Poppy throws CHEENEE/Rums under the bus but I still don't like Poppy

[UTUSN]

*********QUOTE********

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/05/us-usa-politics-bush-idUSKCN0SU05620151105?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews
[font size=5]Former President George H.W. Bush raps Cheney, Rumsfeld in biography: Fox News[/font]

Former President George H.W. Bush takes some unexpected swipes at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, key members of his son's administration, over their reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, in a new biography of the 41st president, Fox News reported on Wednesday. ....

Speaking of Cheney, who was vice president under President George W. Bush, the senior Bush said: "I don't know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," according to the report. .....

"The reaction (to Sept. 11), what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East," Bush told Meacham in the book to be published next Tuesday.

Bush believes Cheney acted too independently of his son by creating a national security team in his own office, and may have been influenced to become more conservative by his wife and daughter, Lynne and Liz Cheney, the report cites the biography as saying.

On Rumsfeld, secretary of defense for most of the two terms served by his son, Bush is even more critical. He is quoted as saying: "I don't like what he did, and I think it hurt the President," referring to his son.

"I've never been that close to him anyway. There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow," he was quoted as saying in the biography. ....

*************UNQUOTE*************

[dflprincess]

1. He's trying to protect junior by taking swipes at these two

and no doubt thinks it will help Jebbers as well.

[UTUSN]

2. Ain't it funny how he (now), RAYGUN, CASEY, et al., never remembered stuff - plus that

WOODWARD was a young *intelligence* agent and "interviewed" CASEY on a coma/bed?!1

[Rex]

7. The convenient death of Casey was the first red flag for me to realize

The GOP will do what ever it takes to stay in power. What ever it takes. Those folks are as evil as they come and have fooled way too many people.

[gratuitous]

4. That's my reading as well

Sounds like Daddy Bush doesn't think Sonny Bush was in all that much control of his own administration. I wonder, though, if Daddy has anything to say about his lame-duck middle-of-the-night on Christmas Eve pardons of his accomplices in Iran/Contra? Strange how a national media that remembers every jot and tittle of the minutiae of the Democrats - in some cases, whether they happened or not - never remember Poppy's Pardons?

[JHB]

16. Not strange at all...

Only one side makes it a point to constantly "work the refs".

[PatrickforO]

3. I have just two words to offer regarding W, Rumsfeld and Cheney...

WAR

CRIMINALS

[valerief]

5. Some of us remember YOU bombing Iraq, Poppy. nt

[Rex]

8. Some of us remember Poppy telling Saddam to Drill Baby Drill!

And as soon as he did, Poppy pretended Saddam went rogue and started the Gulf War. The Bush family sure is good at starting wars based on lies told. Good at getting innocent people killed and ruining the lives of countless families.

[Octafish]

18. Some of us remember YOU arming Iraq, Poppy.

We've been at war with Iraq for so long, two generations have grown up never knowing the answer, seeing how it's never on the tee vee or discussed in history class.



The truth from William Safire, Tom Lantos (D-California) and Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas):

THE ADMINISTRATION'S IRAQ GATE SCANDAL

BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Congressional Record
Extension of Remarks - May 19, 1992
Washington

Americans now know that the war in the Persian Gulf was brought about by a colossal foreign-policy blunder: George Bush's decision, after the Iran-Iraq war ended, to entrust regional security to Saddam Hussein.

What is not yet widely understood is how that benighted policy led to the Bush Administration's fraudulent use of public funds, its sustained deception of Congress and its obstruction of justice.

As the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, was urging Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to buy the friendship of the Iraqi dictator in August 1989, the F.B.I. uncovered a huge scam at the Atlanta branch of the Lavoro Bank to finance the buildup of Iraq's war machine by diverting U.S.-guaranteed grain loans.

Instead of pressing the investigation or curbing the appeasement, the President turned a blind eye to lawbreaking and directed another billion dollars to Iraq. Our State and Agriculture Department's complicity in Iraq's duplicity transformed what could have been dealt with as `Saddam's Lavoro scandal' into George Bush's Iraqgate.

The first element of corruption is the wrongful application of U.S. credit guarantees. Neither the Commodity Credit Corporation nor the Export-Import Bank runs a foreign-aid program; their purpose is to stimulate U.S. exports. High-risk loan guarantees to achieve foreign-policy goals unlawful endanger that purpose.

Yet we now know that George Bush personally leaned on Ex-Im to subvert its charter--not to promote our exports but to promote relations with the dictator. And we have evidence that James Baker overrode worries in Agriculture and O.M.B. that the law was being perverted: Mr. Baker's closest aid, Robert Kimmett, wrote triumphantly, `your call to . . . Yeutter . . . paid off.' Former Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter is now under White House protection.

Second element of corruption is the misleading of Congress. When the charge was made two years ago in this space that State was improperly intervening in this case, Mr. Baker's top Middle East aide denied it to Senate Foreign Relations; meanwhile, Yeutter aides deceived Senator Leahy's Agriculture Committee about the real foreign-policy purpose of the C.C.C. guarantees. To carry out Mr. Bush's infamous National Security Directive 26, lawful oversight was systematically blinded.

Third area of Iraqgate corruption is the obstruction of justice. Atlanta's assistant U.S. Attorney Gail McKenzie, long blamed here for foot-dragging, would not withhold from a grand jury what she has already told friends: that indictment of Lavoro officials was held up for nearly a year by the Bush Criminal Division. The long delay in prosecution enabled James Baker to shake credits for Saddam out of malfeasant Agriculture appointees.

When House Banking Chairman Henry Gonzalez gathered documents marked `secret' showing this pattern of corruption, he put them in the Congressional Record. Two months later, as the media awakened, Mr. Bush gave the familiar `gate' order; stonewall.

`Public disclosure of classified information harms the national security,' Attorney General William Barr instructed the House Banking Committee last week. `. . . in light of your recent disclosures, the executive branch will not provide any more classified information'--unless the wrongdoing is kept secret.

`Your threat to withhold documents,' responded Chairman Gonzalez, `has all the earmarks of a classic effort to obstruct a proper and legitimate investigation . . . none of the documents compromise, in any fashion whatsoever, the national security or intelligence sources and methods.'

Mr. Barr, in personal jeopardy, has flung down the gauntlet. Chairman Gonzalez tells me he plans to present his obstruction case this week to House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, probably flanked by Representatives Charles Schumer and Barney Frank, members of both committees.

`I will recommend that Judiciary consider requiring the appointment of an independent counsel,' says Mr. Gonzalez, who has been given reason to believe that Judiciary--capable of triggering the Ethics in Government Act--will be persuaded to act.

Policy blunders are not crimes. But perverting the purpose of appropriated funds is a crime; lying to Congress compounds that crime; and obstructing justice to cover up the original crime is a criminal conspiracy.

SOURCE: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920519l.htm

William Safire was almost alone in the Corporate Owned Media of 1992 tying George Herbert Walker Bush to the illegal arming of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact, very few liberal and almost zero conservative voices have dared oppose the Bush bandwagon, let alone the War Party. The story, read by the late Representative Tom Lantos (D-California), into the Congressional Record (public domain), Amazing stuff. Still...not much else worth remembering, besides how few Democrats stood with Gonzalez.

More, from back in the day: Know Your BFEE: Poppy’s CIA Made Saddam Into the Butcher of Baghdad.

PS: Thank you for the inspiration, valerief. Hope you don't mind me piling on. I'm in one of those moods today.

[Downwinder]

6. Thought Cheney was following Poppy's lead as VP.

[bemildred]

9. Just hang them all and be done with it. nt

[malaise]

10. All I know is that Poppy was the only head of the CIA to become President

Bad bad bad

[Octafish]

12. In between, he ''served'' as Vice President.

Somewhere in Detroit, 1980 GOP Convention:



After the election, the relationship really, ah, evolved:

George Bush Takes Charge

The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

CONTINUED...

More details from the good professor:

EXCERPT...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

[font color="green"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

As you know, malaise, this all matters because there's a steady bloody red line from 1981 to the present day few know about. More would, were the nation's news media honest and lived up to their constitutional mandate.

[malaise]

14. They fugged up Jimmy Carter - conspiring

with the so called enemy - he should talk. I don't plan to forget.

[Octafish]

17. The Safari Club

This writer sheds light on the Org designed to keep Poppy's CIA "open for business" during the Carter years. It also sheds light on why things never really change, such as wars without end and trickle-down economics:

A NEW BIOGRAPHY TRACES THE PATHOLOGY OF ALLEN DULLES AND HIS APPALLING CABAL

by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, Nov. 2 2015, 1:24 p.m.

EXCERPT...

Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”

In February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to Washington, D.C. While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:

In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.

Turki was not telling the whole truth. He was right that his Georgetown audience likely had never heard any of this before, but the Safari Club had been known across the Middle East for decades. After the Iranian revolution the new government gave Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, one of the most prominent journalists in the Arab world, permission to examine the Shah’s archives. There Heikal discovered the actual formal, written agreement between the members of the Safari Club, and wrote about it in a 1982 book called Iran: The Untold Story.

And the Safari Club was not simply the creation of the countries Turki mentioned — Americans were involved as well. It’s true the U.S. executive branch was somewhat hamstrung during the period between the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence world and the end of the Carter administration. But the powerful individual Americans who felt themselves “literally tied up” by Congress — that is, unfairly restrained by the most democratic branch of the U.S. government — certainly did not consider the decisions of Congress to be the final word.

Whatever its funding sources, the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of these powerful Americans. According to Heikal, its real origin was when Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, “talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep” in Africa. Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. But, Heikal writes, “The United States directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the Christian Science Monitor’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”

This all seems like something Americans would like to know, especially since de Marenches may have extended his covert operations to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. In 1992, de Marenches’ biographer testified in a congressional investigation that the French spy told him that he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris between William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until after the next month’s election, thus denying Carter any last-minute, politically potent triumph.

De Marenches and the Safari Club certainly had a clear motive to oust Carter: They blamed him for allowing one of their charter members, the Shah, to fall from power. But whether de Marenches’ claims were true or not, we do know that history unfolded exactly as he and the Safari Club would have wished. The hostages weren’t released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward America’s intelligence “community” was back in business.

And yet normal citizens would have a hard time just finding out the Safari Club even existed, much less the outlines of its activities. It appears to have been mentioned just once by the New York Times, in a profile of a French spy novelist. It likewise has made only one appearance in the Washington Post, in a 2005 online chat in which a reader asked the Post’s former Middle East bureau chief Thomas Lippman, “Does the Safari Club, formed in the mid-70s, still exist?” Lippman responded: “I never heard of it, so I have no idea.”

CONTINUED...

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the-deepest-state-the-safari-club-allen-dulles-and-the-devils-chessboard/

When Carter's CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, tossed out the bad apples, rogues, etc. -- Poppy was ticked. They were his chums. So, the petrodollar-connected friends found a work-around. Voila! The hostages are held past the election and Pruneface and Poppy are back in the White House.

[malaise]

20. Thanks

Excellent post

[malaise]

11. Another take

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/05/george-bush-senior-iron-ass-cheney-arrogant-rumsfeld-damaged-america
<snip>
'Iron-ass' Cheney and 'arrogant' Rumsfeld damaged America, says George Bush Sr
Former US president George HW Bush has hit out at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, two of the most senior figures in his son’s administration, labelling them too “hardline” and “arrogant” in their handling of the 11 September attacks.

“The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book, which is due to be published next week.

But he criticised Bush Jr for allowing Cheney to build “kind of his own state department” and for the inflammatory language that infused the US response to the 9/11 attacks.

“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there – some of it his [Bush Jr], maybe, and some of it the people around him. Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

------------------
Cheney is proud of his role - read the article. Amazing how the BFEE is never responsible for its own mess

[LuvNewcastle]

13. Poppy probably taught Rumsfeld and Cheney

lessons on how to be evil. The only thing he cares about is that they all got caught. He has no right to be criticizing anyone else's behavior.

[tanyev]

15. "It wasn't my son's fault. He was led astray by those older bullies he was hanging out with."

[bklyncowgirl]

19. How long before Jeb! and W decide it's time to put Poppy in the home?

Or are we going to forget the fact that the bulk of Jeb's foreign policy advisors consist of Cheney and Rummies disciples.