The Warning

Well, I am about done with this blog. This period...this era...of my life is coming to a close. A new era, beyond the ups and downs of the WoB, is beginning.

I am in the WoB now. But it is different.

So.

I am finishing a new film I've written, directed and produced.

I will stick around a while longer. But not much. This blog will pass, as it should.

Tears

No cynicism. No clever phrases or jokes. No soul searching, or pondering my personal depths.

I just want to take a minute to note that last night I saw...hopefully we all saw...a moment that I never believed would come.

Although the lovely and brilliant Michelle Obama had to backtrack on her "I am proud of America for the first time" statement, I have no such pressure on me to say otherwise.

For the first time in my life, I am truly proud to be American.

Truly.

My greatest American hero is Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe he is the greatest American who has ever lived. Last night, I saw his dream realized, the uncashed check of American history finally taken to the bank and paid...not in full, but it was, at least, accepted and some of the funds released.

I watched the events at Invesco Field from beginning to end, thanks to C-SPAN, and I found tears running down my face throughout.

Not because I am a Democrat...because I am not.

Not because I believe Obama can change the fundamental imperialism and domination by the Military-Industrial Complex that corrodes the soul of this nation...because he cannot.

Not because I think the Republican Party is, at its core, run by blood-thirsty, elitist and amoral greed-mongers...well, yeah, I do believe that.

No, I cried some tears of redemptive joy for all those Black men who were lynched. For all those Black men who languish in prison on trumped-up charges, or who have been wrongly convicted by our criminal "justice" system.

For all those slaves who lived through one of the great blights on human morality in the history of mankind.

For all those brave men who marched and demonstrated and tried so hard to endure Jim Crow and segregation for the right to vote, to use bathrooms and lunch counters. Who simply wanted to be treated as human beings.

For Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron and all those Black men who refused to let racism keep them from achieving excellence.

We, as a people, have never quite faced up to the desperately immoral threads that weave through the history of our country.

But last night...last night I saw that there is some redemption in the soul and psyche of this nation. I saw a Black man...and his lovely family...take the stage and claim a position that, for over two hundred years, seemed unthinkable.

I also saw that my generation might be the last to know fully the perniciousness of our collective racism and that those who come after us have embraced a vision of race that transcends our past.

It is young people who made this moment possible. Please keep that in mind. Hip Hoppers of all races. Kids who grew up after the Cosby Show was a hit. After Michael Jordan became the most popular man on the planet. Kids who see Black Americans in ways that Martin Luther King, Jr. could only dream of...that he did dream of.

If Obama loses, it will be because we still have millions of racists. We still have a society that reacts to fear and propaganda. We still have an unpaid debt to history and to those peoples...Blacks, American Indians and people in countries around the world...who we as a collective have dominated, enslaved, murdered, bombed and stolen from.

But last night, with funky songs playing...with an anniversary in the ether...we saw that there is hope that we can transcend our history and be something more.

Please take a moment to reflect on this...because we all, in the context of American history, witnessed the single most important event we have yet seen in our lifetimes.

And feel free to shed a tear of redemptive joy.

The One

She's "the one."

Has been. Always will be.

Much maligned over the years, she always accepts me. Not in spite of my faults, but because of 'em.

The Whore of Babylon. The city personified as a woman full of Biblical wrath. Washington, D.C.

I have been there nearly two out of the last four months. Both times to fulfill my destiny as the servant of a fellow man. To do what he could not. To be what he refused to be. To give him one last send off that would solidify his legacy.

Fitting. Fitting that it was service that sent me back to the city that has swallowed me and spit me out twice. Spit out, because I refused to serve the Whore. That is what "she" (funny that we call cities and boats "she," but it works) demands. Once you stop serving her and all that she is...well...you find yourself alienated and lonely and agitated. It takes participation, being one with the various aspects of her vanity and power. I was always rubbing up against her vanity and power through the media and an obsession with politics and history and "justice." My vanity and search for some avenue to exert my own power, those things brought me to her.

Once things fell apart, from health or fire or some other sort of random brimstone, I no longer served her and she spit me out. Perhaps because I made myself so distasteful.

I just could not face my own vanity, and my lust for her wily ways. I left for good, so I said, last Summer and immediately came apart at the seams. My vanity was left behind, my lust and what little power I did have quickly mutated. I wasn't serving her. I wasn't serving those around me. I was self-serving insofar as I retreated into denial over my lost opportunity. The opportunity to make a stand. To not retreat or be spit out.

Going back to help my dying friend became a salve. My wounds, mostly self-inflicted but some also inflicted upon me, felt the soothing coolness of gratitude and love and appreciation.

Felt the feeling of home.

For DC...the Whore of Babylon...is my home. One of them, at least. But the one home that strips me bare and causes me to face the reality of who I am and what I have given up over the years. What I could be. But it also is a place that has embraced me through the people I know there. The people who open their homes and hearts and families to me. People who actually care about and who know me. They do. They know me. And they've shown me my value. My worth. And shown me the self-serving indulgence of feeling worthless.

I gave. They returned the favor. By showing me that the Whore of Babylon is not just a mythical frame for the self-portrait of my persona, but it is also a place I have made a name and identity for myself...the family I have found there has made DC more than a tricky one-liner or a catchy title. It is a place I will return to again and again. I will never be free of that embrace, not fully.

I have slept with the Whore. And, dammit, I have certainly paid. Paid dearly. But it was a transaction. Not a mugging. I did so with free-will. Still am.

So, here I am in NorCal. My native land I love so much, and it occurred to me to move back to the Whore! I will not, but it didn't seem so strange an idea. My burned apartment is shiny and new. My family there, the people who I have grown to love and respect, allow me to be who I am and don't mind my idiosyncratic ways. I am not quite the crazy uncle, but I am always welcome to stay in more than one basement.

I guess the upshot is that I live in more than one place. I live on both coasts. And will. Because the Whore of Babylon, with it's enraging drivers and bad service and slimy sycophants and tax-payer troughs of money and mammon worship, that Whore is "the one." The one I am destined to embrace. As one who looks into abysses as a matter of course, as a man perpetually outraged...as a digger of dirt and overturner of rocks...and as a man who simply wants family and a home...I cannot deny that she, the city and Biblical bitch, has forever marked me.

And no, I am not going to take this metaphor to its logical conclusion and say I now have the Mark of the Beast! Rather, this metaphor has me as the one who refuses to take the Mark...but returns to the belly of the Beast because it is the one place that I can feel it all, everything I have inside me...every political, moral, philosophical and emotional wound throbs...occasionally bleeds...and is also salved...all at the same time.

America's Investment in Negative Assets

Another suicide at Guantanamo.

Years and years of detention, strange psychological games and bizarre, "no really, it ain't torture" rituals led another evildoer to take his own life.

Of course, the Pentagon doesn't it call it suicide. The term is "an act of asymmetrical warfare." Seriously. When three evildoers ended their life sentence early in June of 2006, the War on Terror talking point called the suicide an "act of war."

It is reminiscent of another famous euphemism for suicide...Rev. Jim Jones told his followers that they were "not committing suicide, it's a revolutionary act."

So, just to keep in lockstep with the War of Terror terminology...Another act of war occurred at Guantanamo.

The funny thing about this one is the lead in to the story in today's Washington Post:

A detainee found dead in his cell at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday was a Saudi army veteran who trained with U.S. forces before fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to military hearing records.

Isn't that interesting?

Here is an evildoer who is being kept away from civilization, never charged with a crime or able to see a lawyer...and he was not only another example of one of our Saudi friends involved in "terror," but he’d also trained with US forces.

An anomaly, perhaps. Just a coincidence? Maybe.

But he is not the first.

In fact, during the crazy aftermath of the 9/11 attacks Newsweek ran this interesting tidbit:

"U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in [the 9/11] terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s." -- 9/15/01

And then there is this from the NY Times from the same day:

The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif.

Kinda strange, isn't it?

Stranger still is the fact that these connections disappeared from the media. Vanished.

And the Joint Congressional Report on their investigation into 9/11? Redacted.

Or so we can assume, because 28 pages of the report relating to Saudi financing and other sticky Saudi issues will never be seen by the public. The Saudi-loving Bush team waved the magic wand of "National Security" over the report and made potentially difficult to explain information just disappear.

Sorry America, you are on a "need to know" basis.

That didn't stop one patriotic Air Force Lt. Colonel from speaking his mind. Not too coincidentally, Lt. Colonel Steve Butler was serving as vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California when he wrote a letter to a local paper claiming Bush knew of the impending attacks and, essentially, let them happened to save his Presidency and get his War on Terrorism.

Of course, he was relieved of his duties. Duties that may have had him cross paths with one of the hijackers admitted by the Defense Department to have attended the famous language school.

No, stop that. It's a just a coincidence.

Or is it?

In the shady world of fun and games we call espionage, there are assets and negative assets.

Assets are agents, contract agents, informants and other "friendlies" who work with an agency...like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA or the recently ascendant DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). Assets are the characters we see James Bond movies.

But there are other "assets" agencies acquire and use. Less known, but just as important, they are called "negative assets." These unfriendlies are recruited by deep cover assets to inflict damage, run terror campaigns and generally wreak havoc on...ourselves.

Really. Not kidding. Common practice.

Negative assets can be used to alter the political dynamics of a friendly country heading toward turmoil or privatization of resources our corporations want to control. They can be use to unseat public allies who are private foes or public relations liabilities. Dictators who become liabilities, for instance, can be overthrown by enemies that an agency funds, trains or otherwise helps materially to carry out a task the agency's government cannot public condone. By people the government cannot public condone.

It makes for strange bedfellows.

One of the great practitioners of this negative asset allocation is Israel.

In the early seventies, men like former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir Ariel Sharon decided that they needed to counter the PLO within the ranks of the Palestinians. Voila! The government helped to establish Hamas. Really, it's true.

They provided funding and support, and helped to create a terrorist organization.

Now they use Hamas as a rationale for continued occupation. Hamas has, in turn, bedeviled the Palestinian Authority's attempt to govern the Occupied Territories...thus creating a low-grade civil war between Hamas and the PLO.

Bonus! Now they are killing themselves.

And now the Israelis and the United States are assisting PLO elements within the Palestinian Authority in their struggle against Hamas. The money is flowing.

Keep that “killing themselves thing” going is just common sense, right?

And it goes even further...a story today in the UK newspaper The Telegraph points to documents that indicate the famous hijacking by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) at Entebbe may have may have had assistance from an Israeli agency…Shin Bet.

That hijacking and the heroic raid by Isreali forces that followed became a rallying point for resistance to Palestinian claims for independence from occupation. It helped to unite Israelis behind the cause. It helped to demonize the Palestinians.

Enemies are, for governments seeking justifications or legitimacy with their own people and foreign powers, golden.

British intelligence had assets working in the IRA. Italian and US agencies had assets in the Red Brigade.

And the US (the CIA) was present and instrumental in the founding of what would become Al-Qaeda.

It doesn't stop there.

Seymour Hersh has been reporting, much to the indifference of the mainstream media, that the Bush Administration has quietly been using Prince Bandar, a.k.a. Bandar Bush, to fund Sunni extremists in terror campaigns in Lebanon and Iran.

Yup. Saudi money and Wahhabism...the potent cocktail that lead to the rise of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks...is being used to foment a spreading conflict between Sunni and Shiites in the Islamic world.

Bonus! That “killing themselves thing” is as good as it gets in the hurly burly of empire building.

The camp in Northern Lebanon that was in the news over the last couple weeks?

The terrorist attacks by Pakistanis in Eastern Iran a couple months ago?

Those money trails lead back to our, or...more precisely…the Bush Team’s, Saudi friends.

Negative assets returning dividends.

We've seen it here at home, too.

The Miami "Terror Cell?" Negative assets recruited, supplied and goaded into delusions of terroristic grandeur by an FBI agent. That case is going nowhere because the negative assets were incompetents and the operation bungled.

But how many of those operations make through to completion?

Without some slip-up along the way, it is hard to know. Because a good negative asset is one who doesn't realize that they are being controlled by an asset...a member of an agency or government who would be otherwise considered the enemy by the negative asset in question.

Negative assets, when they work out, have the greatest degree of plausible deniability possible. Plausible deniability is the mother's milk of espionage fun and games. It protects those at the top who send their orders down the chain of command. If an agent, an asset or an operation is compromised? Well, it stops at the lower level, keeping the string pullers from ever being tainted or, depending on the type of operation, convicted.

So when we think about this latest suicide...sorry, excuse me...act of war…at Guantanamo, and the fact that he, like so many others, had links to the US military...we are left to speculate about what really happened to bring him to the both Gitmo and his death.

Was he another negative asset who had to be pulled off the War on Terror battlefield to keep him from divulging compromising information? Is that why he was never charged? Was never allowed to speak to a lawyer? Was he a product of an Evildoer Enemy Factory, churned out to justify a power play for dominance of the Middle East and all that powerful and profitable oil?

Is the War on Terror just a game of shadowy puppetry...assets and negative assets unleashed to create war justification and legitimacy where once there were none?

Well, America...you are on a need to know basis. And like those 28 redacted pages on the role of the Saudis in Al Qaeda and 9/11...it has been determined that you don't need to know.

Memorial Day of Reckoning

Memorial Day Weekend.

It's pure Americana. The kick-off to the Grilling Season, it is a three day intro to Summer for America’s families.

Barbecues. Picnics. The first trip the beach. A time for the American Way of Life to be celebrated with copious amounts of beer and hot dogs. It is also a weekend of sales. Cars. Mattresses. Big screen TVs. All of American Life squeezed into the brass ring of our work life: a three-day weekend.

Some people remember to display the American flag. But few people stop and consider the name for the day and the meaning behind it.

Too much consumption and too little reflection, perhaps.

Memorial Day is the set aside so Americans can remember...memorialize... the death of thousands upon thousands of American soldiers throughout our history. To thank, as it were, those who made "the ultimate sacrifice" to defend America. And, as the slightly jingoistic phrase goes, to "defend our freedom."

All of this memorializing of sacrifice is set in stark relief against a backdrop of gluttony and shopping.

Sure, there will be parades. And Arlington Cemetery will play host to a Presidential photo op. But what does it mean that a somber and sullen occasion like the remembrance of fallen soldiers became a time of fun and sun and food and cheap mattresses?

Memorial Day is a peculiarly American holiday for just that reason. Its "celebration" lacks historical context. Lacks any real contemplation of the cost in lives to preserve the American Way of Life. Or any accounting for the reasons behind those wars and the deaths that poured out of them. In typical American fashion, the memory is stripped out of the word memorial so that it becomes something totally different that it is. Than it always was.

American re-invention at work.

This year's Memorial Day this phenomenon is particularly acute. As "holiday travelers" thought about scaling back their driving due to higher gas prices, there was an ongoing reason for solemn reflection.

War. Death. Iraq.

Of all years, wouldn't this be a good one to cancel the trips and shut off the barbecues...to gather around those who've lost loved ones, or around those who've survived this and previous wars? Isn’t it a good time to look into our collective soul and ponder the question of why we've lost so many to war? Or to use that oft-referred to freedom to express ourselves and our supposed, growing disdain for this war?

No. The meat is grilling and the mattresses are selling.

It is because we, as Americans, cannot begin to take real responsibility for what we have wrought.

The blame is not for those who actually wore or are wearing uniforms. For those who have been in war and lost limbs or lives or friends in foxholes. They do what they are told to do, what they are required to do. By us. Yes, all of us.

And no, a "Don't Blame me, I Voted For Kerry" bumper sticker is not an exemption clause. Not an escape.

Because those "freedoms" and the "democracy" that those soldiers supposedly died for means that we all are responsible for the death and destruction that happens, that has happened, in our name.

The 3,435 Americans dead as of the writing of this blog. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who've died. The nearly 4 million Iraq refugees. All of that blood and pain and destruction...it's on our hands this Memorial Day.

But who in America right now, crowded around a picnic table or a barbecue grill thinks of themself as responsible for all that carnage?

And that is the problem.

For we know so little of our own history, let alone what is happening right now. This is particularly true of the various wars that were not fought to "preserve our freedoms." Wars not fought to protect our so-called democracy against invaders and enemies.

Sure, World War II was a good case of a good war against obvious threats.

But World War I? No real rationale for that one. Woodrow Wilson had a "vision" for the world and America's role in it. Wilson is, not surprisingly, a big hero to the Neo-Cons...even though his Wilsonian vision was mostly a failure.

Santayana is laughing…do you hear him?

Our entrance into World War I was far more turbulent and unpopular at home than the causally under-informed American knows. It caused an "isolationist" reaction in the 1920s and 30s. The term in now an epithet. Although isolationism might actually, in non-interventionist form, remove the giant American thorn from the World's paw and, consequently, stop all the blowback we seem to suffer.

Hey, it worked for Daniel.

And then there are the other wars. The Mexican-American War was pure expansionism. No freedom at stake there, except for the freedom of Americans to take what wasn't theirs. Same with the Spanish-American War. The Korean War. The Vietnam War. Countless little interventions designed to make business safe for corporations and to keep resources out of the hands of peasants in their far off lands.

But most Americans know very little of this history. Of their history.

They rarely think about the 1.5 million Vietnamese who died.

For what?

For our freedom?

We do recall Vietnam Veterans and finally give them the social acceptance they should've had as soon as they got back. But we underfund and occasionally cut the budget of the Veterans Administration.

Few, if any, families are inviting a group of psychological and/or physically scarred Vietnam Vets to come into their homes and yards for hot dogs and hamburgers and a few cold beers. So why, then, should we raise taxes on the dividends of our great investor class to pay off some of the human cost of their extravagant American lifestyle?

You see, it is related. The reason we have such plenty, such an abundance of beer and hot dogs and mattresses, is because we have used our military to enforce, incrementally and over time, an empire around the world. We have accumulated riches. We have secured everything from oil to bananas with our guns and our military and our dirty little covert wars.

All of American Life is made possible by the overwhelming force of our advanced weaponry and the young men and women we put into uniforms. They are more a victim to this than the rest of us, because they sometimes go in as a way out of the working poverty that also goes along with our American Way of Life. Because there is no other way to college. Because, at times and for some, there is no other way.

Still others go in for the "patriotic" reason. Because they love and believe in their country and want to serve in its defense. These are the people I am thinking about today.

All those young men and women who went in with the purest intentions, but found themselves as pawns in the great game of empire and power and oil. Who might have gone in after 9/11 to help their country respond to an attack, but ended up occupying a country of innocents who had nothing to do with 9/11, but had the unfortunate luck of being in a lynchpin country in a theoretical global strategy concocted by some corporate power players and Neo-Cons who, like Wilson before them, wanted to reshape the world.

Now they die in the service of power and greed. Not to protect our freedoms. Their families suffer. And they will suffer from the scars of being part of an immoral occupation. They will suffer like the Vietnam vets before them.

Some make the ultimate sacrifice.

Meanwhile, on this most somber of days when we should consider the high cost of America...both now and then, the vast majority of us will overeat and drink too much and maybe partake in some of those amazing sales that dot our consumerized country.

And somewhere in Iraq, a soldier may die. Iraqis are, most certainly, likely to die. And we can curse the high price of oil and the "holiday traffic" and ignore the one word that seems to have left our collective consciousness--sacrifice.

The Other Massacre

There were two massacres “in the news” this week.

One, in a bucolic Virginia college town, kept the voracious, non-stop gaze of the media transfixed. Each detail described over and over again. Pictures replayed on seemingly infinite loops, the lives of victims explored and celebrated. The human cost considered and the inhumanity of random killing pondered as the massacre became a cultural obsession.

The other?

Haditha.

This week Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell issued a 104-page report on the 2005 massacre in a worn-torn Iraqi town that took 24 civilian lives. In it, Bargewell excoriated the chain of command for ignoring the misconduct that lead a group of Marines to inflict deadly vengeance upon innocent civilians in response to a roadside bombing by insurgents.

An example of the fog of war, perhaps? The grayness that colors the interaction between and occupying force and the people they were sent to “liberate.” Or that mind-shattering experience we know so well from Vietnam Veterans…inconclusive lines between friend and foe created by guerrilla tactics, a language barrier and a civil war? Or just an example of the inhumanity of forcible occupation without moral justification?

Key questions our media and culture must engage as we stumble down the road to empire and ponder the mounting human cost of a global war on “Terror.”

However, while the media focused on the sort of mentality--the mental illness, in fact--that leads an individual to kill without conscience, the report on Haditha was basically ignored. A report that, while predictably denying any real cover-up by the Pentagon, is punctuated by some startling statements by the career officer in charge of the investigation.

According to Maj. Gen. Bargewell:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics."

…and…

"Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

So, as we consider the value of human lives lost in Virginia shouldn’t…couldn’t we…also consider the value of human life in Iraq?

What of the over 650,000 Iraqi casualties since the invasion? The Pentagon and the White House dismiss these numbers, for obvious reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons they forbade hospitals in the newly “liberated” Iraq from counting the casualties they encountered.

Or what about the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have lost or fled their homes since the invasion?

Perhaps the size of the numbers is the problem. Too big, too hard to comprehend. They are simply statistics, not individuals.

32 people killed in Blacksburg.

It’s a staggering number, but still manageable in the media’s mind. Pictures can be shown, the lives understood. They are people…human beings with obvious value to their families, friends and their communities.

But then isn’t 24 a manageable number, too?

Yes, the story was basically told when the “not-really-a-cover-up” was exposed. Still, it doesn’t seem that the lives of those Iraqis…whether men, women or children…hold the same value for us and our media. Just as they don’t, according to the report, for the Marines in charge of democratizing them.

Although, to be fair, the Department of Defense has goen to the trouble of ascertaining the actual "value" of individual Iraqis.

In yet another report that was basically ignored, the ACLU pried loose documents from the Army that revealed Iraqis, and their co-liberatees in Afghanistan, “have received more than $32 million in compensation from the Army for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage.”

The devilish details from the report show just how cheap life is in Iraq.

• No more than $2,500 can be offered to each person killed, although a few exceptions seem to have been made.
  
• The family of an Iraqi fisherman in Tikrit killed while turning off his boat’s engine received nothing for his death. The Army ruled that it was collateral damage--the result of combat. But they did coughed up $3,500 for his boat, net and cell phone…all lost after he was killed.
  
• A civilian fueling his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no apparent reason. The Army ruled that neither Iraqi had done anything hostile or criminal and approved $5,000 to the civilian's brother but nothing for the Iraqi officer.
  
• Soldiers killed a man and his sister by firing 200 rounds into their car as it approached a checkpoint, apparently too quickly, near Mussayib. The Army lieutenant colonel who handled the claim awarded relatives a $10,000 compensation payment, finding that the soldiers had overstepped the rules of engagement.
  
• An American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy's uncle $500.
  
• In one incident, in Feb. 18, 2006, a taxi approached a checkpoint east of Baquba that was not properly marked with signs to slow down, one Army claim evaluation said. Soldiers fired on the taxi, killing a woman and severely wounding her daughter and son. The Army approved an unusually large condolence payment of $7,500.
  

And in Haditha?

Various residents of the town received a total of $38,000.

Life, it would seem does have some value in Iraq. A monetary value.

Yet, wouldn’t we find it strange…even distasteful…if the parents of the Virginia Tech killer offered each of the victims’ family $2,500? Wouldn’t it be dehumanizing to put a price--and a paltry price, at that--on the humanity each of their loved one’s exhibited over the years, on the relationships and affectations that made them who they were?

It’s all part of a bizarre numbers game.

Those brutally massacred in Haditha are, like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who seen their lives inexorably changed or summarily lost, merely statistics.

Reports are issued, money is paid.

The victims in Blacksburg deserve all the humanity we can muster…in condolences and outrage and tributes. But during a week in which we grappled with the consequences of random murder, what does it mean that we so easily glossed over the reports on Haditha, on the millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of casualties?

The numbers coming out of Iraq are not abstractions…not to Iraqis. But then again, the media would never rest if they tried to deal with those murders as more than just numbers.

It just too big…which also says something about our role in Iraq, doesn’t it?

Critical Massacre

Inexplicable. Horrifying. Tragic.

Shocking and senseless.

The massacre at Virginia Tech inspires language of disbelief, fear and indignation. The media, politicians and pundits offer ponderous meanderings through a maze of confusion built by one gunman in a moment of vindictive violence.

Once a name and a face, along with a thought-provoking package sent to NBC, were layered over the top of the random killing…our national attention turned to the question of “why.”

What would explain this?

What could explain this?

Who is to blame?

To the casual observer, and those of us who did not lose loved ones or have some temporal connection to Virginia Tech and Blacksburg are just that--casual observers, the obvious answer is that a troubled youth exhibiting obvious psychological warning signs just lost it…he went nuts and happened to have guns he could use to play out a twisted scenario: a personal, paranoid war against a perceived enemies.

But is this latest example of mass killing yet another anomaly we may never fully understand? Another example of how convoluted the human mind truly is?
Or is it just an outgrowth of who we are? Who we really are when we peel back the bucolic veneer of the American Dream?

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Despite all those heroic high school lessons in American history, the rhetoric we hear every election cycle about the goodness, generosity and peaceful intentions of America…the truth is that America and American history are replete with war, bloodthirsty campaigns against American Indians and Third World peasants, and violent repression and enslavement of an entire race of people.

We are a warlike and violent people. Always have been. Our God-given right to violence stretches back to our “Puritan” founders, our Colonial ambitions and the slaughter of those people who stood between us and our Manifest Destiny.
That was a long time ago. But the language they used--against infidels, Godless savages and “Imps of Satan”--echoes today in the War on Terror and our “Crusade” against “Evildoers.”

Violence punctuates our national myth--the Winning of the West, with shootouts and lynchings and posses riding out to mete justice on cattle rustlers. The entire founding of the nation “from sea to shining sea” was done with guns.
With killing and theft. With wars.

“War” is our primary national modality. Wars that mostly were, as history has shown to any willing to examine it, of choice and ambition and a bloodthirsty disregard for the humanity of our enemies. The Mexican-American War. The Spanish-American War and the brutal repression of the Philippines that followed. Too many campaigns against American Indians to list.

Since the end of the Second World War, the one “Good War” and our lone moment of moral superiority, it has been non-stop violence: the Cold War (and its numerous, violent “hot spots“), the Korean War, the Vietnam War…and countless little wars around the globe like Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, hapless Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, the Persian Gulf.

And we so love war that we declare one even when the intention is some common good, like the War on Poverty…on Drugs…on Cancer.

We have Presidents who’ve said that they are starting a war to keep the peace. Peace through war. A War on War, it would seem.

As we look at this one sociopath will we also look at the context within which he festered? An amorphous War against Terror that has cost countless “innocent” men, women and children their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whole families killed by faceless bombs, large caliber ammunition fired from planes, helicopters and Humvees.

We are a society that has, more or less, made peace with torture. A society that was easily lead into a war against a people that did nothing--no attack, no invasion--to justify the unleashing of the largest military in the history of mankind. What about the fact that we have the largest military in the history of mankind?

And what do we make of those Executive Branch sociopaths who ordered the mass killings we’ve inflicted upon the people of Iraq? Or the gunmakers who profit hand over fist fueling the wars we start? Or inspire others to start. The corporate heads of Lockheed Martin, of General Dynamics…are they, too, inexplicable killers who cause random death of innocents? The media, politicians and pundits spend no time questioning the psychology of the executives and scientists who create new and interesting ways of killing people.

In fact, we celebrate them…with huge salaries and Congressional kowtowing.
But what really separates them from the lone gunman? Profitability, perhaps?

Or what do we make of the thousands of “contractors,” a.k.a. mercenaries, who are riding around Iraq, armed to the teeth and making huge salaries. Or those who have been caught “randomly” shooting Iraqis civilians? They are reprimanded by their companies, but where is the national conversation about those mass killings?

It comes down to language. The language of mass murder, of random death dealt out by a crazed lone gunman, is reserved for those events that we ourselves are not directly complicit in. We do not feel complicit in the tragic event at Virginia tech. Or Columbine. Or any of the growing number of mass shootings our country has experienced over the last four decades. Those are anomalies in American society…examples of the mysteries of the human psyche and, in the ultimate Americanization, the price we pay to live in a free society.

But the mass killings that made our nation? That protect our national interests, like oil? The mass killings that happen when we drop bombs on civilians? Or what about the weaponry we, the world’s largest dealer of guns and military hardware, sell to governments and rebels alike? That we sold to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War?

Those are wars. Or for wars. And as a nation of war, we have found a way to disassociate ourselves from those acts of violence with the language of war:
campaigns, battles, collateral damage, casualties, enemy combatants.

We create an alternate world of skewed morality to justify the wealth, the land, the death created by those acts. We indemnify whole peoples and their ideas and cultural affectations to rationalize the violence we portray as necessary and just. Paranoid worldviews predominate our history, particularly since the end of the Second World War.

Disassociation. Skewed morality. Violence justified by paranoia.

How much of an anomaly is the lone gunman? Or has our culture reached critical mass…that to be an American is not just to be part of a culture of violent retribution, but an example of it?

Rectification of Names

Confucius:
“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So, what does an ancient Chinese philosopher have to teach us about our post-Modern world?

Quite a bit, actually.

Since the 2000 Election, we've seen our national language deteriorate into Orwellian NewSpeak, into transpositions of black for white and into lies parading around as fanciful conventional wisdoms. Propaganda and truth, until Katrina came and washed away the media's veneer of compliant patriotism, were fed to the American public, from the Administration by way of the news media, like MREs--a great Pentagon acronym for Meals Ready to Eat. Incidentally, the professional association of military reporters and editors is also called "MRE."

Isn't funny how sometimes people give us the truth unintentionally?

Anyway....

Confucius would marvel at just how completely we, the American people, have proven his axiom on "incorrect language." But even his genius couldn't foresee the power of the Corporate-American media. Still, he knew that a people who are propagandized cannot make judgments and, as we've seen for six years, "stand about in helpless confusion."

Now, it is true that Team Bush had to steal the first election and that there is plenty of evidence that the Team did it again in 2004. You can't fool all of the people...or even 51% of them, I guess. And it is true that at least 1/3rd of Americans saw through much of the propaganda offered up as truth since 9/11..and that number has grown. But those people also tend to hold their American brethren in contempt...for not being able to see through the often paper-thin tissue of lies that have been peddled by our Fearless Leaders and our Cowering Media. The Informed need to read Confucius. It is not so easy to stay informed when there is so much disinformation clogging the informational arteries...and for those who are struggling to stay afloat in this debt-ridden, fear-factored environment there is very little time to read all of the alternative news sources out there.

One of the great advantages Team Bush has is that it takes time and effort...and a serious dose distrust and cynicism...to wade through it all and make sense of it. They've cynically used cynicism to drive a wedge through the electorate.

It is true that the media is now more likely to ask questions, but it is still woefully inadequate to the Confucian task at hand. Team Bush is a disinformation machine...a prolific propagandizer and language engineer.

The Rectification of Names is a 24/7 job these days, and the confusion...along with the obvious deterioration of our morals and our art...is six years in the making (if not more, but let's do this one presidency at a time!).

Here are some examples that need Rectification:

War on Terror: If it is indeed a war on "Terror"--meaning terrorism (it's already imprecise language)--why do we support terrorism? We are supporting, through advisors in Pakistan and funding from Saudis like Prince Bandar, Sunni terrorists operating in Iran and Lebanon. And why didn't we identify the source of the money and personnel behind 9/11--Saudi Arabia--as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

State Sponsor of Terrorism: As we see above, this is a name needing major Rectification. Iran is a SST, but isn't the US also a SST for supporting Sunni terrorist conducting a bombing campaign in Iran?

Terrorist: Anyone killing "innocent life" is considered a terrorist. How many innocents--women and children--have we killed in Iraq? What about Israel, which has killed dozens of children with indiscriminant bombs in the Occupied Territories since 9/11? Heck, they even helped to found Hamas, an organization labeled "terrorist" and who we are countering through Prince Bandar's initiative to fund Sunni terrorists in Lebanon. Well, Al Qaeda wouldn't even exist if the CIA hadn't helped to create it in 1979 to, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, to goad the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. So confusing.

Hostages: The just-released British sailors were hostages. Their confessions were coerced. So what does that make the hundreds of Muslims held for years in secret and not-so-secret prisons? What about their confessions? What's the difference between British sailors and the five Iranians we took and are still hold in Iraq? Or the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to every plot imaginable?

Syria: Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes to Syria and sends the wrong signal. So, what was the signal sent to Syria by Team Bush when the CIA shipped "enemy combatant" Maher Arar (since cleared of all charges) on a private jet to Syria to be tortured?

Torture: We don't even know what this is anymore. No agreed upon definition. This has led to the kind of moral decay Confucius predicted, hasn't it? From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, the US tortures because the language and definition of what torture is has been brought into question.

And on and on and on....

The "People" depend upon leaders, reporters and editors...upon the news media...to use language judiciously and accurately. They have an inherent need to trust those in power. A need that was multiplied by 3000 on 9/11, and magnified by the Anthrax Attacks and the continual drumbeats of war...on Terror, on Iraq...that followed.

The "Informed" should show some patience and spend more of their time attacking the purveyors of incorrect language and less time occupying an elitist perch above the "People." We are all in this sinking ship of state together and there are few lifeboats left. Those bobbing on the waves of propaganda should throw a line to those sinking into the depths of it. Don't blame the victim. Be Confucian and Rectify the Names under which all of this is being done.

Chiquita Bananas of Death

Bananas of Death.

Every time you eat a Chiquita banana, you are eating a blood-stained banana.

Is that too hyperbolic?

Well, although it has been generally ignored by anything but the business press, eight executives of Chiquita Brands International admitted to paying $1.7 million to right-wing paramilitary death squads in war-torn Columbia during a period spanning 1997-2004.

Let's go over that again.

To keep the bananas flowing, to keep "leftists" from taking banana fields and to keep workers' rights activists from unionizing banana pickers, Chiquita Brands paid right-wing death squads to...ensure the "free and fair" trade of bananas. With guns. Automatic guns.

Do you think we'll invade Chiquita's Headquarters in Ohio for supporting terrorism? Well, it's not like they are Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, after all. Bush can give them a pass, right?

The company agreed to pay a $25 million dollar fine. I mean, c'mon, $25 million paid to the US Government is surely enough to offset the terrorism and killing done in the name of Americans' access to that phallic fruit.

Who cares if hundreds, if not thousands, of brown people had their peasant lives disrupted or ended by this terrorist campaign against the enemies of banana freedom? Because there is no chance that any of the $25 million will ever see it's way to those who suffered at the hands of Chiquita's plan to liberate bananas from Pinko anti-bananaists.

Of course, it does not do anyone any good to set off a round of recriminations. To that end, the agreement reached with Chiquita kept the names of those eight executives involved withheld from the public. Now, next time you "liberate" snack foods from a local Mini-Mart, perhaps using right-wing gangs to do your bidding, you can rest assured that your name will be withheld from the public. Let's just hope you can afford the fine. We know that Chiquita can.

The funny thing about this? It's been going on for decades.

The United Fruit Company is the paragon of death-squad free trade, the historical blueprint of covert use of violence to ensure free access to bananas. Back in the 1950s, Guatemala elected a dude named Arbenz who thought that the Guatemalan people should own the land of...well...Guatemala.

Silly man.

The United Fruit Company, of which the Bush family was a major shareholder, proposed the idea that Guatemalans owning Guatemala smacked of Communism. What to do? Well, they overthrew the elected government of Guatemala...thanks to their friends in the CIA...and they made sure that the free flow of bananas remained the backbone of anti-Communist nutrition in American bellies everywhere.

Really, it's true. CIA documents prove it. Hell, they've even bragged about it.

And it's even funnier than that! Chiquita's old name, prior to 1985? The United Fruit Company! Isn't that cool?

Now, in Columbia the stakes are even higher. Columbia is still the world's largest exporter of cocaine. During Bubba Clinton's Administration, they got Congress to agree to Plan Columbia...a multi-billion dollar plan to take back the coca fields from the "leftists" and put them in the hands of pro-American right-wingers and the Government of Columbia. Of course, the "Plan" was supposed to "liberate" the fields from evil Pinkos and end the production of coca leaves.

Didn't happen.

In fact, the Columbian government...considered the most pro-American government in South America...is in the middle of a huge scandal. The scandal? Oh...well...those right-wing paramilitary squads hired by Chiquita? It looks like right-wing paramilitary squads like them were linked to members of the parliament and to President Uribe's Administration. The self-same Uribe using American Plan Columbia dollars to fund the "fight against cocaine."

Oh yeah, Columbia also has a huge untapped oil fields, but there is no way that oil would be something we would kill people for...is it?

What's really happening with Plan Columbia is that we are funding right-wing cocaine kingpins who are friendly to America in their fight against cocaine kingpins who refuse to pay any tolls or tariffs to American drug masters...in other words, they were Commies. It's sorta like the deal "we" had with the Contras...they were allowed and assisted by the CIA in their drug-running ops during the 1980s by the CIA and members of the Iran-Contra team in the White House. In return for that help, they killed Commies. Seems like a fair trade. Get it? Fair trade.

So what if it led to the crack cocaine epidemic? Yes, there is empirical evidence for this. Read Gary Webb. Read about Freeway Ricky Ross and the Meneses Brothers. It's all there. That is, if you want to know.

So here we are, some fifty years later and Chiquita is doing the same damn thing that the United Fruit Company did. But dammit if we don't have the freedom to buy bananas each time we go to the supermarket.

Isn't free trade fun, even if it isn't close to being fair?

Sheikh Your Booty

It's an elegant dance, the Texas Two-Step Side-Step. So far, DubbaYou's Administration has danced around some of the most pernicious scandals in presidential history.

Enron. WMDgate. Abramoff. The Department of Interior. Plamegate.
And can you believe Halliburton is still the largest contractor in Iraq? It's sorta impressive when you think about the things they've gotten away with.

They keep on dancing, sliding around these and other impeachable and firing offenses like a young John Travolta at Gilley's. But, although they don't ride the mechanical bull...they do produce the bull mechanically. Like a factory.

The cleanest getaway may be 9/11. The unanswered questions are legion. The 9/11 Commission was the most compliant of dance partners, following the Administration's lead like a Texas Debutante.

Is it possible that they'd refuse to hear testimony that Prince Bandar, as in Bandar Bush, and his wife were funding Al Qaeda? Yes.

That they'd use that famous Texas Two-Step Side-Step to justify not telling us who put those pesky put options on American and United Airlines? Yes.

But putting aside fact that the 9/11 Commission's version of that fateful day is one of the most fanciful conspiracy theories ever concocted, the real boon to the Administration has been the dance partner they've embraced over and over again: Al Qaeda Evildoers--the Terrorism Two-Steppers they whirl out onto the public dancefloor every time they need a little misdirection.

The Miami Terror Plot, the Re-Killing of Al-Zarqawi, The NY Tunnel Plot, those exquisitely timed internet video releases from Bin Laden on servers we just can't seem to find...and don't forget that Terror Alert "Thermometer" they used to stick up our collective ass just to remind us to be scared. Hey, John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge coming at you with a rectal thermometer is enough to scare anyone.

This "Nexus of Terror and Politics," as it's been called, stretches the definition of coincidence. But it has, until recently, worked quite well. The White House danced around scandal after scandal by trotting out their latest terror jig and keeping us all off balance. So, is it surprising that just as US Attorney Firing-Gate was leading right into the White House and the email trail left by Rove that they'd hit the dancefloor with the Grand Confessor, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? It's been three years since they took him into their torturous bosom and now they got him confessing to everything but kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

When the story begins to terrorize the White House, they turn the story to terrorism.

It looks like the Sheikh was the best dance partner they've had yet...following their lead like a fawning Texas Debutante. The question is what would you confess to after three years of torture, sensory depravation and humiliation? Of course, the parts of the transcript where the Sheikh was asked about his being tortured are blacked out. So is much of the information he gave about the killing of Daniel Pearl. Which is strange, because you'd think they'd want this hot-button example of Evildoing exposed in full...getting the maximum effect. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Pearl was in India working on another, very damaging story when he got the "out of the blue" call to meet with Al Qaeda's braintrust. He was digging into a huge Enron scandal in India...a multi-billion dollar boondoggle Kenny Boy had perpetrated on the Indians.

Another misdirection, perhaps?

It's hard to tell anymore. The Two-Step Side-Stepping has had the media in such a whirl for so long that reality and perception management became indistinguishable. And the media was, for years, paying the piper while they did his dance. Can't risk coddling terrorists by asking our leaders hard questions. Can't risk losing access to the propaganda. To the Bull Mechanism.

However, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession, which includes a bombing plot on a bank that had not even been founded when he was captured, is not working the same dancefloor magic of previous fleet footed flurries. This time the media is not dazzled, which is refreshing. Not that they are asking questions about the impact of torture, or why it has become so tacitly acceptable to so many. Or why we didn't get anything that would lead us to bin Laden. But it's a long-overdue start.

Now, the question that hangs out there like the Hindenburg over New Jersey is whether or not people will begin to look back and see if we've all been swung around since these Unitary Executives came into office. It seems like an eternity ago, but the questions--about Bandar, about Bin Laden investments in the Carlyle Group and DubbaYou's first company Arbusto, the money funneled by the Head of Pakistani Intelligence to Mohammed Atta, Marvin Bush's role in the company handling security for the World Trade Center, Dulles and the airlines in question--they are a pertinent as ever. There is quite a bit of Terrorism Two-Stepping we need to retrace. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is, for the purposes of mis-directing us from another potentially impeachable and certainly firing-able offense against the US Constitutional and judicial systems, a perfect follower of Karl's lead. Can Karl dance his way out of this? Perhaps.

There is a glimmer, though, reflecting off the great Disco Ball...mirroring back to us a faint image of what's happened: false terror alerts, torture and extraordinary rendition...and the false flags under which so much has been done.

Media-ocracy....aren't You as Mad as Hell?

What is news? And why do we just call the whole damn blathering mess "the media"?

Is the message the media itself, as Marshall McLuhan famously said?

God help us if it is...because the media is morass of prurient details, bogus scarefests and misanthropic misdirections. It's hard to find "news" in between all those Astronauts in Diapers, Amber Alerts and endless political babbling by putrid pundits who claim to actually know something about something. Whatever that may or may not be.

At this moment, CNN is airing wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith dropping dead.

As one CNN anchor said to another, "It's tragic...because she did make great television."

A.J. Hammer, the other anchor, replied, "Yes, it was great television because it was train-wreck television."

And then Hammer re-regurgitated all the details of her sordid, perhaps even tragic, life to Wolf Blitzer, keeping the coverage going and going and going.

What the hell has happened to the media? Where the hell is the news?

Real news.

For example:

...mounting death and destruction in Iraq and the total collapse of the surge strategy before it even starts...and, by the way, there are tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Iraq, leaving their broken homes and picking up their broken families and fleeing the "liberation." Has that been on CNN today?

...$8 billion worth of hundred-dollar bills, packaged by the US Treasury and shipped to Iraq after the Great Liberation, is missing...gone...like a cheap magic trick by a cheap kiddie party magician. Viola, taxpayer…now you see it, now you don’t

...Merck is pushing its HPV drug on the entire pre-teen female population of the United States by attempting to make it a mandatory vaccination which, at approximately $300 per shot, is poised to be one of the greatest drug deals of all time.

...the NAFTA Superhighway being built from Texas all the way to Canada which, by the way, is going to be one giant toll road...mostly owned by foreign companies. Huh?

...or the fact we still haven't caught the anthrax attacker, owe 45% of our national debt to foreign banks and nations...and on and on and on.

No. We get day after day of the Diapered Astronaut. Perhaps NASA can get Depends to sponsor a Space Shuttle, like NASCAR. Now we will get endless hours of Nicole-Anna-SmithTV. We get Amber Alerts aplenty...giving us the impression of rampant child abductions despite FBI statistics that show abductions have fallen every year for over a decade.

We get Lindsay Lohan's latest drinking binge or rehab visit, but Lara Logan...just as pretty...but far more trenchant...is unable to get CBS to air her reports from Iraq. That's right, she actually had to organize a media campaign to pressure her own media employer to air the news she was reporting from Iraq on their dime.

Somewhere along the way the news we grew up watching mutated into a freakshow...with national networks covering “breaking” local news like apartment fires, car chases, small-time crime in small town America. Fine fodder for the affiliate in Peoria, but worth hours and hours of national coverage?

No, like Paddy Chayefsky’s foreboding anchor in the movie Network, we should all be “mad as hell.”



One might think we are being conditioned to live in fear, to ogle at the misfortunes of various and sundry people...and, in the timeless process of misdirection, to accept less news so we accept more injustice, more organized corruption.

Many media folks think it’s the viewers who want less. The lowest common denominator is the commoner in front of the TV set, choosing the course obediently followed by their dutiful servants in corporate offices at all the major networks, newsrooms and movie studios

But Rupert Murdoch let the cat out of the bag at the Hyper-Elite Conclave Called Davos.

Asked if his News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: "No, I don't think so. We tried." Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: "We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution."

Now, had it been an actual cat, in an actual bag...lit on fire and placed in the lap of a stripper? Hell, it might have made national headlines.

But…no.

It came and went, like a cool breeze gently and inconspicuously blowing a no-bid Halliburton contract from Cheney's office to the Pentagon. One would think that a big-time mogul admitting intended manipulation of the news would, at least, make news.

Network’s fictional anchor Howard Beale, after being used, duped and suckered into a corporate-ized newscast said it best:


Like Howard Beale, we've been had. Duped. Conditioned to accept more and more of less and less. And it is conditioning by the gatekeepers, the editors and the corporate boarders who decide what we, the people, want and need and can handle. We can’t, according to many of them, handle the truth.

But people aren't totally stupid. Parents, in a recent poll, said they are more afraid of the media's influence on their children than of their children having sex. Well, that and the fear their kid might get fat (between endless food commercials and non-stop “skinny is best” messages, what’s a kid to do?).

They’re basically, right, though because the media is filled with more sex and violence than an orgy at an Ultimate Fighter afterparty.

The always over-hyped commercials during the generously-timed Super Bowl were, this year, filled with "pain and humiliation." It stood out from the hard helmet on helmet impacts during the game...products pitched with all sorts of petty violence, humorless jabs at humanity and that “whatever/so what” cynicism that dominates sitcoms and newscasts. Widgets sold to those looking for the big laugh at the expense of others and captivating gasping rubberneckers who love a good car crash.

Is that who we are now? Is that the message of our media?

Sometimes it’s easy to despair of it all. On the media side, trying to break news through the semi-permeable barrier of elitism that dominates places like D.C. can eventually break you. Or me. Or both.

D.C. is L.A., but the celebrities have the power of life and death in their hands. And their hands in your pockets.

Those of us in this morass we call the media take solace in lunches, exchanging war stories and decrying the shortsightedness of executives who “fail upwards,” refuse to think that their viewers can think. We spin eulogies over drinks. But many of us give up. Many have and many more will if they start out in their “careers” thinking the media is anything more than a whore for corporate interests.

And those who play pimp? They become media moguls, just ask Rupert.

Blowing Out the Surge Protector

The Surge.

It sounds so sexy. So overwhelming. So forceful.

But, for an administration that ignored General Shinseki's admonitions about troop requirements, it's hard to figure what they figure will happen when they surge up to 50,000 troops into a war-torn, incessantly-bombed and now-failed state like Iraq.

Or is it?

Perhaps there is a logical answer to why "they" are moving ahead with a plan that most of their GOP compatriots, except McCain and Lieberman (yes, folks...Joe is a de facto Republican now) in the House and Senate refuse to endorse.

Iran.

Yup, it's gotta be Iran.

A second Carrier Task Force is steaming towards the Gulf. Submarines abound. Fly-overs being secured. Special Forces gallivanting around the Iranian countryside. A surge is coming...to fight the in-surge-ncy.

And the "Iran is behind the insurgency" mantra is being chanted in the media so often that DC is beginning to feel like an ashram.

The media buzz is all about whether we are going to attack Iran, as if it's in question. Isn't it strangely reminiscent of the media's meaningless navel-gazing about questions regarding WMDs in Iraq before that attack?

No, the debate is being framed. A faux debate. The overall message is one of Iran as bad guy.

In fact, a group calling itself the American Foreign Policy Council is showing "Iran is evil" commercials during CNN broadcasts...roughly one per hour. Only in the DC area, though.

Take a look at what DC'ers are seeing everyday:


And this is the text of a similar American Foreign Policy Council ad clogging up the minutes between CNN's live shots of apartment fires, car chases and celebrity gossip:

The nuclear clock is ticking… and time is running out.

Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism - supporting attacks that have killed hundreds of Americans.

An Iranian group boasts 25,000 members who are ready to become suicide bombers in the US and Europe.

Now, in violation of the UN, Iran is developing a dangerous nuclear capability and has threatened to share it with others.

Stand up for peace. Call the White House and tell them to enforce sanctions against Iran today.

Check this "council" and what they are obsessed with...which reads like another Neo-Con laundry list of imperial pretexts.

What does this have to do with the surge?

Everything.

The surge is a great way to get additional troops into Iraq to deal with the backlash…the oh-so predictable chaos surge that will occur once the bombs start dropping around Iran.

It is likely that many of the surged troops will be protecting the Iran-Iraq border from friendly confines of the string of permanent bases we've quietly, at least to the tin ears of our mainstream media, been building since day one of Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Oops! Not O.I.L.

No, after reflecting on the intrinsic irony of that acronym it was re-named Operation Iraq Freedom. O.I.F.

Yeah, that’s much less...FUBAR.

Hey, when it comes to propaganda, a little goes a long way.

Frankly, the impending fun and games with Iran should surprise no one. Really. No one.

The groundwork has been laid since Bush's post 9/11 State of the Union, “Axis of Evil” speech. In fact, even earlier than that.

But now we have the lives of our boys and girls on the line. The Iranians are, according to the Bush Ashram, responsible for the deaths of American troops with their sophisticated I.E.D.s, their advanced planning capabilities...all fueled by their hatred of our ability to watch American Idol, eat Cheetos and burp up aspartame sodas. Yes, it's true...the Koran, via the Old Testament, forbids idolatry. Perhaps even American Idolatry.

So that's why they hate us!

I guess it has nothing to do with our protectorate over the Saudis and the long-standing conflict between the Western-loving, gold-plated despotism of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. A people who could not be motivated by our intervention in their democracy back in 1953. Or by the Shah's Savak...a brutal Gestapo-type internal police force that enforced the rule of our Puppet Regime.

Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that Iraqis have been dying by the thousands since we invaded their country.

It’s not that Iraqis want us out.

It's that Iran is using Iraq to challenge our benevolent, democratic protectorate over the Persian Gulf. To stop the Iraqi people from practicing their own form of American Idolatry.

That’s the Kool Aid…would you like ice with that?

So take this surge for what it is and realize what it isn't. It's a Trojan Horse solution to the amazing disarray and death we've unleashed in Iraq. Really, it's a subterfuged way inside the gates of Hell...a Hell we are going to unleash on yet another country in the Middle East. It's a protection racket for our anti-democratic, beheading-friendly and summary-executing compatriots in Saudi Arabia.

And Israel gets some dirty work done, too. It's a two-fer!

But it isn't going to solve the mess we call Iraq. No, it’s simply going to increase the death and destruction of Iraq as we widen the war. Iraq, alas, it as the crossroads of the Bush Ashram's Roadmap for a New Way Forward, for a re-made Middle East.

Fire up the bulldozers, we've still got work to do...re-making the map of the Middle East is a multi-generational affair. The surge will help to make us the protector.

Let’s just hope the Iraqis appreciate it before it blows us all out.

The Lame Duck and Cover President

It's happened quite often in American politics. A president faces the last two years of his presidency with a hostile Congress, fully or partially controlled by the other party.

That "divided government” situation will, according to the Lame Duck Axiom, disable the president's ability to get much, if anything, done. His wing broken, the president is left with only the Bully Pulpit and agenda-bending compromises at his disposal.

There is no re-election to win. Scant legacy-burnishing legislation to pass. He's a wounded duck on the pond...and the guns are trained on him.

The big sweep by Democrats in November clipped W's wings. In fact, his Right Wing is almost gone. He is bobbing in the troubled waters on unpopularity, surrounded on all sides by political hunters in Congress and, because of massive budget deficits and a messy war, he is increasingly separated from his flock of conservative supporters.

The election was a rebuke, and it's logical to assume that many people voted, or skipped their turn to vote, because they wanted to disable the presidency. Americans opted for divided government so as to clip Bush's high-flying, Icarus-like agenda to remake the Middle East and reshape Governmental agencies into cash machines for wealthy contributors.

W, it would seem, is the ultimate Lame Duck. Right?

Wrong!

In fact, he is now liberated...freed from the constraints of feigned conservatism, exempt from the pressure of elections and re-elections. He has nothing left to win. The flipside? He has nothing to lose, either.

His true colors, painted the in the dark grays of shadowy Neo-Conservatism, are now in full bloom. Iraq is neutralized. Caught up in civil war, Iraqis are killing Iraqis...saving us from the unseemly task of having to kill them all ourselves. The chaos in Iraq serves its purpose, as stated by Neo-Cons on the Project for A New American Century website. It will keep us there for generations, establishing a permanent military presence in the Middle East. If Iraq were to break out in peace, love and understanding we'd be hard-pressed to stay.

But that was merely the predicate. The subject is Iran. Iran is the target, and has been for some time. The bombing campaign was designed a while ago with approximately 1000 targets in mind. US Special Forces have been creeping around Iran for three years. There are covert and overt attempts to gin-up support for anti-government forces within the country...setting the stage for mass demonstrations by students and youngsters that will, in the Neo-Con fantasy, destabilize the Iranian regime.

And then there are the Carrier task groups (officially, there are two) deployed to the Persian Gulf and the submarines that skulk beneath those massive displays of force and intention.

But the most stunning evidence that Bush is not the Lame Duck so many want him to be is the "re-shuffling" immediately after the election. An old Iran-Contra vet, Poppy loyalist and intelligence-bending CIA agent was brought in to "relieve" Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was so detested that Robert Gates was a breath of fresh air, even though he's blowing the same smoke up our collective asses that Rummy did. Gates has been subtly bellicose regarding Iran and his arrival in the Pentagon may be the finishing touch on the six-year process of transferring covert ops from the CIA to the Pentagon.

Next? Admiral William Fallon was brought in to head up CENTCOM. CENTCOM is defense-speak shorthand for US Central Command, the regional headquarters covering the Middle East. Yeah, North America is not the "central command" of our US military…it's the Middle East. Isn't that strange?

So Fallon, a Naval Aviator and well-established Neo-Con, has been brought in at a propitious time. That is, if one plans on attacking Iran.

Why?

Any attack on Iran will be fought in the air and on the water. No, there will not be an invasion. A massive bombing campaign will trigger a naval reaction by Iran, as they deploy their sizable fleet of small attack boats to cut off oil exports from the Persian Gulf. This sort of fight is an Admiral's bathtub dream...a chance to play in real-time scenarios once done while mommy scrubbed his back.

Congress is moving to pre-emptively strike what many are seeing as the next step in Bush's doctrine of Pre-Emptive War. Journalists and opinioneers are blathering about Bush’s bellicosity as he uses the Bully Pulpit, the last redoubt of the Lame Duck President, to be the biggest bully on the Middle East’s block.

But this has all been coming for years. It's been planned and talked about in Neo-Con circles and at their Fortress of Solitude within the American Enterprise Institute. It's part of the Project for a New American Century's "vision" of a 21st Century run on American military power. It's part of AIPAC's vision of an American protectorate in the region.

Look, traditional axioms of American politics have been, since the Reichstag-esque tipping point we call 9/11, jettisoned in favor of new axioms of Executive action. While Bush lost the Congress, he still has a grip on the courts. The grip has loosened a bit, but when key issues of Executive action get to the Supreme Court, he's got a vanguard of "Unitary Executive" believers who can give him the right to act, even though Congress might try to shoot him down.

The collective sigh of relief that came after Bush was transformed into a "Lame Duck" fits nicely into the black hole of conventional wisdom we've all been sucked into. The axioms and traditions we still cling to mean little or nothing to the Bush Presidency. In fact, those "truisms" are decoys...drawing the flock a little closer while Cheney is loading his gun. Guess who gonna get shot in the face?

Quite frankly, our President really doesn't care what Congress or the American people think. Not really. He never has. And it's the consent of the governed, and the loss of that consent, that transforms a president into a Lame Duck.

So we yammer on about decoys like "surges" and "new ways forward," bipartisanship and working together, changes in personnel and our well-managed perceptions. Meanwhile, our Lame Duck-in-Chief is using them as cover for the continued implementation of a plan that has been two decades in the making. The Surge is a convenient way to bolster forces in anticipation of a bombing campaign and possible cross-border action with Iran. The New Way Forward is a catchy and meaningless talking point. Personnel moves have shuffled more Neo-Cons into the deck. Rhetoric gets hotter every day, as Iran...and Syria...are pointed to as the primary obstacles to the latent democracy we imposed on Iraq.

Public opinion and Congressional maneuvers may look like the brakes are being applied, but the Unitary Executive has, according to Team Bush's thinking, the ultimate say-so on matters of war and peace.

It may be time for us to duck and cover, because this Presidency is anything but lame.

Bush 41 in the CIA? It's not Poppycock!

They do not confirm or deny.

It's company policy.

“The Company" is what CIA agents affectionately call the shadowy agency and, in an effort to "protect" operatives, they refuse to confirm an agent's identity or deny whether or not someone works for The Company.

Except when George Hebert Walker Bush is the person in question.


The CIA has long denied that Poppy Bush was a CIA agent. Despite his Skull and Bones past. Despite the historical ties between the Dulles Brothers, Allen being the first CIA director, and the Bush family. Despite the fact that Poppy was appointed CIA Director in 1976 at a crucial juncture...just as the Church Commission was shedding a glaring light on the darkest of The Company's business: mind control experiments, infiltration of the news media by agents, assassinations, drug experiments on unwitting civilians and more.

And, in what must be the strangest of all predicates for a continued denial of Poppy's CIA career, the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was renamed the “George Bush Center for Intelligence” in 1999.

What? How can that be? How can a guy who never served in The Company's ranks and spent just under a year as CIA director get a whole building named after him?

It's like re-naming Yankee Stadium for Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson because they pitched there for a couple years. Not the House that Ruth Built, but the House that Roger or Randy Built.

No one in the media ever questioned why Langley was re-named for one of the CIA most famous non-members. No one called it the House that Poppy Built.

It's a non-starter...questioning the family history of the Bushes and their history of covert hijinx.

Just ask Kitty Kelley.

She wrote a well-researched, multiple-sourced account of "The Family" and didn't get one media interview or one nationally televised opportunity to plug her amazing book on one of America's most important political families.

Larry King cancelled. The Today Show cancelled.

Why?

How can she get multiple chances to expose the Uber-icons of the GOP, the Reagans, as astrology-obsessed weirdoes on shows like Larry King, but couldn't get a minute of airtime to tell us about the Bushes?

Why? Because the Bush family is a no-go zone. Nothing on W's cocaine party days. Nothing on the family’s association and financial dealings with Rev. Moon. Nothing on Neil Bush's soap opera divorce. Nothing.

The key to understanding the Bush family requires understanding Poppy's role in the CIA. A role often ignored, continually denied and deftly obfuscated.

Yet, circumstantial evidence abounds and key documents are there to be perused.

The Nation bravely tried to inject the issue into the 1988 Presidential Campaign, but it was never picked up by the media.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans remain ignorant of the covert actions, system-bending tendencies and financial jury-rigging of the Bush Clan...a pattern that dates back to Prescott Bush and his days on Wall Street in the late 1920s.

For those who've done some digging, it looks like the history of the Bush family is intertwined with much of the history of America. You can't fully understand American history without knowing something about the wheeling-dealing Bush family.

Now, new documents have peeled back the curtain…offering yet another peek into Poppy's CIA career.

Although you won't find this in the NY Times or on CNN.

Take a look at this article:
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

…or scroll down to read the full text and find links to the documents the article cites.

But it’s still just a taste of what is known but never mentioned in by “journalists” and “reporters.” Researchers, authors and alternative journalists have done the work and dug up some interesting tidbits about the man called Poppy.

Take a look at these fun facts:

He made a phone call to the FBI’s Dallas office (there is a written record of this) on the morning of JFK's assassination stating that a "radical student" was going to make an attempt on JFK's life that day.

During his short time as Director of the CIA (less than a year), logs show that he went into the CIA's JFK assassination files more than any other Director of Central Intelligence. He was all over those files, despite the fact he said when asked in an interview that he couldn’t recall where he was the day JFK was murdered. Wow, isn’t that strange?

The Bay of Pigs was codenamed Operation Zapata, and the two support boats called the "Houston" and the "Barbara J."

His family had large sugar growing interests in Cuba that were nationalized by Castro. Where in Cuba was this agribusiness? On the Zapata Plain.

Poppy speaks fluent Spanish, by the way.

His long association with Felix Rodriguez...a Bay of Pigs veteran some believe Poppy "turned" into an asset. Strangely enough Felix was on still on CIA's the payroll in the 80s and part of Iran-Contra.

His family had a large investment in the United Fruit Company, which had huge agricultural interests in Guatemala. In 1954, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. A government that, strangely enough, wanted to nationalize its banana plantations. You know...turn over much of the land used to grow bananas and other agricultural products to help the people of Guatemala...the people actually living and working on the land. That operation unleashed to a civil war that lasted over thirty years and claimed tens of thousands of lives, mostly civilians.

Then there is his feud with Ross Perot over POW/MIAs in Vietnam. That's a helluva story...which the cowards at 60 Minutes refused to run. They had Perot, who had been appointed POW Czar by Reagan, in a taped interview recounting his confrontation of V.P. Poppy. Poppy was the point-man on intel, and Perot’s investigation into our lost soldiers led to revelations about CIA drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, the CIA’s use of men listed as POWs and MIAs in that enterprise...and Poppy's knowledge of both. When the story was killed by CBS the producer quit and wrote "Kiss the Boys Goodbye."

How about strong circumstantial evidence regarding Poppy’s part in both the October Surprise and Iran-Contra.

Again, he was the acknowledged "point-man" on all intelligence issues in Reagan's Administration.

But he, like the Gipper, knew nothing about Iran-Contra?

Yeah, sure.

He knew enough to pardon:
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Duane R. Clarridge, Clair E. George, Robert C. McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and Alan G. Fiers Jr.

Each of these players had been indicted and/or convicted of charges by the Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh.

Variations on that theme include:

Poppy Bush giving “executive clemency” to Aslam P. Adam, a convicted heroin dealer.

Poppy Bush pardoning Orlando Bosch, another anti-Castro guy…a terrorist who was linked to the bombing of Mackey Airlines in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Oh yeah, Bosch was previously convicted of firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbor.

And what about the strange coincidence that John Hinckley, Sr. was, according to FEC records, a long-time contributor to Poppy's political campaigns? Or that they were neighbors in Houston and the families had long-standing social ties? Or what about the acknowledged fact that Scott Hinckley was scheduled to meet with Neil Bush the day Reagan was shot...to talk to Neil about Vanderbilt Oil's "tax issues" and SEC issues that needed fixing? And then there is the oddity of all oddities that had John Hinckley, Jr. been successful...Poppy would've been President. Really...it's all true.

Lastly, but not leastly…remember Poppy's "No Quid Pro Quo" dealings with Manuel Noriega?

Noreiga was a key player in laundering drug money from the burgeoning cocaine trade of the 1980s. Noriega was “Our Man” in Panama and he allowed CIA planes to refuel at an airport outside Panama City…planes like the one flown by Eugene Hasenfuss. Hasenfuss was part of a Contra gun and drug running operation that the CIA was tacitly, sometimes explicitly, participating in. Hasenfuss was shot down, tipping over the first domino that exposed the operation and led to the Iran-Contra Scandal. The dominoes never quite made it up the chain of command, though.

When Noriega became a bit of an embarrassment, Poppy ordered the military to invade Panama, killing a couple thousand civilians and capturing Pineapple Face, as Panamanians called him. He was put on trial. His trial was a farce. All of the witnesses his defense called, mostly CIA agents, were denied by the judge on the grounds of “national security.” Noriega is currently rotting in a Miami jail, his story never told. His conviction silenced him and kept him from telling us about the “quid pro quo” he made with Poppy.

So, here we are...with a large number of men…the Secret Team of covert players…filling the ranks of W’s Administration.

Abrams, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter, McFarlane, Negroponte, Otto Reich, Wolfowitz, Perle…all men who’ve been linked to the Uber-Agent…the CEO of “The Company”…good old Poppy Bush.

If you find yourself perplexed by what’s happening around you, take a peek behind the curtain and examine the life and times of the Wizard--Poppy. His life runs parallel to the events that have shaped the United States over the last fifty years. He can be, if you look hard enough, a Rosetta Stone for decoding recent American history.

So, here’s the full article. Take a peek and enjoy!

Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.

While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.

The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.

Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.

Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."

When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.

It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.

"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good."

In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”

This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.

Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.

Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.

George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.

The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”

The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.

Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]