Lawrence Walsh in 1991-92: Documents indicated GHWB lied about being "out of the loop".

[seafan]

Robert Parry lays it all out in this 1997 piece, Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up

WASHINGTON -- In crucial ways, Watergate, the signature scandal of the 1970s, and Iran-contra, the signature scandal of the 1980s, were opposites. Watergate showed how the constitutional institutions of American democracy -- the Congress, the courts and the press -- could check a gross abuse of power by the Executive. A short dozen years later, the Iran-contra scandal demonstrated how those same institutions had ceased to protect the nation from serious White House wrongdoing.
Watergate had been part of a brief national awakening which exposed Cold War abuses -- presidential crimes, lies about the Vietnam War and assassination plots hatched at the CIA. The Iran-contra cover-up marked the restoration of a Cold War status quo in which crimes, both domestic and international, could be committed by the Executive while the Congress and the press looked the other way.

That Iran-contra reality, however, is still little understood for what it actually was: a victory of weakness and deceit over integrity and courage. On one front, the Washington media wants to perpetuate the myth that it remains the heroic Watergate press corps of All the President's Men. On another, the national Democratic establishment wants to forget how it crumbled in the face of pressures from the Reagan-Bush administrations. And, of course, the Republicans want to protect the legacy of their last two presidents.
Those combined interests likely will lead to very few favorable reviews of a new book by a man who put himself in the way of that cover-up -- Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. In a remarkable new book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up, Walsh details his six-year battle to break through the "firewall" that White House officials built around President Reagan and Vice President Bush after the Iran-contra scandal exploded in November 1986.

snip

Still, despite the legal and political obstacles, Walsh's investigation broke through the White House cover-up in 1991-92. Almost by accident, as Walsh's staff was double-checking some long-standing document requests, the lawyers discovered hidden notes belonging to Weinberger and other senior officials. The notes made clear that there was widespread knowledge of the 1985 illegal shipments to Iran and that a major cover-up had been orchestrated by the Reagan and Bush administrations.

snip

The Republican independent counsel also infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was "out of the loop" on the Iran-contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush's defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.

Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran-contra affair, a discovery that elevated the president to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran-contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.
"George Bush's misuse of the pardon power made the cover-up complete," Walsh wrote. "What set Iran-contra apart from previous political scandals was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension."

snip

December 27, 2006:

http://cmsimg.news-press.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=A4&Date=20061228&Category=NEWS01&ArtNo=612280357&Ref=AR&Profile=1002&MaxW=400&MaxH=400&Q=80&title=1
The Associated Press
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Barbara Bush listen as former President George H.W. Bush speaks about former President Gerald R. Ford on Wednesday outside the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande (FL), where they had arrived for vacation.

When asked what future presidents could learn from Ford's presidency, George Bush responded:

"I think what they'll learn is what I've learned from being close to him, and even those that weren't close to him, is what decency and honor are all about. He came in, he healed, and the rest is history. He was an amazing man."----George H. W. Bush, December 27, 2006

GHWB obviously missed that boat.

[H2O Man]

1. Nominated.

Very important.

[PDJane]

2. K&R

I agree.

[seafan]

4. Thank you, H20 Man. The road back to our democracy leads through Iran-Contra.

Understanding of it is crucial.

[Morgana LaFey]

8. Yeah, THROUGH Iran-Contra, but not STARTING with Iran-Contra

IMHO, at least.

[blm]

15. 9-11 answers are rooted in IranContra, BCCI, and CIA drugrunning.

The coverups of these crimes against the constitution are TOO COSTLY.


Everything else will work itself out once TRUTH MATTERS to a president.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/111106.html

[hwmnbn]

3. Tonight on a PBS retrospective of Ford.......

They showed a clip of Bush 41 praising Ford for his decency and integrity. I had a visceral reaction watching this man utter those words. I knew full well what Iran-Contra did not only to our country, but to the people of Nicaragua, and Central America as a whole.

These miscreants wreaked political havoc all over the region. For this main perpetrator to have the gall to talk about decency and integrity is beyond the pale. He knows what he did and like his son, has no conscience about it.

[calimary]

10. Yep. That's why bush 2 had all the presidential papers of reagan and

of his dad - deep sixed for the next few decades. So that by the time they see the light of day again, all the principals will have been long dead and immune from prosecution - that is, unless, hopefully, the next president issues an executive order releasing them. Those papers belong to the public, and they were on schedule to be released when shit-head "TOOK" office.

[blm]

21. And now we have Bill Clinton saying the same about Bush1 to further rehab

Poppy's legacy.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/111106.html

[dansolo]

5. Bush was the former head of the CIA

Did anyone really buy that he was "out of the loop"?

[seafan]

7. GHWB still receives daily CIA briefings. (Because out-of-the-loop 'wouldn't be prudent'.)

One of the people who corresponded with Wilson is George H. W. Bush, the only president to have been head of the C.I.A.-he still receives regular briefings from Langley.

Vanity Fair's profile on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, January 17, 2004

[karlrschneider]

12. A most salient point that too often is overlooked.

Anybody who doesn't realize a former DCI would -ever- be de-looped, as it were, is delusional.

[Erika]

6. GHWBush was also a crook

Interesting how the Bush family vacations all over the world while being humble everyday Texans.

Bab Bush's remark during Katrina will always serve as how out of touch the Bush family is with the working class. "These disadvantaged have it so much better here in the stadium". The bitch.

[King_Crimson]

9. Rumour has it...

that the low-life bastard was in Dallas the day JFK was slaughtered...as an employee of the CIA! Yet the worm says he can't remeber where he was on that day!

ASSASSINATION


"...JM/WAVE ...proliferated across in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA's largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the <...> building complex reads: US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY.

Donald Freed, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141.

The review offered so far of George Bush's activities during the late 1950's and early 1960's is almost certainly incomplete in very important respects. There is good reason to believe that Bush was engaged in something more than just the oil business during those years. Starting about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, we have the first hints that Bush, in addition to working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been a participant in certain covert operations of the US intelligence community.

Such participation would certainly be coherent with George's role in the Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers, Harriman networks. During the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman circles have always maintained a sizable and often decisive presence inside the intelligence organizations of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the Harriman and related Anglophile financier factions of Wall Street have generally regarded those parts of the state apparatus dealing with intelligence and covert operations as their own very special property, property which had to be kept seeded with control networks in order to be effectively steered from above. For George Bush to interface with the intelligence community while ostensibly engaged in his business career would be coherent with that well-established pattern.

A body of leads has been assembled which suggests that George Bush may have been associated with the CIA at some time before the autumn of 1963. According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, "a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities." 1 By the time of the Kennedy assassination, we have an official FBI document which refers to "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency," and despite official disclaimers there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man in the White House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible covert operator hinges on four points, each one of which represents one of the great political and espionage scandals of postwar American history. These four cardinal points are:

1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April 16-17, 1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA's "Miami Station" (also known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the amphibious landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the leadership of Theodore Shackley, became the focus for Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations directed against Castro, Cuba, and possibly other targets.

2. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the coverup of those responsible for this crime.

3. The Watergate scandal, beginning with an April, 1971 visit to Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White House Special Investigations Unit (the "Plumbers" and later Watergate burglars) from among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans.

4. The Iran-contra affair, which became a public scandal during October-November 1986, several of whose central figures, such as Felix Rodriguez, were also veterans of the Bay of Pigs.

George Bush's role in both Watergate and the October surprise/Iran-contra complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book. Right now it is important to see that thirty years of covert operations, in many respects, form a single continuous whole. This is especially true in regard to the dramatis personae. Georgie Anne Geyer points to the obvious in a recent book: "...an entire new Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, pop up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf." 2 Felix Rodriguez tells us that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the "Grey Team" in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find directing the contra supply effort in central American during the 1980's, working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush. 3 Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in Bush's 1979-80 presidential campaign.

To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great political scandals attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are a significant extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of individuals who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal and compare them with the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones that have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacopo Arbenz in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in the Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after all, were contained in Howard Hunt's safe, the contents of which were so conventiently "deep sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)

George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra. Since he appears especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers, it is surely legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might have started.

1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official "red Studebaker" biographical material and the Zapata Offshore annual reports are extremely cryptic.

The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers who had directed the US intelligence community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the back yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of birthright.

During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime's project of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro's defending forces in less than three days.

Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.

Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: "So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not." 5 But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt's Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course "deep-sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been "Don Eduardo," roughly the Spanish equivalent of "Mr. Edward" or perhaps "Mr. Ed." 6

According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan's promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might respond that Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right, and the subject of a recent Hollywood movies starring Marlon Brando. As J. Hugh Liedtke had observed, he was the classic figure for the revolutionary-cum-bandit. A more knowledgeable Bushman might argue that the main landing beach, the Playa Giron, is located south of the city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninula, on the south coast of Cuba.

Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush's habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like "Zapata," Barbara, and Houston can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.

After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro's prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.

During the early 1950's, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs:

No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of the US-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our Dominican Republic intervention. Castros' beachhead triumph opened a bottomless Pandora's box of difficulties that affected not only the United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.9

Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy's fault, and not the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had designed it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, which never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur's warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house." 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur "warned against the committment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice." 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that "MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland should have his head examined." 12 MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to "muster the courage" to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley's many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.

The raison d'être of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these operations from US territory, flagrant and extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order of the day. Documents regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were massively violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes and boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities of the covert operatives were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it achieved during the 1980's, when it became as notorious as Chicago during Prohibition.

It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of support from continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military superiority demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a policy of world peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in the possibilities of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of mutually assured destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or perhaps abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If re-elected to a second term, Kennedy was likely to have re-asserted presidential control, as distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community. There is good reason to believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar Hoover from his self-appointed life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency to presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was committed to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural impact of which was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above all, Kennedy was acting like a man who thought he was president of the United States, violating the collegiality of oligarchical trusteeship of that office that had been in force

since the final days of Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two younger brothers who might succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond the control of the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades. George Bush joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these points.

After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present, possibly together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the truth of these allegations has never been finally established. Both Hunt and Sturgis were of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later appear center stage in Watergate. There were also allegations that Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of six to eight derelicts who were found in boxcars sitting on the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded up and taken in for questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the assassination. Some suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in the assassination. Some of these allegations were at the center of the celebrated 1985 defamation case of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which a Florida federal jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the "derelicts" in question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this question. But these allegations and theories about the possible presence and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were sufficiently widespread so as to compel the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) to attempt to refute them in its 1975 report. 14

According to George Bush's official biography, he was during 1963 a well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president of Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization, supporting Barry Goldwater as the GOP's likely 1964 presidential candidate, while at the same time actively preparing his own 1964 bid for the US Senate. But during that same period of time, Bush may have shared some common acquaintances with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Between October, 1962 and April, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina were in frequent contact with a Russian emigré couple living in Dallas: these were George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed at length about his contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977, the discrediting of the Warren Commission report as a blatant coverup had made public pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview de Mohrenschildt once again. But in March, 1977, just before de Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the House committee's staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him alive was Edward Jay Epstein, who was also interviewing de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination for an upcoming book. Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination who enjoyed excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA. If de Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us about his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight into Bush's activities during this epoch.

Jeanne de Mohrenschildt rejected the finding of suicide in her husband's death. "He was eliminated before he got to that committee," the widow told a journalist in 1978, "because someone did not want him to get to it." She also maintained that George de Mohrenschildt had been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs. 15 After de Mohrenschildt's death, his personal address book was located, and it contained this entry: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland." There is of course the problem of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number: "4-6355." There are, of course, numerous other entries, including one W.F. Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City, William S. Paley of CBS, plus many oil men, stock brokers, and the like. 16

George de Mohrenschildt recounted a number of different versions of his life, so it is very difficult to establish the facts about him. According to one version he was the Russian Count Sergei de Mohrenschildt, but when he arrived in the United States in 1938 he carried a Polish passport identifying him as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt, born in Mozyr, Russia in 1911. He may in fact have been a Polish officer, or a correspondent for the Polish News Service, or none of these. He worked for a time for the Polish embassy in Washington DC. Some say that de Mohrenschildt met the Chairman of Humble Oil, Blaffer, and that Blaffer procured him a job. Other sources say that during this time de Mohrenschildt was affiliated with the War Department. According to some accounts, he later went to work for the French Deuxième Bureau, which wanted to know about petroleum exports from the United States to Europe.

De Mohrenschildt in 1941 became associated with a certain Baron Konstantin von Maydell in a public affairs venture called "Facts and Film." Maydell was considered a Nazi agent by the FBI, and in September 1942 he was sent to North Dakota for an internment that would last four years. De Mohrenschildt was also reportedly in contact with Japanese networks at this time. In June, 1941, de Mohrenschildt was questioned by police at Port Arthur, Texas, on the suspicion of espionage after he was found making sketches of port facilities. During 1941 de Mohrenschildt applied for a post in the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to the official account, he was not hired. Soon after he made the application, he went to Mexico where he stayed until 1944. In the latter year he established his name as de Mohrenschildt, jettisoning the German version of von Mohrenschildt, and began study for a master's degree in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas. According to some accounts, during this period de Mohrenschildt was investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence because of alleged communist sympathies. After the war, de Mohrenschildt worked as a petroleum engineer in Cuba and Venezuela, and in Caracas he had several meetings with the Soviet ambassador. During the postwar years he also worked in the Rangely oil field in Colorado. During the 1950's, after having married Winifred Sharpless, the daughter of an oil millionaire, de Mohrenschildt was active as an independent oil entrepreneur.

In 1957, de Mohrenschildt was approved by the CIA Office of Security to be hired as a US government geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia. Upon his return he was interviewed by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service, with whom he remained in contact. During 1958, de Morhenschildt visited Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; during 1959 he visited Africa again and returned by way of Poland. In 1959 he married Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former ballet dancer and dress designer who had been born in Manchuria, where her father had been one of the directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. During the summer of 1960, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told their friends that they were going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles along Indian trails from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal destinations was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, after which they made their way home by way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the Mohrenschildts returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the Soviet Union in June, 1962. By this time de Mohrenschildt was also frequenting Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he introduced the Oswalds. Admiral Bruton was the former director of naval communications, and had superintended a comprehensive modernization and reorganization of the navy's means of keeping in touch with ships, planes, missiles, submarines, and the like.

It is established that between October, 1962 and late April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt was a very important figure in the life of Oswald and his Russian wife. Despite Oswald's lack of social graces, de Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society, took him to parties, assisted him in finding employment, and much more. It was through de Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt, a young German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, an expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological profile of Oswald. Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings during one of her many estrangements from Oswald. According to some accounts, de Mohrenschildt's influence on Oswald was so great during this period that he could virtually dictate important decisions to the young ex-marine simply by making suggestions. Oswald was in awe of de Mohrenschildt, according to some.

According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald's alleged April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-wing General Edwin Walker. According to Marina, de Mohrenschildt once asked Oswald, "Lee, how did you miss General Walker?" On April 19, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April 29 the CIA Office of Security found that it had no objection to de Mohrenschildt's acceptance of a contract with the Duvalier regime of Haiti in the field of natural resource development. De Mohrenschildt appears to have departed for Haiti on May 1, 1963. In the meantime Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to New Orleans.

According to Mark Lane, "there is evidence that de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions." Much of the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on the idea that he was a baby sitter, handler, case officer, or control agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence agency. 17 De Mohrenschildt's pedigree evokes haunting parallels to the typical figures of the PERMINDEX networks of Georges Mandel, Ferenc Nagy, Max Hagerman, Max Seligman, Carlo d'Amelio, Lewis Mortimer Bloomfield, and Clay Shaw, to which public attention was called during the investigations of New Orleans district attorney James Garrison.

It is therefore highly interesting that George Bush's name turned up in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt. The Warren Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that George de Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence agencies. This included ignoring the well-developed paper trial on de Mohrenschildt as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a US asset abroad. The Warren Commission concluded:

The Commission's investigation has developed no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildts. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy. 18

On the day of the Kennedy assassination, FBI records show George Bush as reporting a right-wing member of the Houston Young Republicans for making threatening comments about President Kennedy. According to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act,

On November 22, 1963 Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, 5525 Briar, Houston, Texas, telephonically advised that he wanted to relate some hear say that he had heard in recent weeks, date and source unknown. He advised that one JAMES PARROTT had been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in politics in the Houston area.

According to related FBI documentation, "a check with Secret Service at Houston, Texas revealed that agency had a report that PARROTT stated in 1961 he would kill President Kennedy if he got near him." Here Bush is described as "a reputable businessman." FBI agents were sent to interrogate Parrott's mother, and later James Milton Parrott himself. Parrott had been discharged from the US Air Force for psychiatric reasons in 1959. Parrott had an alibi for the time of the Dallas shootings; he had been in the company of another Republican activist. According to press accounts, Parrott was a member of the right-wing faction of the Houston GOP which was oriented towards the John Birch Society and which opposed Bush's chairmanship. 19 According to the San Francisco Examiner, Bush's press office in August, 1988 first said that Bush had not made any such call, and challenged the authenticity of the FBI documents. Several days later Bush's spokesman said that the candidate "does not recall" placing the call.

One day later after he reported Parrott to the FBI, Bush received a highly sensitive, high-level briefing from the Bureau:

Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director


Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in US policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the US but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W.T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

William T. Forsyth, since deceased, was an official of the FBI's Washington headquarters; during the time he was attached to the Bureau's subversive control section, he ran the investigation of Rev. Martin Luther King. Was he also a part of the FBI's harassment of Dr. King? The efforts of journalists to locate Captain Edwards have not been successful.

This FBI document identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November, 1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July, 1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for president. McBride's source observed: "I know was involved in the Caribbean. I know he

was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA." 20 When pressed for confirmation or denial, Bush's spokesman Stephen Hart commented: "Must be another George Bush." Within a short time the CIA itself would peddle the same damage control line. On July 19, 1988 in the wake of wide public attention to the report published in The Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports that any person is or was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated press that the CIA believed that "the record should be clarified." She said that the FBI document "apparently" referred to a George William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at CIA headquarters, and that "would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report." According to her account, the George William Bush in question had left the CIA to join the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1964.

For the CIA to volunteer the name of one of its former employees to the press was a shocking violation of traditional methods, which are supposedly designed to keep such names a closely guarded secret. This revelation may have constituted a violation of federal law. But no exertions were too great when it came to damage control for George Bush.

George William Bush had indeed worked for the CIA, the DIA, and the Alexandria, Virginia Department of Public Welfare before joining the Social Security Administration, in whose Arlington, Virginia office he was employed as a claims representative in 1988. George William Bush told The Nation that while at the CIA he was "just a lowly researcher and analyst" who worked with documents and photos and never received interagency briefings. He had never met Forsyth of the FBI or Captain Edwards of the DIA. "So it wasn't me," said George William Bush. 21

Later, George William Bush formalized his denial in a sworn statement to a federal court in Washington, DC. The affidavit acknowledges that while working at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February 1964, George William Bush was the junior person on a three to four man watch shift which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. But, as George William Bush goes on to say,

I have carefully reviewed the FBI memorandum to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State dated November 29, 1963 which mentions a Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency....I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA. In fact, during my time at the CIA. I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI.

Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum. 22

So we are left with the strong suspicion that the "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" referred to by the FBI is our own George Herbert Walker Bush, who, in addition to his possible contact with Lee Harvey Oswald's controller, may thus also join the ranks of the Kennedy assassination cover-up. It makes perfect sense for George Bush to be called in on a matter involving the Cuban community in Miami, since that is a place where George has traditionally had a constituency. George inherited it from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and later passed it on to his own son, Jeb.

NOTES

1- Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July 16, 1988.
2- Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerilla Prince (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
3- Felix Rogriquez, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1989).
4- On Pluto, see the East German study by Guenter Schumacher, Operation Pluto (Berlin, Deutscher Militaerverlag, 1964).
5- E. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973), p. 214.
6- Secret Agenda.
7- For Operation Zapata, see Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), p. 89.
8- For the names of the ships at the Bay of Pigs, see Quintin Pino Machado, La Batalla de Giron (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1983), pp. 79-80. This source quotes one ship as the Barbara J." See also Schumacher, Operation Pluto, pp. 98-99. See also Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979), which also has the Barbara J. According to Quintin Pino macahdo, the Houston had been given the new name of Aguja (Swordfish) and the Barbara that of Barracuda for the purposes of this operation.
9- Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day, pp. 13-14.
10- Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 329.
11- Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 723.
12- Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), p. 339.
13- See Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 112 ff.
14- Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Washington: US Goverment Printing Office, 1975), pp. 251-267.
15- Jim Marrs, "Widow disputes suicide," Fort Worth Evening Star-Telegram, May 11, 1978
16- A photocopy of George de Mohrenschildt's personal address book is preserved at the Assassination Archives and Research Center, Washington, DC. The Bush entry is also cited in Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), p. 332.
17- For de Mohrenschildt, see Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (London: Hutchinson, 1978); C. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981); and Robert Sam Anson, "They've Killed The President!" (New York: Bantam, 1975).
18- Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 262.
19- Miguel Acoca, "FBI: 'Bush' called about JFK killing," San Francisco Examiner, August 25, 1988.
20- Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July 16/23, 1988, p. 42
21- Joseph McBride, "Where Was George?", The Nation, August 13/20, 1988, p. 117.
22- United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil Action 88-2600 GHR, Archives and Research Center v. Central Intelligence Agency, Affidavit of George William Bush, September 21, 1988.



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[unblock]

11. this is the true legacy of ford's pardon of nixon

the lesson being that the pardon power is a stay out of jail free card, so you and your buddies can truly be above the law. works best if a successor from the same party does the deed for you, but if the other side wins, just do it yourself in the last few days of your term.

at least, that's the lesson the republicans learned....

[spag68]

13. And ollie gets a job with faux

[seafan]

14. GHWB's role in the Letelier-Moffitt murders was hidden from the public until after Nov 2000 election

History on the Ballot

Robert Parry
November 5, 2000

History will be on the ballot Nov. 7.

snip

Indeed, if the American people understood the already documented role of the Republican candidate’s father in a wide range of scandals, it is hard to believe that the younger George Bush could have ridden his father’s “good name” to the GOP nomination, let alone to the gates of the White House.
But much of that history remains in the shadows, ironically because Democrats chose to limit critical investigations in the name of bipartisanship in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

More recently, national security agencies have frustrated timely release of information, seemingly with an eye toward the election and possible restoration of the Bush dynasty. The Cold War history now in the balance includes evidence implicating the elder George Bush – at least for negligence and possibly worse – in the double homicide of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt in a 1976 car-bombing in Washington, D.C.

This murder is under renewed criminal investigation by the Justice Department, a probe that would face serious new obstacles in a second Bush administration.
The American people would have known more about the elder Bush’s role in this terrorist incident by now, except that the CIA dragged its heels long enough to push back release of CIA documents to Nov. 13, a week after the election.

What’s already known about the Letelier-Moffitt murders isn't pretty. In 1976, George H.W. Bush was CIA director when his office at Langley, Va., received a warning from a U.S. ambassador about a suspicious mission being carried out in the United States by Chilean intelligence then headed by a paid CIA asset, Col. Manuel Contreras.

But Bush’s agency took no known action to stop the assassination. After the fatal car-bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, Bush’s CIA consulted with Contreras and planted false stories in the U.S. news media to divert suspicion away from the killers. The CIA also withheld important evidence from the FBI.

snip

[seafan]

16. GHWB's role in interfering with the Iranian hostage release, sabotaging Pres. Carter's re-election

More from Parry:

When Bush was tapped to be Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential nominee in summer 1980, many of these former CIA officers joined the Republican national campaign. A contingent manned a 24-hours-a-day Operations Center at Reagan-Bush campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.
.....
The ex-CIA officers also maintained close ties to on-duty CIA officials, including Donald Gregg and Robert Gates who worked inside Carter’s White House and were privy to the administration’s most sensitive secrets and strategies.
Carter’s most pressing crisis at the time was Iran, where Islamic extremists had overrun the U.S. embassy and were holding 52 Americans hostage.
As the 1980 campaign progressed, some former CIA men began promoting the idea of secret Republican initiatives in Iran. Other CIA men allegedly went further, assisting the Reagan-Bush campaign in developing back-channel contacts with the Iranian government.

snip

Over the past two decades, more than a score of witnesses – including senior Iranian officials, top French intelligence officers, Israeli intelligence operatives and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat – have confirmed the existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter’s efforts to free the hostages before the U.S. presidential election in 1980.
....
In a little-noticed letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17, 1992, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican hostage initiative in July 1980 when a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and to Casey’s business associate, John Shaheen.
Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: the Republicans were in league with the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding Iran’s help.
Bani-Sadr said the emissary “told me that if I do not accept this proposal they would make the same offer to my rivals.” The emissary added that the Republicans “have enormous influence in the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.”
Bani-Sadr said he resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was accepted by the hard-line Khomeini faction.

For years, at the center of these so-called October Surprise allegations were the gray eminences of the elder George Bush and Bill Casey, who allegedly traveled to Europe for final rounds of meetings with Iranians from the Khomeini faction.
Two eyewitnesses – an Israeli intelligence official named Ari Ben-Menashe and a pilot named Heinrich Rupp – placed Bush in Paris for a meeting on Oct. 19, 1980.

snip

(More in the next post below)

[seafan]

17. But GHWB never explained where he was on October 19, 1980.

(And he also states he *cannot remember* where he was on November 22, 1963...)


Parry continues...

Two eyewitnesses – an Israeli intelligence official named Ari Ben-Menashe and a pilot named Heinrich Rupp – placed Bush in Paris for a meeting on Oct. 19, 1980.
Bush has denied making such a trip but has never explained what he was doing that day. His alibi, based on partially censored Secret Service records, has not been credibly supported by a single witness who could recall Bush’s movements during the hours that a trip to Paris would have required.
On the other hand, in support of the statements by Ben-Menashe and Rupp, two other witnesses confirmed that Republicans were talking about Bush traveling to Paris at precisely the same time frame.
These corroborating witnesses were then-U.S. State Department official David Henderson and Chicago Tribune journalist John Maclean. The pair met in Washington that same weekend and discussed the Bush tip that Maclean had received from a senior Republican.

snip

Another document from (Reagan’s foreign policy adviser, Richard) Allen’s personal files established that Allen and Bush were in contact about the hostage issue. According to Allen’s handwritten notes, Bush called him on Oct. 27, 1980, with news that former Texas Gov. John Connolly had heard that Carter still might be able to spring the hostages before the election.
Bush ordered Allen to check out Connolly’s rumor and then pass his findings back to Bush via former CIA officer Shackley, whose name was misspelled by Allen as “Shacklee.”
The note confirms two points: that Bush was actively involved in the campaign’s October Surprise operation and that Shackley, considered a master spy, was helping Bush on the issue.

The existence of the Republican-Iranian meetings in Paris also was confirmed by three senior French intelligence officials, including French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches, according to evidence uncovered by a later congressional investigation.
David Andelman, a journalist who was deMarenches’s biographer, testified to a House task force that the French intelligence chief admitted setting up the Paris meeting for Casey.
In January 1993, another piece of corroborating evidence was sent to Congress by the Russian Supreme Soviet, which pored through intelligence files in Moscow at the request of the task force and reported finding documents showing that Casey had traveled to Europe in 1980 for meetings with Iranians.

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R Gates … and former CIA director George Bush also took part,” said the Russian report, drafted by Sergei V. Stepashin, who later became Russia’s prime minister.
Despite this body of evidence, the Republican hierarchy has steadfastly rejected the October Surprise charges. That denial was backed by a bipartisan House task force that agreed in early 1993 that there was “no credible evidence” to support the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal.

....because Lee Hamilton prided himself on "bipartisanship".....

[seafan]

18. VP Bush "had his fingerprints all over both sides of the Iran-contra affair..."

Parry explains:

snip

Then, immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, the Iranians released the American hostages.
It’s also clear that the Reagan-Bush administration followed up release of the hostages with a secret policy of permitting Israel to ship U.S. military hardware to Iran.
Senior State Department officials learned of the secret policy in summer 1981 when an Argentine plane carrying U.S. military supplies from Israel to Iran strayed off course and was shot down over the Soviet Union.

snip

The clandestine U.S. relationship with Iran took other turns in the months ahead. Israel invaded Lebanon, followed by a Reagan-Bush decision to introduce American troops and then to begin shelling Moslem villages. Islamic extremists retaliated by seizing more American hostages.
With this new crisis, some of the operatives from 1980 popped up again. Businessman Shaheen and Iranian banker Hashemi urged Casey, who had become Reagan’s CIA director, to trade arms to Iran for hostages. Soon, the earlier pipeline of weapons to Iran had merged with the flow of weapons that would be at the center of the Iran-contra scandal.

Vice President Bush had his fingerprints all over both sides of the Iran-contra affair, both the Iran side and the side funneling military supplies to the contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Key personnel from his office, including former CIA officer Donald Gregg who had become Bush’s national security adviser, placed Cuban-American operative Felix Rodriguez in Central America. Rodriguez soon was running the day-to-day operations re-supplying the contras and coordinating with national security aide Oliver L. North.

A flow chart that emerged during later investigations indicated that Bush’s office managed the contra network after Congress passed laws in 1983-84 first limiting and then barring U.S. military assistance to the contras. Authority for the secret re-supply operation later passed to North, according to the flow chart.

snip

[seafan]

19. But GHWB kept insisting he wasn't in the loop, despite being implicated by Hasenfus.

But, it all http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/110500b.html">unraveled on October 5, 1986:

Despite the growing evidence, most of the major news media dismissed the stories of secret operations and related drug trafficking as conspiracy nonsense.

The scandal only unraveled because of outside events. On Oct. 5, 1986, one of North’s supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua.

The sole surviving crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, pointed the finger at George Bush’s vice presidential office and the CIA. Bush and other administration officials denied Hasenfus’s statement.

The second Iran-contra shoe dropped in early November 1986 with a story in a Beirut newspaper about the Iran arms sales. When the secret about North’s diverting Iranian arms profits to the contras was disclosed a few weeks later, the Iran-contra scandal was born.

But the Reagan-Bush administration was not ready to tell all. Immediately, the administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill moved to counter and to contain the scandal. For his part, Bush insisted that he was “not in the loop” on the Iran-contra business.

[seafan]

20. But, Cheney came to the rescue.

Then, as now, the same dark actor works in the http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/110500b.html">shadows.

One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand.
Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact.
A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney “kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,” the source said. “He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.”

So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether.
Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report.

snip

By the mid-1970s, Project X material was being shared with armies all over the world. In reviewing these training programs, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the “objectionable” lessons taught at the School of the Americas, where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.
But the full story of Project X – and the precise techniques taught to the Third World armies – will never be told.

In the final days of the Bush administration, Dick Cheney’s Defense Department ordered the collection of all Project X documents. The manuals and other materials were brought to a central location and systematically destroyed.
The ostensible rationale for the mass destruction of documents was to prevent Project X from being used as teaching material in the future. But the more immediate consequence was to keep these unpleasant facts away from the American people.

snip

Around the same time as the destruction of the Project X records, President Bush was completing the long-running cover-up of the Iran-contra scandal. On Christmas Eve 1992, he issued pardons to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants.
The pardons effectively ended the Iran-contra investigation and spared leading Republicans, including Gen. Colin Powell, the embarrassment of having to testify at the Weinberger trial about their earlier deceptions.
After leaving office, Bush himself refused to submit to an interview with Walsh that might have established what Bush and his aides actually did during the Iran-contra operation.

Is there any doubt left, as to why George W. Bush moved so quickly after seizing office in 2001, to hide his father's papers from the American people?

[Joe Chi Minh]

22. The word, "legacy", tends to have positive overtones, so I tend to

recoil somewhat when I see the word used in connection with post-Eisenhower Republican presidents. Unless, of course, a negative connotation is applied to it directly and explicitly.

[Prophet 451]

23. Is anyone surprised?

Bush lies as easily and as often as he speaks. Essentially, if he said it, it's a lie. I'm starting to think that he's seriously unwell mentally, so extreme is the difference between our world and the one that seems to exist in his head.