased out as currency-backing requirements. Remember that the U.S. moved off the gold standard and it became final under Carter.
Then, only year-before-last, Switzerland removed itself from a gold standard and elected a Jewish woman as head of Switzerland. The rest is history, well tracked as uprisings came after Marcos had perfected the plan established and shipped out tons of gold and currency around the globe. Then Marcos was literally KIDNAPPED and instead of being flown home he was abducted to the U.S. (Hawaii). What happened in between? Well, Mr. Bush for his uses and for gaining untold assets in oil, etc., and even gold from Brunei, tried to take IT ALL.
When theft of the very corporation holding the asset established as Bonus 3392-181 was made, the holder converted, with witness, the asset certificate, fully valid prior to the Federal Reserve Act, to a CONTRACT fully qualified, owner identified, and registered under the law. The corporation, Cosmos Seafood Energy Marketing, Ltd. was reclaimed as well. It was found that the snatching of the corporation was done directly through the Secretary of State (Nevada) [Papas] with instructions from George Bush. This was a bad scene but was rectified through agreements to not prosecute. So be it.
TRUTH AND HONOR HAVE HAD LITTLE PLACE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER – AND A LOT OF BANKS LOST THEIR SHIRTS OVER THE MISUSE OF SAID “CERTIFICATE ASSETS” BY BUSH. However, a lot of money moved around the game board.
At that time in history, readers, George Bush and Saddam Hussein were BUSINESS PARTNERS – even to the sharing of BANK ACCOUNTS of massive size.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/secretsoc_20century/secretsoc_20century09.htm
The CIA has never had a problem with overthrowing democratically elected governments, especially when they democratically decide to do something that the Agency considers not to be in the U.S.'s interests. Michael Manley in Jamaica, Salvador Allende in Chile, and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala were three leaders overthrown by CIA-led insurgencies. The CIA has also provided covert support for rebel groups such as RENAMO in Mozambique, the Contras in Nicaragua, the Afghan mujaheddin , the Kurds in Iraq, and the Inkatha Zulu party in South Africa. The current president of Nicaragua, Violeta Chamorro, was also on the CIA payroll when she was publishing La Prensa , urging her people to overthrow the Sandinistas. Many of the paramilitary coup d'etats in South America were supported by the CIA, including the takeover by the generals in Paraguay and Argentina. The CIA also supported some 30,000 Meo tribe mercenaries in Laos in the 1960s, as well as other soldiers of fortune, to destabilize the existing regime. Of course, the CIA has done their best to tamper with undemocratic governments as well, but with less success - agents of the CIA were wandering through Tibet in the 1950s, doing their best in whip the Tibetans into a bloody revolt against the Chinese. And several unsuccessful invasions of Cuba have been attempted in the wake of the original Bay of Pigs Fiasco, by CIA-armed Cuban exile brigades such as Alpha 66.
But overt, naked, military force can often jeopardize the CIA, especially when it fails and their role in the action stands revealed. For that reason, they often utilize more 'subtle' methods to destabilize governments. They have stuck their fingers in many elections and 'rigged' them to produce a more 'beneficial' result. To make governments more unopopular with their people, they have also used economic sabotage - they tried to ruin a whole years' sugar crop from Cuba by coating it with an unpalatable substance; and for years in East Germany they attempted to sour milk, disrupt mining activity, sabotage factories, and ruin other productive industries. Another technique is to use propraganda and disinformation - they spread false stories about the regime, especially here in the U.S. and the presses of its allies, in the hope that other nations will stop trading with the country. The CIA also uses techniques to reduce the charisma and appeal of foreign (especially revolutionary/anti-US) leaders - at one point, they tried to make the beard of Fidel Castro fall out, as if that was somehow the source of some Samson-like power for him!
That is their "negative" policy. But when they want to support pro-capitalist or pro-United States political parties, they often use other techniques. They provide "political advice and counsel," which we might call "spin doctoring" here in the U.S., to make those parties more palatable. Sometimes they give financial assistance to those parties covertly, or subsidies to important individuals. Other times they try and support private organizations like trade unions, business firms, and "think tanks" that are willing to 'lobby' for better relations with the U.S. Occasionally there is even "private" training and coaching of opposition leaders here in the United States, and carefully crafted exchange programs. Many of the organizations who exist ostensibly to aid and support democracy and development in the Third World - like the Foundation for Democracy - are CIA fronts who really support anti-communist regimes, even if they are basically undemocratic and under military rule. Pro-U.S. regimes like ARENA in El Salvador and the PRI Nationalist Party of Mexico often receive "technical" assistance from the CIA in managing the affairs of their country - especially as regards 'unruly' peasants and the possibility of insurrection.
The irony of using undemocratic means to 'protect democracy' has not been lost on many commentators. In many cases, the leftist leaders overthrown by the CIA were elected in fair and popular elections, and were not even inclined to allowing Soviet hemispheric ambitions into their country; but the CIA did not believe that, and certainly tried to convince others that that was a real danger. The CIA feels it has some god-given right, somehow, to interfere with the affairs of other nations; while at the same time supposedly carrying out its mission of blocking such infiltrations right here at home. How would the American people react if they found out that the KGB was interfering in our democracy? They shouldn't cry foul, then, when countries protest when the CIA does the same thing in trampling on their national sovereignty. While the Peace Corps was trying to nudge the Third World toward a pro-U.S. attitude, the CIA was doing its best to turn them into the other camp by playing the "ugly American."
The CIA has many controversial friends. Over the years, it has maintained many ties with the Mafia and organized crime, and it is very likely that Mob hit men have done contract work for the CIA in the past. Another group that it has frequently been involved with has been the international arms traders, like Adnan Khashoggi. Such arms dealers have turned up in countries with very flimsy explanations as to their presence there... inevitably with some CIA equipment for sale. True to their business, the arms dealers will often sell to both sides of a conflict - for example, arming both Iran and Iraq during their long war. One tie the CIA has worked hard to maintain over the years is with the Vatican, for obvious reasons. In the world of gathering intelligence you need to spread your tentacles far; who better to pick up some juicy info then a priest hearing Confession? The CIA has many connections to the para-Jesuit order Opus Dei and also to the Sovereign and Military Order of the Knights of Malta (the order descended from the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, kicked off the isle of Malta by Napoleon's troops.) Several CIA officials, including Bill Casey, have been made honorary members of this Catholic order. Needless to say, the CIA has had no problem making friends with prominent dictators, such as Pinochet, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Marcos, the Pahlevi Shah, Somoza, General Franco, and, until 1989, Noriega in Panama and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
But is there really a connection between the CIA and "international fascism" as some more conspiratorially-minded individuals have suggested? It does appear that the CIA was involved in some of the shady right-wing intrigues of Europe, including the whole P2 Masonic affair in Italy. Also, the group connected to Pope John Paul II's attempted assassination, the Gray Wolves, is part of a fascist "Black International" which is linked closely to the Reverend Moon's organization and Gen. Singlaub's World Anti-Communist League, which have been known to work with the CIA. There are those who think that the CIA was part of Project Paperclip, which smuggled ex-Nazi scientists and S.S. officials into this country to spy on Russia or develop rocket technology, or that it assisted the right-wing generals in South America to hide Nuremberg war criminals from international justice in exchange for what information could be gleaned on Soviet military forces. Some U.S. far-right groups are actually as paranoid about the CIA and its 'internationalist' agenda as they are about the Trilateral Commission or the Council for Foreign Relations, so it is doubtful that the CIA works with them...
It's not always clear where the CIA stands in the shifting sands of international politics: they can and do switch sides and double-cross their "friends." The CIA supported the Kurds from 1975-79 in their war for independence from Iraq, but when the Ayatollah Khoemini came to power in Iran, he was perceived as a greater threat. Keeping Saddam Hussein in power to 'buffer' Iraq took precedence over the Kurds' rights, and they were abdandoned to his savage response. Then, when Khoemini died and Hussein invaded Kuwait, the U.S. turned against Hussein, who they had been arming for the past eight years. Following the 'liberation' of Kuwait, the U.S. invited the Kurds to rebel yet again, only to abandon them to Saddam Hussein's forces once more. Having been double-crossed twice, I am sure that the Kurds will run the other way the next time the CIA comes around with some scheme. It is not suprising that the only 'friends' the CIA has are people who are equally as untrusting of others, and untrustworthy, as it is in its affairs - mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, cutthroats, adventurers, and other spy agencies such as the Israeli Mossad.
The "Enterprise," as it was called, was a joint effort during the 1980s between the NSA, CIA, and DIA to go over Congress' policy in Central America. As the Christic Institute has pointed out, the 'Shadow' government behind the 'Enterprise' has been active for 25 years, and the recent Iran-Contra hearings have only scratched its surface, grabbing its more visible members such as North, Secord, and Poindexter. The "Enterprise' was to sell arms to Iranian 'moderates' in order to raise funds to support the Nicaraguan Contras, whose aid had been reduced to a minimal level in 1985. Links to the Islamic Republic were not hard to find since the 'moderate' contacts made by Reagan's "October Surprise" Team (which included Bill Casey) in 1980 were all too eager to accept our weapons in their war with Iraq. It was thought, somewhat erroneously, that these 'moderates' had some connection to the Shiite groups in Lebanon who were holding Americans hostage, and that they could obtain their release. The "Enterprise" also was involved with some attempted bombings right here in the U.S., and sabotage efforts against groups opposing U.S. Central America policy, such as the Pledge of Resistance and the Christic Institute. Bill Moyers called the Iran-Contra hearings a "Constitutional Crisis," much as some people called Watergate 20 years earlier... but they did not result in the resignation of a president.
It turns out that unscrupulous businessmen, like Stefan Halper and Harvey D. MacLean, Jr., who founded the Palmer National Bank in 1983, used deregulation in order to make loans to ex-CIA operatives involved in funding the Contras. Much of the S & L swindle, it turns out, may have turned up in the hands of the CIA. Halper, not unsurprisingly, was one of the individuals who helped set up Oliver North's defense fund. Other banks, such as Robert L. Corson's Vision Banc Savings, were involved in the 'laundering' of money connected with Noriega... and the Houston bank went under four months after Corson took ownership. The "vanishing money" in the Iran-Contra scandal went, in part, to secret Swiss accounts belonging to its principals - but at this point it intertwines with another recent scandal, involving the Bank of Commerce and Credit, International (BCCI). BCCI has been branded an 'outlaw' bank for its supports of brutal Middle East regimes, but one of its big trading partners, it seems, was the CIA, as well. Yet another banking scandal - the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, where millions of dollars disappeared from the Vatican Bank into the pockets of "G-d's Banker," Roberto Calvi, has CIA written all over it... Licio Gelli and his Italian organization may have worked with the CIA to frame the Communists in a train station bombing in Italy in 1980.
The CIA has a rather remarkable 'financial empire.' Despite the fact that it is the only government agency with a totally unmonitored 'black budget' - they can spend as they see fit (within set limits) - it is also the only one that annually turns a profit! That is because it maintains many 'shadow proprietaries,' commercial enterprises that operate "up-front" operations until the point where they are called on to do CIA business. Some of those proprietaries include major airlines, such as Pacific Air and its subsidiary Air America, and trade organizations (such as the International Trade Mart) that are really used for covert operations coordination. These shadow companies are maintained tightly and squeaky-clean (and often turn over a hefty profit) until their covert support becomes necessary. It is well known that the CIA brass reguarly invest much of the Agency's money in stocks and risky investments rather than the generally tame security bonds issued by the government. It isn't just James Bond who believes in gambling... the CIA feels that financial independence is an important key to remaining free of government oversight.
http://www.educate-yourself.org/mc/spooklandtricks19oct06.shtml
Consider the case of Oliver North, known associate of drug traffickers. Oliver North's conviction for three felonies (lying, cheating, and stealing) was reversed in 1990 because his case was muddied by the Congressional grant of immunity. This meant that he could run for office, and in 1994 he was nearly elected to the U.S. Senate. North's infamous notebooks, however, may yet return to haunt him.
Ten months after the Kerry subcommittee subpoenaed these notebooks, they still lacked clean, unexpurgated copies. Nevertheless, these notebooks contain dozens of references to contra drug trafficking. In an e-mail message about General Jose Bueso Rosa from Honduras, who was involved in a conspiracy to import 345 kilos of cocaine into Florida, North noted that U.S. officials would "cabal quietly to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence." Even after Panama's Manuel Noriega was exposed in the U.S. press as a drug runner, North met with him because Noriega wanted help to "clean up his image." In exchange, Noriega offered North some helpful anti-Sandinista sabotage.
Or consider the decision by the Post and other major media to throw away a truly sensational story: the official declaration by Costa Rica, Central America's one shining light of democracy, that it considered a number of major U.S. officials to be drug traffickers, and as such was barring them from entering the country. The list here is nothing short of amazing: Oliver North himself, retired air-force major general Richard Secord, Reagan's former national security advisor John Poindexter, former U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, and former CIA station chief Joseph Fernandez.
On July 22, 1989, the Associated Press ran this story, but they were virtually alone; some major media buried this story, and the rest resolutely ignored it. When asked why, Post reporter Walter Pincus gave a revealing response: "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true."[16] (Before he joined the Post in the 1960s, Pincus traveled abroad on a CIA subsidy to spy on student leaders from other countries.[17] Unsurprisingly, Pincus was out in front of the pack of reporters that attacked the recent Mercury News story.)
When the major media turn aside from stories so sensational, and so easy to pursue, it's unlikely to be an accident. And given that stories so high-profile go nowhere, it's not surprising that the same thing happens to countless lower-profile stories that lack immediately-recognizable American names. Space prevents giving even a "bullet" version of many stories that could be adduced here, but consider the following items, at least:
* Medellin trafficker Carlos Lehder testified at Noriega's 1991 trial that the Medellin cartel gave $10 million to the contras.
* FBI informant Wanda Palacio told the Kerry subcommittee that she saw cocaine being loaded onto pilot Wallace Sawyer's plane in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1985. (Sawyer and his Southern Air Transport L382, carrying guns this time, were shot down over Nicaragua one year later. The flight logs from the plane, recovered by the Sandinistas, substantiated Palacio's story.)
* George Morales, a major cocaine trafficker, offered planes and cash to the contras; when contra leader Adolfo Chamorro checked with the CIA, they said Morales was fine and to go ahead with the deal.
* Ramon Milian Rodriguez, the chief accountant for the Medellin cartel, testified to the Kerry subcommittee that he transferred money to the contras and laundered more than $3 million for the CIA, even after his indictment on drug charges in 1983.
* In what was known as the Frogman Case, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, returned $36,000 to an arrested cocaine dealer after contra leaders stipulated that the money was earmarked for weapons. The Justice Department foiled Kerry's attempts to investigate this. (Russoniello, by the way, is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.)
* Recently a Venezuelan, Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila, was indicted in Miami for smuggling tons of cocaine. This is the only instance in which the CIA has acknowledged responsibility for drugs being imported into the U.S. One CIA officer resigned and another was recalled to Washington, but no CIA officials have been charged.
http://www.namebase.org/news16.html
The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.
During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.
How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"
Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.
By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included:
* Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity.
* Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call.
* Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA.
* Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.
Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.
Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other.
How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.
The CIA’s alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA’s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA’s history of atrocity first.
The CIA co-opted big business right from the start, beginning with the most famous billionaire of the time: Howard Hughes. Hughes had inherited his father’s million-dollar tool and die company at age 19. Anxious to expand his fortune, he made a conscientious decision "to go where the money is" — namely, government. With a few well-placed bribes, Hughes secured defense contracts to build military planes. The result was the Hughes Aircraft company. By 1940, he had also acquired a controlling interest in Trans World Airlines. His government connections and international airline soon caught the attention of the CIA, and the two began a lifelong relationship. Hughes, whom the CIA dubbed "The Stockbroker," became the agency’s largest contractor. Not only did he let the CIA use his business firms as fronts, but he also funded countless CIA operations. Perhaps the most notorious was Operation Jennifer, an allegedly failed attempt to recover nuclear codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. Hughes’ right-hand security man, Robert Maheu, was a CIA agent who at one time represented the CIA in negotiations with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro.
The CIA’s contacts with big business quickly spread. The agency showed a preference for international companies, public relations firms, media companies, law offices, banks, financiers and stockbrokers. The CIA didn’t limit its activities to recruiting businessmen; sometimes the CIA bought or created entire companies outright. One benefit of co-opting big business was that the CIA was able to create a secret source of funds other than from government. With stock portfolios multiplying their profits, it’s impossible now to say how flush the CIA really is. If Congress ever cut off funds for a mission, the business fraternity could easily replace them, either by donations or even setting up profitable businesses in the target country. In fact, this is precisely what happened during the Iran/Contra scandal.
By allying itself with the business community, the CIA received the funds and ability it needed to remove itself from democratic control.
Journalism is a perfect cover for CIA agents. People talk freely to journalists, and few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.
The instigators of MOCKINGBIRD were Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham was the husband of Katherine Graham, today’s publisher of the Washington Post. In fact, it was the Post’s ties to the CIA that allowed it to grow so quickly after the war, both in readership and influence. (8)
MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:
* Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)
* William Paley (President, CBS)
* Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
* Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)
* Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)
* Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
* Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)
* James Copley (Copley News Services)
* Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
* C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
* Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
* ABC
* NBC
* Associated Press
* United Press International
* Reuters
* Hearst Newspapers
* Scripps-Howard
* Newsweek magazine
* Mutual Broadcasting System
* Miami Herald
* Old Saturday Evening Post
* New York Herald-Tribune
Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation’s capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.
After Philip’s suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband’s world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper’s relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated:
We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.
This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post’s headlines.
The CIA also secretly bought or created its own media companies. It owned 40 percent of the Rome Daily American at a time when communists were threatening to win the Italian elections. Worse, the CIA has bought many domestic media companies. A prime example is Capital Cities, created in 1954 by CIA businessman William Casey (who would later become Reagan’s CIA director). Another founder was Lowell Thomas, a close friend and business contact with CIA Director Allen Dulles. Another founder was CIA businessman Thomas Dewey. By 1985, Capital Cities had grown so powerful that it was able to buy an entire TV network: ABC.
For those who believe in "separation of press and state," the very idea that the CIA has secret propaganda outlets throughout the media is appalling. The reason why America was so oblivious to CIA crimes in the 40s and 50s was because the media willingly complied with the agency. Even today, when the immorality of the CIA should be an open-and-shut case, "debate" about the issue rages in the media. Here is but one example:
In 1996, The San Jose Mercury News published an investigative report suggesting that the CIA had sold crack in Los Angeles to fund the Contra war in Central America. A month later, three of the CIA’s most important media allies — The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times — immediately leveled their guns at the Mercury report and blasted away in an attempt to discredit it. Who wrote the Post article? Walter Pincus, longtime CIA journalist. The dangers here are obvious.
By the early 50s, CIA Director Allen Dulles had staffed the CIA almost exclusively with Ivy League graduates, especially from Yale. (A disproportionate number of CIA figures, like George Bush, come from Yale’s "Skull and Crossbones" Society.) CIA recruiters also approached thousands of other professors to work in place at their universities on a part-time, contract basis. Not stopping at recruiting scholars, the agency would go on to create several departments at elite universities, including Harvard's Russian Research Center and the Center for International Studies at MIT.
By the time Operation CHAOS wound down in 1973, the CIA had spied on 7,000 Americans, 1,000 organizations and traded information on more than 300,000 persons with various law agencies. (14) When academia learned of this, its outrage grew.
The loss of academia was only the first blow for the CIA. Other disasters quickly followed; in the early 70s, the CIA was trying desperately to stave off a growing number of scandals. The first was Watergate.
The CIA’s fingerprints were all over Watergate. First, we should note the CIA had clear motives for helping oust Nixon. He was the ultimate "outsider," a poor California Quaker who grew up feeling bitter resentment towards the elite "Eastern establishment." Nixon, for all his arch-conservatism, was surprisingly liberal on economic issues, enfuriating businessmen with statements like "We are all Keynesians now." He created a whole host of new agencies to regulate business, like the FDA, EPA and OSHA. He signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which forced businesses to clean up their toxic emissions. He imposed price controls to fight inflation, and took the nation fully off the gold standard. Nixon also strengthened affirmative action. Even his staffers were famously anti-elitist, like Kevin Philips, who would eventually write the bible on inequality during the 1980s, The Politics of Rich and Poor. Add to this Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam and Détente with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had not only tried to remove control of foreign policy from the CIA, but had also taken measures to bring the CIA itself under control. Not surprisingly, Nixon and his CIA Director, Richard Helms, couldn’t stand each other. (Nixon fired him for failing to cover up for Watergate.) Clearly, Nixon was fighting at cross-purposes with the CIA and the nation’s elite.
As it turns out, the CIA had inside knowledge of Nixon’s dirty work. Nixon had created his own covert action team, "The Committee to Reelect the President," more amusingly known by its acronym, CREEP. The team consisted of two CIA agents — E. Howard Hunt and James McCord — as well as former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. They also employed four Cubans with long CIA histories. In fact, a CIA front called the Mullen Company funded their activities, which ranged from disrupting Democratic campaigns to laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions.
The CIA not only had intimate knowledge of Nixon’s crimes, but it also acted as though it wanted the world to know them. When the FBI began investigating Watergate, Nixon tried using the CIA to cover up for him. At first the CIA half-heartedly complied, telling the FBI that the investigation would endanger CIA operations in Mexico. But a few weeks later it gave the FBI a green light again to proceed again with their investigation.
Furthermore, Watergate was exposed by the CIA’s main newspaper in America, The Washington Post. One of the two journalists who investigated the scandal, Robert Woodward, had only recently become a journalist. Previously Woodward had worked as a Naval intelligence liaison to the White House, privy to some of the nation’s highest secrets. He would later write a sympathetic portrait of CIA Director Bill Casey in a book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It was Woodward who personally knew and interviewed "Deep Throat," the unnamed source who revealed inside information on Nixon’s activities. Many Watergate researchers consider one of Woodward’s old intelligence contacts to be a prime candidate for Deep Throat. (15)
Despite all the facts of CIA involvement, Woodward and Bernstein made virtually no mention of the CIA in their Watergate reporting. Even during Senate hearings on Watergate, the CIA somehow managed to stay out of the spotlight. In 1974, the House would clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate.
The CIA was not as lucky in 1974, when the Senate held hearings on James Jesus Angleton’s illegal surveillance of American citizens. These disclosures resulted in his firing. But that was nothing compared to the 1975 Church Committee. This Senate investigation looked into virtually every type of CIA crime, from assassination to secret war to manipulating the domestic media. The "reforms" that resulted from these hearings were mostly cosmetic, but the details that emerged shattered the CIA’s reputation forever. Interestingly enough, the two Senators who held these hearings — Frank Church and Otis Pike — were both defeated for reelection, despite a 98 percent reelection rate for incumbents.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html
By way of the secret meeting Iran, in turn, agreed to keep the 52 U.S. Embassy hostages until AFTER the 1980 presidential election of the Reagan/Bush ticket. This was for the purpose of making Jimmy Carter running for re-election look like a wimp not being able to get the hostage release. Carter, however, had a plan to get the release in October, just before the election, which would worry Bush. Hence, Bush coined the term "October Surprise". The hostages were released in January, 1981, just at the moment Reagan was safely inaugurated. Marc Rich played a role in all this in that, with impunity, he was allowed to violate the worldwide embargo on Iranian oil. When Reagan/Bush took office, nothing was done to Rich who had brokered some of the weapons deals via Israel to Iran. Rich also handled, for Bush, the millions of dollars given to Iran by Bush as part of the deal. The funds were trans-shipped via a highly corrupt functionary in the financial news industry, Earl Brian [later sent to prison on unrelated charges carefully omitting any of this.]
During the Iranian oil embargo, Marc Rich made hundreds of millions of dollars by treasonously circumventing the U.S.-led restrictions. Rich did this with firms largely owned by the George Bush Family jointly with Richard Cheney and their confederates. Many of Rich's dealings were disguised as soybean and currency trading, on the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Cheney as alleged U.S. Vice President reportedly secretly helps supply Iraq oil exploration and pumping equipment through overseas firms of Cheney/Bush's Halliburton Co., as well as units Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump. [The Washington Times, owned by the illicit empire of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has covered up Rev. Moon's huge money ties to the George Bush Family. Details have been on-line by hard-hitting journalist Robert Parry. http//www.Consortiumnews.com, a version of his print magazines. Also, see the populist newspaper Spotlight, 11/20/00, http//www.spotlight.org].
http://www.rense.com/general26/rich.htm
The generation of CIA and military intelligence led by Shackley, Helms, and Casey have built the perfect beast, using selective assassination that leaves no trace. The ability to cull the human herd with Silent Kill technology allows a few personalities to remake the entire society in their own image. Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) technology kills with ionizing and non-ionizing radiation or slowly drives the target crazy with silent sound, similar to CIA MKULTRA psychiatrist Ewen Camerons psychic driving technique used to break down the targets personality. The new buzzwords at the Pentagon are silent kill, synthetic telepathy and psychotronics. Another means of attack on targets is the Smirnov patent that uses subliminal suggestion to manipulate human behavior. This patent was purchased by the remote viewing company Psi Tech Corporation. Military intelligence officers involved in developing these "non-lethal weapons" also control Psi Tech. Emotional manipulation is accomplished using Dr. Michael Persinger's work to remotely project emotional states that the brain entrains or locks onto and emulates. One can broadcast rage or fear at an individual target to manipulate and control them. As if these methods were not enough to torture and murder people, add to this nightmarish toolbox,active gang stalking. CIA created cults and other cause-oriented groups are used to induce further trauma in the target by actively harassing them in public in a neutralization technique described in counterintelligence operations manuals that are aimed at enemy agents. In the race to develop a new weapon system it has always been necessary to test it on human beings. Perfecting the latest weapons designed to kill slowly and silently as well as perfecting the process of controlling the human mind are no different. Once the weaponry has been perfected on these few thousand people the same techniques will be applied en mass to the general population, and then to humanity as a whole. It is probable that the detention and debriefing of the heads of the DIA, NSA, INSCOM, and CIA, (Maples, Alexander, Lacquement, Hayden) and their replacement with civilian reformers will end the current war crimes.
http://www.truesoundhealing.com/Marshall%20Thomas%20-%20Monarch%20-%20The%20New%20Phoenix%20Program%20-%202008.pdf
http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/LyndonLaRouche.pdf
http://lyndonlarouche.org/fascism20.htm
Buried in the Lyndon LaRouche/U.S. Labor Party file at the Data Center, the off-Broadway media/research outlet on 19th Street in Oakland, is a curious document dated January 16, 1981, in which the late Larry MacDonald, Congressman from Georgia and John Birch Society elder, read some interesting comments regarding LaRouche and his organization into the Congressional Record: "The NCLC," said MacDonald, "is a closed band, but one with its own unique twist that makes it as bizarre among political groupings as a Mobius strip is among geometric figures." This phenomenon of the pot calling the kettle black is typical in the factional fighting among the political cults, not only on the Right, but across the political spectrum. The Right, we should recognize, is not monolithic.
Depending on whom you believe, Larry MacDonald himself is alive (John Judge) or dead (most of the media). The late Mae Brussel, researcher par excellence, in an exposé of MacDonald and his associates published in the February '84 Hustler, made a strong case that Larry MacDonald and KAL 007 were taken out, not by the Russians, but by the CIA because MacDonald, whose neo-Nazi connections had begun to surface, had become a liability to his old friend Ronald Reagan. Be that as it may, mulling over MacDonald's evocation of the image of the Mobius strip regarding LaRouche, I decided that the Mobius strip is an apt geometric metaphor for the whole political spectrum.
http://sonic.net/~doretk/ArchiveARCHIVE/MARK%20EVANS/WhoisthisLaRouche.html
Highlights
Nancy Pelosi in her misguided confusion is thinking about putting into law
recommendations of the monstrous 911-Kane-Hamilton-Zelikow Commission, which
has been totally discredited, because it left out the story of Able Danger, it
suppressed and lied about the meeting of George Tenet, Cofer Black, and Condi
Rice, and it covered up the lies of General Eberhardt and Larry Arnold, the
NORAD and Pentagon generals. There were the Ashcroft-Picard exchanges, and the
NEADS tape sheds new light on the centrality of the NORAD drills. Then there is
the Angel is Next issue, the moment where the invisible government spoke to the
hapless puppet, Bush, in the form of an ultimatum, and Bush turned the
government over to The September Criminals, the new extreme faction that has
remained in power since 911.
The Baker-Hamilton Commission Report
Hamilton sure gets around, he has been on seven or eight commissions, he is the
main cover-up artist for the banker-financier management. James Baker is the
idea man, he was the controller for Bush 41, Baker told Bush 41 what to do. He
ran the White House during the Reagan presidency, moved on to Secretary of the
Treasury, under Reagan, then Secretary of State, under Bush 41. Baker directed
the coup d'etat, when the Republicans stole the 2000 election. Hamilton can
cover up everything going back to Iran-Contra and Watergate for the
finance-oligarchy or invisible government.
http://www.mail-archive.com/cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com/msg06409.html
Operation Mockingbird...
http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.html
ADD DETAILS OF HINCKLEY FAMILY DONATION TO BUSH, CIA MK-ULTRA PROGRAM, CIA "FAMILY JEWELS",
http://www.voxfux.com/articles(closed)/00000013.htm
http://www.nathanielblumberg.com/bush.htm
Friday, May 22, 2009
Ronald Reagan & the CIA
Posted by JASON at 11:32 AM
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