Family Of Secrets- Part 2: Poppy

Last week we ran a synopsis of the first few chapters of Russ Baker's riveting book, Family of Secrets, the fullest story of the Bush dynasty that anyone has been able to piece together. We delved into the first 7 chapters and there have been so many requests for explanantions of the rest of the chapters, that we'll give away another 7 today-- and then the rest tomorrow. The book really is phenomenal and the paperback is inexpensive, so it makes essential reading-- and a great gift.

Chapter 8: Wings for W.

Kennedy’s death made possible LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War, and created business opportunities for the interests that backed both LBJ and the Bushes. But the Bush family’s history of military service, and its support of the war presented a dilemma: how to keep George W. out of the Indochina bloodbath while saving face with their pro-war backers?

After detailing Poppy Bush’s hobby of quietly orchestrating outcomes for those around him (from strategic romances to jobs), Baker shows how strings were pulled to get George W. into the Texas Air National Guard—a safe haven during the Vietnam War-- by pushing him ahead of better-qualified candidates on the official waiting list. Baker then delves into W’s spotty career as a pilot, and the on-going public relations campaign to clean up that problem.

Baker also explores evidence of a particular recklessness and mean streak on Bush’s part, that would reverberate during his presidency. Among these are several previously unreported episodes involving women who were loyal to him-- including a girlfriend compelled to have an illegal abortion.

Notwithstanding his behavior, his father wants him in the “family business,” and, while still training with his Guard unit part-time, he is soon working for an intelligence-connected company run by a family retainer. That this was not intended for public consumption would later become evident: as a candidate, W. preferred that the public wrongly believe that he had never traveled abroad, rather than admit to the foreign travel for this firm.

Baker then cites eyewitnesses on the real reason W. prematurely left his position as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard-- both substance abuse problems and fear of flying may have been involved-- and documents the elaborate cover-up of his shirking of his military obligation. His father sends him to stay out of sight until his military obligation ends, first in an out-of-state political campaign, and then in an inner-city Houston community service program. Later, major news organizations bought a fabricated account of this period. Baker uncovers evidence that Poppy Bush helped engineer the cover-up and then sent his son off to Harvard Business School, far from prying reporters in Texas.

Chapter 9: The Nixonian Bushes

SUMMARY: The back story to the rise of the Bushes: Richard Nixon’s secret obligation to the family, his role in promoting Poppy, and the family’s ultimate betrayal.

DETAIL: George W. Bush most certainly would never have been even an outside prospect for the presidency had not his father been president first. And Poppy might never have been president were it not for Richard Nixon. Nixon appointed the elder Bush to high-profile positions for which he had few qualifications. These promotions filled out Poppy’s resume and propelled him quickly upward. Why did the notoriously unpredictable Nixon, prone to shaking up his team, and privately dubious of Poppy’s mettle, nevertheless stay steadfast in his commitment to Poppy’s well-being? The reason was a secret obligation Nixon owed to the Bushes, dating back three decades.

Richard Nixon was essentially created as a politician in 1946 by financial interests that sought to unseat Congressman Jerry Voorhis, a leading Capitol Hill critic and investigator of banks, investment houses and insurance companies. Poppy’s father Prescott Bush seems likely to have played a role in arranging Nixon’s candidacy. After defeating Voorhis, Nixon would serve the Bushes and the interests they represented faithfully for two decades.

In 1968, the Bushes and their friends pushed Nixon to make Poppy, then just a freshman congressman, his vice presidential nominee. Nixon balked, visibly angering the Bushes. When Nixon attained the presidency, he began asserting his independence from his former patrons in the establishment in multiple ways. Working with Henry Kissinger, he launched extensive secret foreign policy negotiations that excluded and angered members of the military-industrial complex-- that powerful but shadowy entity which President Eisenhower had warned about as he left office in 1961.

Nixon also perturbed the oil industry, represented in the person of Texas congressman Poppy Bush who had-- with the help of his father-- landed a prized seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, where he became known for his doing everything he could to protect valuable tax breaks for the oilmen.

Playing his own devious game, Nixon persuaded Poppy to leave this valuable perch to run for the US Senate from Texas. When Poppy lost, he suspected that Nixon had secretly backed his Democratic opponent. Nixon, however, gave Poppy a consolation prize: UN ambassador.  He also elevated that post to cabinet stature. This had two important consequences for Bush: on the one hand, Poppy now had a front-row seat to White House deliberations on international issues, including oil imports; on the other hand, Poppy’s base of operations was now in New York-- allowing him to distance himself from Washington as the Watergate scandal, which would ultimately destroy Nixon, began to unfold.

Chapter 10: Downing Nixon, Part I: The Setup

SUMMARY: Compelling evidence points to a staggering new interpretation of Watergate: That the same constellation of corporate, military and intelligence elements which removed JFK from power orchestrated the events that forced Richard Nixon to resign.

DETAIL: When burglars are arrested at the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate building, Nixon immediately sees that the crime makes no sense. He does not, however, realize that it is part of a pattern of events to which he himself will be tied.

Of course, Nixon knows he has enemies-- including the right wing of the Republican Party and various business interests, to whom he does not respond with sufficient obeisance. Nixon also has enemies in the shadows. Since the first days of his administration, he, like JFK, has been battling the CIA. Among other things, the Agency balks at turning over records related to the Bay of Pigs invasion—for which he had been the “action officer”  as vice president under Eisenhower. According to Nixon’s top aides, when he spoke to them about seeking information on “the Bay of Pigs thing,” he was actually referring to  the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Nixon was also deeply disturbed by the fact that circumstances had placed him in Dallas the very morning that his old nemesis, JFK, was assassinated in that city. Nixon’s presence there was the result of a request by a businessman with ties to the US-backed secret effort to topple the democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. That businessman, Baker notes, was a Bush family confidant. Nixon was asked to appear in Dallas in connection with a convention, timed for the week of JFK’s motorcade, that would bring thousands of rabidly anti-Castro and anti-Kennedy Pepsi bottlers to Dallas. The US army had taken the peculiar step of donating military vehicles for use in a social activity related to the convention, which resulted in the movement of military trucks in the city on the eve of Kennedy’s arrival. Baker also probes the strong views of the sugar lobby toward the removal of Castro, and Nixon’s own warning to his aides to be wary of that lobby.

Flash forward to 1972. Nixon recognizes that the CIA was involved in the Watergate burglary, that the burglars and their supervisors had been both strongly anti-Kennedy and connected to attempts to overthrow or kill Fidel Castro, and that there were powerful Washington circles eager to prevent any records from surfacing that linked them to the removal of world leaders. Nixon realizes that a very high-stakes game is afoot and that he is the likely intended victim.

However, by November, 1972, the discovery of the Watergate burglary has not caused Nixon any great political problems, and he is reelected in a landslide. In forming a new cabinet, he complies with a request from his UN ambassador George HW Bush that he be brought back to Washington and installed as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Nixon presumably knows nothing about Poppy’s double life with the CIA. In addition, Nixon is unaware that a number of figures connected to CIA elites have been infiltrated into his White House.

Almost immediately, a series of operations unfold, all traceable to the White House, that will end up destroying Nixon. Moreover, the operations are connected  to earlier ones that began well prior to the Watergate burglary, and that also would have badly damaged the president if publicized, but each time, leaks to the press failed to generate sufficient controversy. Even today, some of these operations are not widely recognized as precursors to the Watergate break-in. The elements were always provocative: purported attempts to blackmail Republicans, to obtain sexually embarrassing information on Democrats, and so on.

One such story was the so-called Townhouse Affair, a budding financial scandal that fizzled before it could explode. The best-known, and most damaging to Nixon, was the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. (Ellsberg is the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers which so embarrassed the military leadership by exposing years of lies regarding the purported success of the Vietnam War.)

None of these were actually initiated by Nixon-- in many cases, he was entirely unaware of anything; in a few cases, he appears to have been deliberately given bad advice, goaded to provide broad thematic approval for operations that actually served no real administration interest and were guaranteed to damage him if discovered.

This chapter takes a fresh look at White House counsel John Dean and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who became celebrities because of their roles in the undoing of Richard Nixon. It focuses on their little-known personal ties to the right wing of the Republican party, and to military and intelligence interests unhappy with Nixon and his initiatives, including his “back-channel” diplomacy to de-escalate the arms race and end the Cold War. Baker explores how both men came to be in their positions, and were thus able to play key roles in Nixon’s downfall. Throughout the chapter, we see traces of Poppy Bush’s activities, showing up on John Dean’s call sheets for no apparent reason, establishing personal relationships with White House operatives who set up shadowy operations in Nixon’s name, helping John Dean in efforts to convince Nixon to take the blame for these activities with which he has no connection.

Chapter 11: Downing Nixon, Part II : The Execution

SUMMARY: The operation to remove Nixon goes into high gear; Nixon ultimately is checkmated.

DETAIL: We see the purportedly loyal John Dean turn witness for the prosecution, and discover that the man who informs the Senate of the existence of a White House taping system, Alexander Butterfield, is connected to the CIA.

We learn the extent to which Dean himself, far from being troubled by his conscience about activities occurring around him, was at the very center of the mega-scandal-- encouraging low-level operatives, without Nixon’s knowledge, to participate in illegal activities including the Watergate break-in itself, and fostering elements of a cover-up that he would later blame on Nixon.  

We discover how Nixon’s remarks from several out of hundreds of taped conversations were taken out of context to create the impression of guilt. One is the famous “smoking gun” tape, where in reality Nixon is not calling for a suppression of the Watergate investigation, but rather learning that the CIA is involved and following Dean’s advice. The other is John Dean’s celebrated warning to Nixon about a “Cancer on the presidency”-- a cancer that turns out to have little to do with Nixon, and everything to do with duplicitous men surrounding him.

This chapter also details the elaborate effort, involving Dean and Poppy Bush, to goad the liberal Connecticut Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, a Bush family nemesis, into congressional inquiries that led to Nixon’s resignation.

Other figures who play a role in Nixon’s downfall turn out to have their own intelligence ties-- besides Bush, Dean, Woodward, and Butterfield, these include White House aides Egil Krogh and Richard Moore,  RNC official Jeb Magruder, and even Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a friend of Poppy Bush’s from Texas with his own ties to CIA and to the botched investigation of the JFK assassination. Jaworski, Bush and others are tied to Texas foundations which served as conduits for fund disbursement to secret CIA projects.

Baker also probes the evidence that “Deep Throat” was a fictional creation intended to divert inquiry from the true story of how the damaging anti-Nixon narrative was actually orchestrated.

The disgraced Nixon is replaced by yet another figure connected to the Kennedy assassination story-- Gerald Ford. Ford had been a member of the Warren Commission and played a crucial role in the commission’s single-bullet theory that implicated Oswald, and Oswald alone. One of Ford’s first acts is to move Poppy Bush out of the investigative limelight, sending him off to China as envoy. Once again, Poppy disappears as things are heating up, and reappears elsewhere in a prestigious post for which he lacks qualifications, and propelled upward.

Chapter 12: In from the Cold

SUMMARY: This chapter covers the real reason the Ford administration responded to congressional investigations of the CIA by installing the  purported intelligence neophyte Poppy Bush as Agency director.

DETAIL: While Poppy is in China, revelations of staggering CIA improprieties are published. With congressional inquiries underway, Poppy is recalled from Beijing and made director of the agency. It is yet another appointment for which he seems ill-qualified: Poppy is known only as a likable, lightweight politician with no background in spycraft.

Poppy’s new position is the result of a so-called “Halloween Massacre” in which President Ford, generally considered a moderate, lunges to the Right.  He rolls back Nixon’s policy of rapprochement with the communists, and dramatically increases the power of two hardball conservatives, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, along with a protégé, Paul Wolfowitz. All will become key figures decades later in the George W. Bush administration.

At CIA, Poppy politicizes the intelligence analysis process. His mission is to challenge growing evidence that the Soviet Union is in serious decline, which threatens the interests of defense contractors and hardliners in the military.

Poppy also oversees moves  to restrict further inquiries into the essential nature of the CIA, and to move sensitive operations off the books in order to stymie reform efforts. He also faces growing calls for new inquiries into assassinations of public figures. Meanwhile, the Chilean ex-diplomat Orlando Letelier, an associate of the deposed president Allende, is killed in Washington by a bomb planted by a man with CIA connections.

As investigators for a new House Select Committee on Assassinations begin interviewing witnesses about the events of November 22, 1963, a CIA official urges the Reader’s Digest, long connected with CIA propaganda efforts, to conduct its own  inquiry. Among the people it contacts is Poppy’s old friend, George de Mohrenschildt.

Meanwhile, the now elderly de Mohrenschildt writes to Poppy at CIA headquarters about unknown persons who are threatening him. De Mohrenschildt admits that perhaps he has been indiscreet in talking about Oswald, and asks Bush to “remove the net.” Bush sends him a friendly letter dismissing his concerns. Ford loses his re-election bid to Democrat Jimmy Carter. Poppy, dismissed from his CIA post, returns to Texas and joins a Texas bank with intelligence connections. (Poppy will later claim that he cannot recall what the job entailed.) On the day a House committee investigator arrives to interview de Mohrenschildt about JFK’s death, the Russian émigré dies from a shotgun blast to the head. It is determined to be suicide.

Chapter 13: Poppy’s Proxy and the Saudis

SUMMARY: The untold story of how the Bush circle arranged and benefited from a shotgun marriage between the United States government and the Saudi royal family. 

DETAIL: When Poppy Bush assumed the CIA directorship, some curious events took place in Texas. James Bath, an airplane broker who had served in George W. Bush’s Air National Guard unit and doubled as a kind of “minder” for W., received a call from a Saudi tycoon. Bath would later claim the call came out of the blue. In any case, Bath was soon in business with two of the most powerful Saudi clans. One of them was the Bin Ladens.

Was this an assignment from Poppy to a reliable family operative, and/or a reward for Bath’s help in keeping W. out of trouble?  Back when Bath  and W. served together in the Guard, Bath had stopped flying at the same time as W. and this became a cover for W’s grounding. Bath was an ace with no problems on his record, and it appears that he fell on his sword as a favor to the powerful family that had taken him into its fold.

The Saudi venture looks improbable on its face. Bath had no real business experience to commend him to the billionaires. Quickly, though, he was paired in the venture with another pilot, this one an MBA. Bath became affluent. But what was in it for the Saudis?

For an answer, we travel through a condensed history of the relationship between the Saudis, America, and the oil industry. Key points include the US commitment to protect the Saudi royal family from the constant efforts to depose them. Poppy Bush figures prominently in this.
Bath seems to be an intermediary in a complex shotgun marriage in which the US ramps up protection, and the Saudis agree to run petrodollars through Texas. Some  funds benefit the Bush circle; others support the Iran-Contra supply lines and other unauthorized covert operations.  Bath essentially fronts for all of this.

Chapter 14: Poppy’s Web

The bank that employs Poppy during these years is typical of institutions in the Bush orbit. It has ties to powerful oil industry figures, to the Saudis, and to figures connected to the Kennedy assassination. Later, during the savings and loan scandal, the bank will fail.  The government will bail it out during Poppy’s presidency.

Poppy works hard to keep his distance from Jim Bath, but Bath’s extensive off-the-books intelligence operation is riddled with Bush operatives.

A virtually unknown aspect of the criminal bank, BCCI, is its ties to the CIA and to Poppy Bush-- and its role in damaging the political fortunes of President Jimmy Carter, a bête noir of the CIA and of the elder Bush. Carter eventually loses his bid for re-election to Ronald Reagan and his running mate, Poppy Bush. 

Much more was at stake in the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran than is generally known. The Rockefellers were desperate to hang on to the billions deposited in their Chase bank by the Shah’s government. The hostage crisis lasted for the entire year of Carter’s re-election battle and ended when Reagan and Bush were inaugurated.  Coincidentally or not, it helped ensure that those Chase funds would not be returned to Iran’s revolutionary government. The Shah’s backers will later show up in businesses tied to a young George W. Bush. When the Shah’s son is evading hit men, he will hide out in the business run by Bush operative Jim Bath.
 
Chapter 15: The Handoff

Despite his image as a spoiled goof-off,  George W. Bush was deep into the political and intelligence machinations of his father. The strange companies that W. ran or participated in bear the markings of covert intelligence activities.

The first of these was an international business that W. doesn’t talk much about. The second came over a summer during his years  at Harvard Business School. W. was supposed to be serving out his part-time Air National Guard obligation. Instead he showed up in Alaska to work at a firm whose owner admits it did intelligence-related work. This job never made it onto W.’s  thin resume.

After graduation, W. followed his father’s example, and headed to Texas, supposedly to seek his fortune in the oil industry. The substantial funds that poured into his first venture did not seem to come from the people who signed the checks.  In any case, the ventures failed to make money for the investors, whoever they really were.

George W. took time out from business to mount his first Congressional campaign. Again, vast sums poured in, from family friends around the country and from  financial, oil, military and intelligence interests. With the campaign underway, W. met and quickly wed Laura Welch, whose claim that she did not know W. during his troubled National Guard days seems in doubt. 

After losing the election, Bush returned to the oil industry in a venture financed in part by figures connected to the Saudis and the Shah of Iran. When this venture too failed, he was rescued by wealthy Cincinnati businessmen, one of whom he will as president appoint to his foreign intelligence advisory board.

Tomorrow Next week we'll look at the last third of the book.

Family Of Secrets-- All Your Worst Fears About The Bushes Were True

I don't know which single book I liked most in 2009. The DWT Bookstore has pages of my faves-- the ones Ken and I are always referring to-- from Idiot America, Nixonland, Dateline Havana, Bloggers on the Bus and Turkmeniscam to The Progressive Revolution, The Eliminationists and, of course, Russ Baker's Family of Secrets, a 600 page thriller that digs more deeply into the Bush Family than anyone has ever done. The paperback is now in its third edition and I've been urging Russ to work with someone on doing a synopsis that we could use to turn people on who are intimidated by books with hundreds of pages. Yesterday he finally sent me something that can be used here at DWT. He starts with the questions many of us have asked over and over again: "How did the spectacularly unqualified George W. Bush come to be the President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world? What lay behind his improbable rise and disastrous policies? Was there more to his controversial reign than the pundits’ standard bromides?"

These are the questions that launched Russ Baker into five years of research. The answers, based on hundreds of interviews, including with persons close to the Bush family who had never talked with reporters, proved astounding.

Not only, Baker found, had we missed the very essence of W., but also of his father and grandfather and in fact the entire clan. Moreover, behind the secrets of the Bushes and their circle lay larger ones that cast decades of American history in a new and revealing light.

The Bushes have been portrayed as everything from incompetents to ideologues to outright crooks. Many of their transgressions  are now well known-- from grandfather Prescott’s involvement with Nazi-era financiers to W.’s initiatives that weakened Americans’ constitutional rights at every turn.

But Baker’s research took him to far deeper levels of insight into the American power machine, as it unearthed material of the sort more commonly identified with shady foreign regimes or Hollywood thrillers than with the still-hallowed U.S. presidency.

Baker explained this in a post-publication interview: “As I discovered, there was an entire hidden stratum of truth underlying the rise of the Bushes-- a truth that, if not reckoned with, threatens to derail the reforms we all hope are on the horizon.”  
 
The copious evidence Baker assembles points to one jarring conclusion: that the parade of faces in the Bush White House were in fact bit players in a long-playing “shadow government” establishment that continues to influence events regardless of who-- or what party-- occupies the White House. Power cliques in this country, it turns out, function much as they do elsewhere in the world. Here, however, they are better hidden, in part-- paradoxically-- because we think our society is so open that hidden centers of power could not exist.

There is a tendency in America to tar anyone who sees larger configurations and coalescences of interests, irrespective of the quality of their research, as "conspiracy nuts." Yet the revelations and lessons of Family of Secrets come at us on practically every page, and with sourcing and documentation that have stood up to scrutiny. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse into something deeply embedded in our body politic, and profoundly dangerous to our democratic traditions.

 
Below are brief summaries of the first seven chapters, hopefully enough to mkae you want to buy a copy of the whole thing.

Chapter 1: How Did Bush Happen?

Baker explains how he came to write this book, and the extent to which his discoveries surprised him and forced him to re-examine popular assumptions about George W. Bush, his father George H.W. Bush-- and, ultimately, about how power in America works. He began with a sense that behind the George W. Bush presidency lay “something more consequential and pervasive-- well beyond the missteps, overreaching, and palace intrigues one finds in all presidential administrations.”

“Above all, the deception at the root of the decision to invade Iraq and the disastrous occupation that followed only confirmed my feeling that the assumption of power by Bush pointed to something deeper than a callow and entitled president surrounded by enablers and Iagos with dark schemes.”

The inquiry into W. quickly leads to W’s father. “To my surprise, I began to see that understanding George H. W. Bush (Senior, or Poppy, as his relatives and friends call him) was really the key to understanding the son-- and not just in the simplistic, psychoanalytical terms to which some commentators have resorted.” Despite the conventional narrative of a father-son rivalry, the two were basically members of a single team with a deep bench and a long, if little-known, track record. It was this team that put W. into play: “George Bush the younger was essentially cleaned up, reconditioned, and then ‘managed’ into becoming his father’s successor in the White House.”
 
After recounting some of the more egregious acts of George W.’s administration, he writes: “None of these developments looks so surprising when one considers the untold story of what came before. This book is about that secret history, and the people and institutions that created it.”  

Baker explains the inherent paradox that defines the Bush clan: “[W]hile serving forces that operate best in the shadows, the Bushes craved for themselves a place in the spotlight. To get what they wanted and to do what they felt they must, they had to live what amounts to double lives. Even as the Bushes gained fame and power, they managed to somehow avoid careful scrutiny… So adept were they at this game that they are almost never mentioned in their colleagues’ writings… It is almost as if this clan never existed until the moment it occupied the White House.” 

Chapter 2: Poppy’s Secret

In the first of Family of Secrets’ many dramatic scenes, an entertainment reporter stumbles upon an obscure declassified document that reveals George H.W. “Poppy” Bush’s secret: Long before he was appointed CIA director under Gerald Ford in 1976, and labeled as an “intelligence virgin,” Poppy Bush already was connected to the CIA. More particularly, he had been working with extremist Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Poppy tried to ascribe the reference found by the reporter to “another George Bush.” But other documents indicate that he had been involved in super-secret covert domestic operations some two decades before his directorship, and that his 1950s offshore drilling company was a cover operation. Baker bolsters this discovery with evidence that Poppy Bush was engaged in intelligence work as early as World War II. Further, he provides background on the role of banking circles around Poppy’s father, Prescott, in creating America’s modern intelligence establishment.

Chapter 3: Viva Zapata

This chapter deals with the Bush family’s ties to the origins of the American intelligence establishment. We learn how the Bushes got into the “family business” of munitions, finance and intelligence work. And we take a behind-the-scenes look at Dresser Industries, an oilfield services firm through which the Bushes got into defense contracting and the petroleum industry.

After his Naval Intelligence work in World War II, Poppy goes to Yale, where the early CIA is busy recruiting-- particularly through secret societies like the Bush family favorite, Skull and Bones. Then we see how Poppy’s early days as an apprentice in oil and defense contractor affiliates of his family’s investment bank coincided with the growth of an oil-defense-intelligence hub in Texas. This led to Poppy Bush’s decision to leave the East Coast behind and move to the Lone Star State.

Meanwhile, US senator Prescott Bush and his former business partners are powers behind the throne during the Eisenhower presidency, a relationship sharpened by their close ties to Ike’s new CIA director, Allen Dulles, and Prescott’s personal role as a senator in supervising assassination activities abroad. In this context, it becomes apparent why powerful Washington figures, including the owner of the Washington Post, enamored of the spy apparatus and transfixed by the Cold War struggles, step up and fund Poppy’s obscure little oil company.
 
As the evidence builds that Poppy’s tiny offshore drilling outfit was an intelligence cover, we see how the Bush circle began moving against Fidel Castro after he expropriated their Cuban holdings.

Chapter 4: Where Was Poppy?

Poppy Bush has claimed not to remember where he was on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. That’s odd, since almost every other American alive at that time can recall where he or she was. Poppy’s amnesia become stranger still-- or perhaps, more understandable-- when declassified documents show (1) that he was working in Dallas for the CIA at the time, and (2) that he called the FBI from a town near Dallas at the very hour Kennedy’s death was being announced.

In that call, Bush Sr. introduced himself as a private citizen, and offered a supposed tip about a possible suspect-- a man who turned out to be innocent, and to have ties back to Bush himself.  Though the tip was a red herring, it served a clear purpose: to establish that Poppy was not in Dallas at the time of his call. Baker exhaustively explores Bush’s activities that week and day, which included spending time with a top CIA expert on removing government leaders. He also dissects a peculiar Nov. 22 letter purportedly written by Barbara Bush and published by her decades later, that explains-- too artfully by half-- the couple’s movements at the time.

Baker reveals the deep animus toward President John Kennedy harbored by the Bushes and their friend, CIA director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster.  And he describes the dramatic, sudden changes in the lives of both Prescott Bush and his son in the wake of that firing.

Chapter 5: Oswald’s Friend

In 1976, a letter arrives for CIA director George H. W. Bush. His aides assume it is from a crackpot-- the writer claims that some kind of net is closing in on him, and attributes this to his having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Bush acknowledges to his perplexed staff that he actually knows the man, who is an anti-communist Russian émigré named George de Mohrenschildt. Poppy Bush confirms in an internal memo that de Mohrenschildt did indeed have some connection to Oswald-- but says he cannot recall the details of the Oswald connection. This is strange, stranger still for the head of the US spy agency.

Bush writes back to de Mohrenschildt that he has nothing to fear. Yet within a year the man is dead from a shotgun blast to the head. The official verdict is suicide. Baker begins a lengthy exploration of de Mohrenschildt’s ties to the Bush family, and to oil interests generally, dating back many decades. And he details the previously unknown military-oil-intelligence pipeline that brought anti-communist Russians out of the Soviet Union and settled them in Dallas, where they were plugged into business and society at the highest level. 

We learn of de Mohrenschildt’s involvement with lucrative oil investment schemes in Cuba that were upset by Fidel Castro’s revolution, and his ties to what is described as a “private CIA” serving the interests of wealthy Americans abroad. Also revealed are De Mohrenschildt’s links to many figures identified in one way or another with the JFK assassination story-- from Abe Zapruder, whose footage of the assassination became a crucial piece of the conventional narrative of that day, to the leader of a military intelligence unit whose members included many members of the Dallas police department, and whose associate forced himself into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade.
 
Chapter 6: The Hit

In this chapter Baker identifies the large array of powerful interests who were furious at John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the attorney general-- and explains why these interests were glad to see an end to Camelot. Central to this story is JFK’s feud with the CIA and especially Allen Dulles.  Another important element is the threat posed by the Kennedys to the oil depletion allowance – the foundation of much of the oil barons’ wealth.The Pentagon also had reasons to want the Kennedys out of power. In revealing how Kennedy’s replacement, Lyndon Johnson, was tied to the same interests as the Bushes, Baker lays bare the close links between Johnson and the Bush family.

In weaving an alternative narrative of the Kennedy assassination, Baker details Allen Dulles’s activities after he was fired by Kennedy and relates them to Oswald’s background with intelligence and the military that suggests that his “defection” to the USSR was part of a US-run “false defector program.” There are indications that Oswald was actually doing intelligence work at the time he took his job in the Texas School Book Depository.

Poppy Bush’s old friend George de Mohrenschildt and his wife began to “manage” Lee Harvey Oswald’s life in the year prior to the assassination. Was this part of an elaborate attempt to focus attention on Oswald, and away from prominent Dallas figures and the CIA group? Baker also reports how de Mohrenschildt was moved offshore prior to November 1963, thereby minimizing his direct connection (and that of Bush and others) to the events of Nov. 22nd.

Baker unpacks the evidence that Oswald was falsely implicated in the assassination to cover for the real culprits. He reveals De Mohrenschildt’s ties to the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Oswald purportedly fired the fatal shots. Baker shows how Oswald was guided into his job in the building, and reveals the military connections of the company that hired him. Finally, we see these key figures, all tied to super-secret military and intelligence activities, converging on November 22. In summarizing the copious facts that place Poppy and his circle much closer to the assassination than has ever been revealed, he asks the simple question: Can all this be coincidence?
 
Chapter 7: After Camelot

Beyond the outlines of a sophisticated operation behind Kennedy’s death, Baker’s research turns up new indications of something more enduring and hence perhaps even more unsettling. Namely, an ongoing effort to dissuade the public from connecting the dots and to perpetuate the increasingly untenable official story: that Oswald, operating alone, killed Kennedy.

We start with the role of Bush associates in the aftermath of the assassination and the ensuing investigation. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of Jack Crichton, an oil industry operative with an intelligence background who was, along with Poppy Bush, part of the cadre at the top of the small Texas GOP. 

Crichton was also head of a Dallas-based military intelligence unit tied to the Russian exile community. His role included controlling Marina Oswald’s translated comments to police, which were actually modified to implicate her husband. This circle used Oswald’s purported ties to the Soviets and Cubans to set off a chain of events that nearly precipitated a missile attack on Cuba.

Baker reveals how the discredited Warren Commission was practically run by Bush family friend Allen Dulles, the CIA director deposed by JFK. It was staffed almost exclusively by figures with ties to the CIA, the military-industrial complex, and right-wing business interests arrayed against the Kennedys. This explains the Commission’s transparent effort to ensure that their interviews of de Mohrenschildt would not lead back to powerful figures. De Mohrenschildt himself expressed bewilderment at the Commission’s feeble questioning of him.

In the fall of 1963, Poppy’s reason for traveling around the state was a futile bid for a US Senate seat. Having lost, he gets to Washington soon enough-- elected in 1966 to the House of Representatives. He quickly takes advantage of his official capacity to travel to Vietnam with the ex CIA-man who helped him launch his earlier intelligence-cover offshore oil business. Declassified documents show the man requesting that the Agency arrange cover for his trip with Bush.

It gets even better. You should consider picking up a copy. Here's a link to the paperback.

Just as a potential case for legal misconduct in the Bush DoJ bubbles to the surface, ex-regimistas whine, "But you can't investigate the regimistas!"

In this segment from last night's Rachel Maddow Show, Michael Isikoff tells Rachel: "About a year ago, the head of something called the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the Justice Department's ethics watchdog unit, disclosed to Congress that it had been investigating whether or not the authorship of [the 2002-3 torture] memos met the legal standards, professional standards, of Justice Department lawyers. This has enormous consequences."

"One of Bush and Cheney's most audacious capers, as far as I'm concerned, was deciding that they could get away with doing illegal stuff by simply having administration lawyers say that illegal stuff wasn't illegal anymore."

-- Rachel Maddow, introducing the above segment

by Ken

The OPR report, Isikoff went on to say, was essentially complete by the end of last year but met with serious objections from then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip. ("It could not be learned precisely what the grounds of Mukasey's objections were," he writes in his Newsweek report, adding that "neither he, Filip nor Mukasey's former chief of staff responded to requests for comment.) The report hasn't been presented yet to new AG Eric Holder, but assuming it is, Isikoff says in the clip,

We understand that if the report goes forward as it was presented to Mukasey, it recommends that the report be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action against the lawyers, which would be a huge embarrassment, obviously. It finds that the entire legal edifice of Bush counter-terrorism policy was based on, not just shoddy legal analysis, but unprofessional and potentially unethical legal analysis.

"The lawyers" are three former senior members of the crucial Office of Legal Counsel: our old friend John "Mr. Torture" Yoo, former Assistant AG and OLC head Jay Bybee (now a federal judge), and later OLC head Steven Bradbury. And according to Isikoff, the report goes into great detail as to how the memos were written, the suggestion being that they resulted from back-and-forth with the White House in which the Bush regimes wishes were drafted into legal opinion.

You have to wonder whether David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey (identified as "Washington lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush"), authors of a preposterous op-ed in today's Washington Post called "A Truth Commission? The Danger in Democrats' Rush to Investigate," knew when they pitched their piece that Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (now also MSNBC's Michael Isikoff, as we learn in the above segment) was about to blow the lid on this particular scandal.

What Rivkin and Casey are peddling is the seemingly commonsensical notion that policy differences, no matter how extreme, are no reason to go hunting for crimes in the activities of a previous administration. The answer to this is so obvious -- if you really don't know the difference between making and implementing policy and breaking the law, you really shouldn't talk publicly about either -- that they have to buttress their argument with a bunch of shaky constitutional arguments as to why a "truth commission" would be either jurisdictionally hamstrung or outright illegal. It's at awkward moments like this that right-wingers suddenly become connoisseurs of the fine points of constitutional separation of powers.

Of course this is all bullshit too. Not that some of the stated separation-of-powers concerns might not be real. But those are things you work out in the structuring of such a commission, assuming that such a commission is even the way to go. Maybe we should just convene bunch of grand juries to sort out which portions of the Bush regime's eight-year-long crime wave are prosecutable?

Come on! Rivkin and Casey don't give a hoot about constitutional niceties. They didn't start by asking, gee, I wonder if a "truth commission" is constitutionally permissible. They went looking for every angle from which they could claim it isn't. It is, in other words, the modus operandi of any defense attorney, whose concern isn't whether the client is guilty but what lines of argument and legal niceties and loopholes can be marshaled to derail the prosecution's case.

Rivkin and Casey want us to think that, ho-hum, this is what always want to do in politics: seek revenge on the other guys who used to be in power. But no, we mustn't allow that. Why, it would undermine the whole system of American government!

Except that, as they surely know, that's not what's happening at all. The problem is that the Bush-Cheney regime actually set out to undermine the whole system of American government. We know they succeeded to a terrifying an extent. Just how great an extent is one of the things we need to learn, for the most obvious practical reasons:

* If we don't know what happened, how can we fix it?

* And if we don't make the malefactors answer for their criminal behavior, how can we possibly hope to prevent it from happening again?

There is one obvious reason why the criminal-investigation problem is so severe after eight years of the Bush regime: the fundamentally criminal mindset of the masterminds of the Bush-Cheney regime. They seem to have gone beyond disregarding the law. In every area of policy making and implementation, they went out of their way to break every law they humanly could, in apparent adherence to the Nixon Doctrine that if the president does it, it's not illegal. For former Vice President Cheney in particular it seems to have been a matter of principle to flaunt the law-flouting, as necessary to him for life as breathing.

A related but perhaps less obvious reason why the situation now is so different is that throughout the executive branch the Bush regimistas did such a bang-up job of demolishing the built-in mechanisms for governmental self-policing, notably the network of inspectors general supposedly keeping tabs on every agency of the federal government. It's an inherently dicey business, trusting an organization to police itself. The president appoints the IGs, after all. That's already one strike against their "independence." Beyond that, an administration determined to keep control of the IGs and other investigators probably can develop a smorgasbord of ways of stifling them, and in the extreme case that you're left with some self-destructive nutjob who doesn't understand that the fix is in, well, there are lots of ways of making sure their reports never see the light of day.

One of the things we need to know is who did what to subvert the executive-branch watchdog institutions, again in order to repair them and try to protect them from future interference.

Let Rivkin and Casey conclude their sinister babbling in rhetorical high gear, complete with veiled threats:

Attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad, however much one disagrees with their policy choices while in office, is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery. As the history of the late, unlamented independent counsel statute taught, once a Pandora's box is opened, its contents can wreak havoc equally across the political and party spectrum. If, for example, al-Qaeda is nothing more than a criminal conspiracy -- as some have claimed for many years -- President Obama's charge sheet has already been started. By authorizing continued Predator missile attacks against al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has directly targeted those "civilians" with deadly force. That is a war crime.

Obama and the Democratic Congress are entitled to revise and reject any or all of the Bush administration's policies. But no one is entitled to hound political opponents with criminal prosecution, whether directly or through the device of a commission, and those who support such efforts now may someday regret the precedent it sets. Claims that the Bush administration abused presidential powers have been thoroughly reviewed by several congressional committees, and the Justice Department is capable of considering whether any criminal charges are appropriate. If H.R. 104 or a similar bill is passed by Congress, Obama should nip in the bud this recipe for a continuing political vendetta and veto the legislation.

Can two "Washington lawyers" really be this obtuse? For one thing, as Jonathan Turley has been screaming for months now with both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, when it comes to the war crime of torture, we don't even have a choice of whether to prosecute. We are required to by a host of international treaties.

But with regard to the full range of criminal behavior we already know was committed by the Bush regimistas, like the blatant politicization of the DoJ and numerous other government agencies, what Rivkin and Casey are saying is, we don't care what crimes were committed. Do most Americans really feel that way?

#

White Man Speak With Forked Tongue

By Noah
 
As that glorious day when Commander-in-Thief George W. Bush exits fast approaches, we have seen his dervishes of spin go out across the land with their pathetic, transparent list of White House legacy polishing lies that only those most in denial about the wretched effects of the Bush debacle could possibly adhere to. Notice that I didn't say believe because anyone that is not 100% delusional, based in reality, lying through their clenched teeth or simply completely brain damaged could buy into the tide of utter crap that we have been hearing from these current day morlocks. The question is: Which is George W. Bush? 

Sure, we know he's a pathological liar and probably has been for his entire life. However, evidence exists that points to an all of the above scenario regarding the brain that our country has been forcibly hitched to by a corrupt Supreme Court during the last eight years of national nightmare. The Bush appearances of this past week were the crescendo, the ultimate, the cherry on the top. First we had the press conference that even my conservative hometown tabloids described as "wacky" and "baffling". Baffling and wacky, yes; surprising, no. Then, I heard that on Thursday he would address the nation! Oh, man. It just gets weirder and weirder. "Hello, nation!" Quick, someone send the first goofball a bag of pretzels, I thought, and let's be done with it! Eat the pretzels, Georgie. Eat the pretzels, preferably alone.

In my mind, I kept seeing him at his desk in the oval office, looking very disheveled with about 4 days growth of beard and several empty liquor and pill bottles tipped over on his desk as the cameras came on. Now, as a general rule, my TV does not receive Bush broadcasts, just as it only turns to CNNFOX and the like when I'm looking for evidence of propaganda or feeling really perverse. We also have a rule in my house that we keep our shoes on when Bush shows up on the telly. Herewith are my impressions and my running commentary that I jotted down as El Heinousio appeared and proceeded to murder the language and maul credulity one last time. God, imagine if some little kids somewhere saw TV for the first time and this is what they saw. There would be no saving them.
 
1. First of all, who are you, Mr. So-called President, to use the words 'moral clarity'? Oh the irony! Moral obfuscation and habitual lying are more accurate when discussing your legacy. You keep saying that history will restore your reputation while, on the other hand, you tell us that there's nothing that needs to be restored, that you are a gift from God. I've heard of being the Queen of denial and I've heard of 'defense mechanisms' and 'escape mechanisms'. You have no hidey-hole in this life, in this world to go to where the consequences of your actions can't find you but, taking refuge in a future neither you nor anyone else will see, breaks new psychological ground. I doubt that even John Gotti thought of that one. Future doctoral candidates will be the only people who will ever give thanks to you, unless you count Osama (for letting him go and for helping him recruit more crazies) and those who have benefited from your largess at the expense of the U.S. Treasury.
  
2. No attacks since 9/11? What about the anthrax mailings? Oh, that's right. That was probably the government itself. Sen. Leahy still wants to know who tried to kill him. What a coincidence that the mailings just happened to have arrived as the "Patriot Act" was coming to a vote and Leahy was skeptical of the bill. A lot of suckers bought it in 2004, not so many now. What took them so long? I don't know. The misplaced desire to believe, I guess. 
 

 
I guess I could also call Eric Rudolph and what he did a terrorist attack but then, you and he tend to be on the same page, on his issue.
 
3. First invasion of America? Gee, I would think the Brits invading Washington and burning down the White House was pretty bad and counts as an invasion! I also know that President Madison led troops against the Brits himself. And, Dolly Madison took the portrait of George Washington with her as she fled. What would you do in similar circumstances? What would you take? "Laura, bring the liquor cabinet! Where's my BIG BOOK OF LIES? Quick, let's get to the undisclosed location!"
 
4. And what about you completely dropping the ball leading up yo 9/11, even after you were repeatedly warned? You keep blaming Clinton (who was one of the people who warned you). I guess, by that logic, we should blame your daddy for the attacks on the WTC in February of 1993, shortly after he left office. You OK with that, genius boy? 
 
5. You spoke of regretting that there weren't any WMDs in Iraq. Yes, I guess this once I can believe you. You probably do regret it. There not being any removes one of your contrived excuses for invading the place. But, you know what I think of when you mention not finding WMDs? I remember you joking about not finding them while tens of thousands of people, including our soldiers, were being maimed and killed. You sure are one damn funny asshole!
 
6. The inauguration? I hear that you are being flown by copter to Barack Obama's inauguration. Is that because at your inauguration, protesters started to break through the security line, your limo had to speed up, guards' guns were drawn, and your limo was covered with eggs by the time it got to the dais? None of this was shown on TV, of course. Instead, we got nothing but happy-happy views of better placed pro-Bush supporters as soon as it looked like all hell might break loose and your car might get turned over.
 
7. You say that your Medicare prescription drug plan is bringing peace of mind to seniors. I know this is one of the current Repug talking points but please explain. You can explain your legislation, can't you? Maybe I should just consider your twisted definition of 'peace'.
 
8. Why is Hank the Grifter Paulson (former head of Goldman-Sachs) handing out our taxpayer cash to his Wall Street criminal buddies with no strings attached just like Cheney gave no-bid taxpayer cash to Halliburton? And, don't go expecting me to believe Bernie Madoff was the only one of his kind and that there aren't even bigger slight of hand artists among your base of contributors on Wall Street. Unlike Madoff, they get the cover of their institutions. Is he just a sacrificial lamb? An example of the sacrifices even Obama says we have to make; a bit of raw meat for the masses? Maybe we should keep Gitmo open for a while. After all, we spent a lot of money on training people in waterboarding techniques. Hey Wall Street! Come on down! You like the Caribbean, don't you?

So, when will some arrests be made on Wall Street? You say you have "kept us safe." Have you kept us safe from Wall Street terrorists who are putting a gun to our heads? I know it's a lot of tough questions but please elucidate. Time will be granted for you to look up the word "elucidate."
 
9. What drugs enable Laura to stay married to you?
 
10. I believe I heard you use the phrase "enjoyed working with the media" or words to that effect in your recent press conference. Not surprising, since they seem to have enjoyed helping you out, too. In a better world, they would be something other than an American version of Pravda.
 

 
Of course, we don't get comments like this in the MSM. Instead, we get smarmy slimebags like Larry King fawning and drooling all over Dubya and Laura on his show, verbally masturbating Dubya while probably thinking of his neighbor's german shepherd that he allows to mount him every morning before he picks up the paper on his doorstep ("That's a good doggie. What advice on the world do you have for me today? Have you ever been dressed up in suspenders? I will always do your bidding. Where did you learn how to speak English so well? Do you know my friend Lou Dobbs?").
 
11. Finally, if your "Mission Accomplished" banner refers to your devastating economic meltdown, your disastrous war for oil money and war profits, being a divider not a uniter, magically creating a $1.2 Trillion deficit out of a surplus, ushering in the biggest redistribution of wealth upwards that we've ever seen, escalating the class warfare on the middle and working classes, gutting the FDA to the point where e.coli infested food kills Americans, relaxing enforcement of mining safety regulations that led to dead miners, tearing up that damn "quaint" Constitution, and your dropping the ball on everything from Al Qeada to Katrina, all I can say in summation is Heckuva job, Bushie. Now you and your gang of thieves and cronies can go straight to hell, immediately. We're still cleaning up the mess of the Civil War. The mess you're smirking about will probably take as long.

Getting To The Bottom Of Bush Regime Perfidy-- H.R. 104

Congressional Dems need more fighters like John Conyers

In looking into why speakers bureau executives feel that Bush, unlike other past presidents, would be worth very little on the open market, we came across a long list of Bush misspeaks. There's one I haven't been able to get out of my mind since he first uttered it on May 12th of last year: "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."

Yesterday Jacob Weisberg addressed that question over at Slate: The Enigma In Chief-- We Still Don't Know How Or Why Bush Made The Key Decisions Of His Administration. Weisberg points to his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terrorism and the financial and economic policies he put in place that led directly to the massive financial crisis the country, actually the world, is dealing with. Bush, Cheney and Rove claim history will judge Bush/them more kindly than contemporary critics. Impossible?

We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush's contemporaries, don't yet understand it ourselves. The Bush administration has had startling success in one area-- namely keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press, and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job at keeping their doings hidden for eight years.

Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq. When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein? What were his real reasons? What roles did various figures around him-- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice-- play in the actual decision? Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception or of self-deception on their part?

And it isn't only Weisberg and other journalists who are eager to get to the bottom of things. You may not have heard of H.R. 104 yet. The Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) introduced it last week, and it immediately garnered 10 co-sponsors, Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Rick Boucher (D-VA), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Jerrod Nadler (D-NY), Bobby Scott (D-VA), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL). The bill would establish a national commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties. One intent would be to get to the bottom of some of the questions posed by Weisberg and others who don't think the best way to insure against more Bush-Cheney-like behavior is to give them a pat on the back and wish them well.

Obama very much wants to let bygones be bygones and move along with his own agenda. He's not appointing a special prosecutor to look into the myriad crimes committed by the Bush Regime. Presidents always have a vested interest in moving on and it should surprise no one that Obama would rather sweep 8 years of Bush Regime crime under the carpet and move on with his own programs. If the former regimistas are charged with crimes, that will dominate all political debate and the mass media. His line on predictable line on Bush (from his appearance this morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos): "[W]e need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Yesterday Dalia Lithwick presented a different perspective in a very powerful NY Times OpEd:

Those who say that there should be no investigation or prosecution of senior officials who authorized torture and warrant-less surveillance rarely even bother offering legal justifications. They argue that the Obama administration has more urgent problems to contend with. They insist that any such process would devolve into partisan backbiting from which this country could never recover. And they insist, as did Attorney General Michael Mukasey in early December, that there is no basis on which to prosecute the architects of torture and wiretapping policies because each was acting to “protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful.”

Others-- including unnamed officials on the Obama transition team-- have already claimed that there is simply no political will for criminal prosecutions, or even a truth commission.

...Nobody is looking for a series of public floggings. The blueprints for government accountability look nothing like witch hunts. They look like legal processes that have served us for centuries. And, as the Armed Services Committee report makes clear, we already know an enormous amount about what happened to take us down the road to torture and eavesdropping. The military has commissioned at least three investigative reports about the descent into abusive interrogation. Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has compiled what he believes to be sufficient evidence to try senior Bush administration officials for war crimes. More previously secret memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were released just last week.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that the first step will be a thorough determination of what has occurred. To that end, this week the House Judiciary Committee chairman, John Conyers Jr., introduced legislation for a panel to investigate the “broad range” of policies pursued by the Bush administration. Such a commission would not constitute a criminal investigation, but it would not preclude one either.

Some commentators have suggested that any such truth commission should promise immunity or a pardon in exchange for truthful testimony, but I believe that if it becomes clear that laws were broken, or that war crimes were committed, a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate further. The Bush administration made its worst errors in judgment when it determined that the laws simply don’t apply to certain people. If we declare presumptively that there can be no justice for high-level government officials who acted illegally then we exhibit the same contempt for the rule of law.

It’s not a witch hunt simply because political actors are under investigation. The process of investigating and prosecuting crimes makes up the bricks and mortar of our prosecutorial system. We don’t immunize drug dealers, pickpockets or car thieves because holding them to account is uncomfortable, difficult or divisive. We don’t protest that “it’s all behind us now” when a bank robber is brought to trial.

And America tends to survive the ugliness of public reckonings, from Nixon to Whitewater to the impeachment hearings, because for all our cheerful optimism, Americans fundamentally understand that nobody should be above the law. As the chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, warned: “Law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”

The determination-- and even viciousness-- with which the most partisan of the GOP Senate caucus is attacking Obama's Attorney General designee, Eric Holder, is to serve notice that they will broker no investigations into the Bush Regime under any circumstances. Miss McConnell has served notice that they will virtually rubber stamp the rest of the nominees and that it is Holder's scalp they will go after.

It's mostly all going to be a big show, and primarily to discredit Holder and sow distrust of him with the public-- just in case he tries to do anything to pursue the kind of crime they live to protect. But because Reid seriously bungled the seating of Roland Burris (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN), Democrats may actually need a Republican vote on the Judiciary Committee to win approval for Holder. And Holder isn't the only Obama legal beagle the far right extremists are trying to discredit in advance. They're even more frightened of Dawn Johnsen, who Obama picked to run the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets the law for the entire executive branch. It isn't difficult to see why the fear her.

Ms. Johnsen accuses Mr. Yoo of "seeking maximum flexibility -- that is, the ability to use the most extreme methods possible without risking criminal liability -- in interrogations of suspected al Qaeda operatives." She means this as a condemnation. But this in fact is the OLC's job -- to explore the legal boundaries of vague statutes and treaties to define where lawful interrogation ends and torture begins. You can debate that Mr. Yoo went too far, as Mr. Goldsmith later did when the Bush Administration withdrew the opinion. But Mr. Yoo was acting in good faith in response to the CIA's request for legal clarity, while leaving the policy choices to the war fighters.

And that's where Ms. Johnsen's premises are most dangerous. "In considering whether a proposed action is lawful," she writes, "the proper OLC inquiry is not simply whether the executive branch can get away with it," in the sense of writing opinions that can "withstand judicial review." She sees the OLC staff not as legal technicians working on behalf of the President but as a policy outfit free to quash Presidential actions with which it happens to disagree.

In case you thought it might be easy to hold the Bush Crime Family to account for their crimes . . .

Of course the Nuremberg trials were derided as a sham, as mere "victors' justice." The Allied powers claimed to be setting precedent for applying principles of international law. Ha, we're such kidders!

by Ken

Just yesterday, you may recall, I was asking, "Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney?" Now I wasn't speaking only of their war crimes, but certainly those are at the top of the list for which some kind of formal reckoning is needed, both as a matter of justice and as a lesson and warning to the people who follow them in their offices.

This morning I found an e-mail from Noah with this link:

http://digg.com/politics/LAW_SCHOOL_TO_ORGANIZE_BUSH_WAR_CRIMES_TRIAL/who

The link takes you to this Digg item:

LAW SCHOOL TO ORGANIZE BUSH WAR CRIMES TRIAL
Organizations that want to put President Bush and his accomplices on trial for war crimes will convene at the Massachusetts School of Law September 13-14 to map out an action blueprint to bring them to justice.

Naturally I was already imagining a blogpost that would take note of this while branding it "Not Much, but It's a Start." These days, while Howie is away, Everything I look at, I automatically imagine as a blogpost. It's an occupational hazard. (Wait, this doesn't qualify as an "occupation," exactly, even if it has been pretty much full-time. Is there such a thing as an "avocational hazard"?) So it would be nice to have more information, right?

The Digg item links to a lengthy post -- with, like, 1850 Diggs! -- which begins:

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."

Dean Velvel is quoted as saying. "For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders."

Hold on now. "September 13-14"? It doesn't seem likely that this refers to 2009. Sure enough, the original story circulated in early June 2008. Meaning that the conference has already taken place, right? Or if it didn't, there's some further development to report, surely.

A job for Google, surely. As you might guess from the number of Diggs, you'll find some version of the original post plastered all over the Net. This was followed by a sprinkling of posts noting indignantly that the MSM is predictably ignoring this important news. Then, well, it's hard to find anything.

Finally I find this report, from Andover (good sign!), on the website of a local paper:

Published: September 13, 2008 12:02 am

Law school dean's war crimes
conference starts today

By Brian Messenger
bmessenger@eagletribune.com

ANDOVER -- A two-day effort by lawyers and academics to coordinate war crimes prosecution against top U.S. officials begins today at the Wyndham Andover hotel.

The conference was originally scheduled to be on the Federal Street campus of the Massachusetts School of Law, but met with opposition from some alumni.

The conference is being hosted by law school Dean Lawrence Velvel.

The 18 participating speakers include authors, academics, lawyers, journalists and members of the American Civil Liberties Union and New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

The conference will begin at 9 a.m. today and concludes Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps the best-known participant in the conference is author and former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi prosecuted Charles Manson with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, a trial he later outlined in his best-selling book "Helter Skelter."

Velvel did not return calls seeking comment this week, but wrote in a June statement announcing his plans to hold the conference that President George W. Bush and other top U.S. leaders must be tried for war crimes.

The present location of the conference was not made public by Velvel or the law school, but was revealed this week by North Andover-based public relations agency Bulldog Communications.

Andover lawyer and Massachusetts School of Law graduate Peter Cotch said he was pleased the conference was moved off campus.

Cotch urged the school's board of trustees to review Velvel's standing as dean when the conference was first announced.

"Larry Velvel is certainly entitled to his own political activities and cultural pursuits, but they should not be confused with the mission of the law school, which is to educate lawyers," Cotch said.

Andover attorney Arthur Broadhurst, a member of the school's board of trustees, said he called Velvel after learning of the conference and was told by the dean the event would be held off campus.

"He wasn't ordered to," said Broadhurst. "When I had talked to him to find out what was going on, he had told me he wasn't going to be doing it on campus."

It turns out that this very same Eagle-Tribune had editorialized on the subject back in July:

Published: July 08, 2008 10:46 pm

Our view: Velvel's 'war crimes' charade is preposterous

The words and actions of the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law cast the Andover school in ill repute and raise doubt over whether anyone can expect serious legal training there.

Lawrence Velvel, dean and co-founder of the law school, says that President Bush and members of his administration should be placed on trial for war crimes and, if found guilty, hanged -- just like the leaders of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

The "Bush is Hitler" argument is a common one in the less rational corners of the Internet. Overblown rhetoric is one thing. Propounding foolishness as a matter of public policy is another matter entirely.

Velvel is planning a two-day conference for September titled "Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." Originally slated for the school's Federal Street campus, the conference has been moved to an undisclosed location.

Velvel declined to comment to our reporter on his motives for the conference. But in writings promoting it, Velvel has said this is no mere academic exercise.

"Because domestic politics are obviously useless for holding the guilty accountable, we must try to do what was done in the 1940s to the leaders of nations who committed evil," wrote Velvel.

"We must try to do what was done to the German and Japanese leaders from top Nazis and Tojo right down to lawyers and judges. ... Not unless leaders fear prison or the gallows for actions that violate law will there be anything to check the next headlong rush to war for allegedly good reasons that later prove false," Velvel wrote.

Velvel names Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as specific targets of his "war crimes" charade. Not surprisingly, Velvel makes no mention of former President Clinton, under whose administration "regime change" in Iraq became official U.S. policy. Nor does he mention the numerous senators and congressmen -- Republican and Democrat -- who in 2002 granted the president authority to use military force against Iraq.

Velvel's conference and war crimes rabble-rousing amount to a political exercise, not a legal one. Indeed, why even hold trials at all? Let's proceed directly to the hangings. It's clear that's where Velvel stands. His attempt to smear a veneer of legality over his hatred of Bush administration policy in Iraq is transparent.

It is perfectly fair, reasonable and just to oppose the war in Iraq and to condemn the president's role in it. The people of the United States are welcome to boot Bush, his administration and its supporters out of public office for as long as they see fit.

But in a democracy, differences in opinion over national policy are not criminal matters. Those who lead law schools should be resisting such nonsense, not encouraging it.

Is it possible for an entire newspaper even a regional one, to fit its entire head up its collective butt? Is it possible that these people who run a newspaper are that utterly clueless about the abundant war crimes committed -- or at the very least in need of adjudicating -- by the Bush regime? (Is this possible? A: yes.) Or are they just reflexive right-wing propagandists?

Or are they just fans of war crimes when we do 'em? It's worth keeping in mind the common description of the Nuremberg trials as "victors' justice" -- a holding-to-account that, for all its fancy kowtowing to supposed higher principles of international law -- would never have been prosecuted except by a winning power upon a losing one.

Somebody deserves to be held up to widespread ridicule and scorn here, but I don't think it's Dean Velvel. One suggestion: If war crimes tribunals ever are held, how about adding the name of "Andover lawyer and Massachusetts School of Law graduate Peter Cotch," on a charge of obstructing international law?


SINCE WE HAVE THE REPORTER'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
(ASSUMING HE'S STILL AT THE EAGLE-TRIBUNE) --

Once this post posts, I'm going to e-mail him and see if he can fill us in on further developments in Andover. I'll let you know anything I find out.

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2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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