In Case You Missed It: Bush, Cheney And The CIA

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

-- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

First a bit of recent history from the archives:

A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001. The blueprint for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.

The PNAC report also describes peace-keeping missions as 'demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations'.

The Plan was published in unclassified form under the title Defense Strategy for the 1990s, (pdf) as Cheney ended his term as Secretary of Defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993.

Compare that with news this week from the Los Angeles Times, looking at Cheney's long war with the CIA.

Still with me? OK, now add to that mix the dark past of former CIA head, George H.W. Bush. For example:

In 1980, with the Republican Party desperate to regain power, then-vice presidential nominee Bush allegedly joined other senior Republicans in secret talks with the radical Iranian government, obstructing President Jimmy Carter's attempts to win the release of 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Carter’s failure paved the way for Ronald Reagan's election, followed by the release of the hostages on Reagan's Inauguration Day.

Later, the elder Bush became enmeshed in other secret negotiations with Iran, the illegal Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme. But he was always careful to cover his tracks. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in fall 1986, Bush asserted that he was "not in the loop." He then got help from Representatives Dick Cheney and Henry Hyde, who protected Bush’s political flanks as the investigation wound through Congress in 1987.

By the time the elder Bush secured the Republican nomination for president in 1988, his role in the Iran-Contra scandal had been carefully concealed from the voters and was treated as "old news" by much of the U.S. news media.

In 1992, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh uncovered evidence that proved George H.W. Bush was very much in the loop on the arms-for-hostages operation and had misled the American people. But Bush stanched further disclosures about his secret involvement with Iran’s fundamentalist government by pardoning a half dozen Iran-Contra defendants on Dec. 24, 1992.

OK, now let's go way, way back... A real search for the connections between the Bush family and the CIA will take you right back to Allen Welsh Dulles, first head of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, who later became US Secretary of State. The Dulles brothers gained fame and fortune by acting as the key financial and legal link betwen rich US families and 1930's Nazi industrialists.

As the New York Times reported back on May 20th, 1933:

Within 5 months of Hitler achieving power, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hitler’s Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht and J F Dulles.

As a result of this, the Harriman International Co. - under Oliver Harriman (Averell’s first cousin) - formed a syndicate of 150 firms/individuals to conduct all exports from Germany to America. It should be noted here that the two Dulles brothers, partners in the corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had acted for many Nazi enterprises during and after this period, including I. G. Farben, developer of the nerve gas, Tabun; SKF, supplier of 60% of its bearings to Germany; and the Schroeder Banking house, of which Allen Welsh Dulles became a director of its New York branch, a post he held until 1944.

Here's the Bush family angle in all this:

Brown Brothers Harriman's affiliate Union Bank- of which Prescott Bush was director- invested huge sums of money into Thyssen Steel, the backbone of Nazi steel production...

In 1937, while director of Union Bank, Prescott Bush (George's grandfather) hired Allen Dulles to cloak his accounts. Allen obviously didn't do that great of a job because in 1942 the U.S. Alien Property Custodian froze Union Bank’s accounts. Coincidentally, Allen Dulles was appointed U.S. Intelligence Chief in post-war Germany while he was also the lawyer representing Thyssen's bank in Holland. This ensuing cover-up may have saved Prescott from further penalty stemming from proper investigation. In 1951, Prescott Bush reclaimed Union Bank from the U.S. Alien Property Custodian, and went on to represent Connecticut in the Senate.

Prescott Bush was later fined under the Trading With The Enemy act [as everybody knows, right???] after President Roosevelt, realizing Dulles was a traitor, had his New York "Office of Coordinator of Information" wire-tapped. Roosevelt also planned to charge Dulles with treason, but this plan failed when Dulles was warned by powerful friends and covered his tracks. Roosevelt's plan died with him.

Now do a Google search (click here) for "Brown Brothers Harriman" + Bush, then look at the name of the top Halliburton subsidiary in Iraq today, KBR or Kellog, Brown and Root. Get the idea now?

Browns, Walkers, Bushs, Harrimans... Mobsters dressed in suits and shiny shoes.

If all this is news to you, and you voted Bush in the last election or even the one before that, perhaps you should have educated yourself a bit better before you gave these bastards the key to the White House.

UPDATE: Here's a little timeline loop I have put together to show how these things work (info sourced here):

In 1962, Halliburton bought Brown & Root, a giant Houston-based construction company.

In 1991, while he was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration, Cheney secretly hired Halliburton´s Brown & Root subsidiary to do a study on the privatization of military logistics operations. This study established the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, which gave its first general contract to—Brown & Root.

When George H.W. Bush left office in January 1993, Cheney spent some time at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, and then in 1995, joined Halliburton as president and chief executive. Cheney added chairman to his titles in 1996, and ran the company until August 2000, when he stepped down to run for Vice President. And during that 1995-2000 period, one dollar of every seven spent by the Pentagon, passed through what is now Kellogg Brown & Root!

In 1998, Halliburton bought Dresser Industries for some $7.7 billion. The deal was clinched by Dick Cheney.

Dresser Industries was founded by Solomon Dresser in 1880, and taken over in 1928 by W.H. Harriman & Company.

Dresser was a Skull & Bones shop, whose board included Bonesman and presidential father and grandfather Prescott Bush.

Both Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush were directors of Union Banking Corp. when it was raided by Federal agents in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, for its dealings on behalf of Nazi Germany.

Dick Cheney is not a Bonesman himself, having dropped out of Yale in his sophomore year, but the Skull & Bones roster contains at least nine Cheneys, more than nearly any other family.