Russ Baker's new book presents an account of the U.S. government that is
both remarkably new and extensively documented. According to this account,
George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, devoted his career
to secret intelligence work with the CIA many years before he became the CIA
director, and the network of spies and petroleum plutocrats he began working
with early on has played a powerful but hidden role in determining the
direction of the U.S. government
 up to the current day.

New research and newly highlighted information assembled by Baker presents
at least the strong possibility that Bush was involved in assassinating
President Kennedy, and that Bush was involved in staging the Watergate
break-in (and the break-in at Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's) with the
purpose of having these break-ins exposed and the blame placed on President
Nixon. In this account, those in on the get-Nixon plot included John Dean
and Bob Woodward. While this retelling of history would make a certain
Robert Redford movie look really, really silly, it would -- on the other
hand -- make Woodward's performance during Watergate fit more coherently
with everything he's known to have done before and since. It would also
give
new meaning to Dean's recent book title "Conservatives Without a
Conscience." I would love to see either of these men's response to
Baker's
book.

Many
 readers of this review may now be rushing off to declare Baker either
profoundly insane or (probably in fewer cases) indisputably correct in his
views regarding the removal of Kennedy and Nixon from the White House, but I
would strongly urge reading the book before doing so. It's called
"Family of
Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It In The White
House, And What Their Influence Means for America."

Those of us who have pushed for years now to have Bush Jr. impeached or
prosecuted have heard all imaginable excuses and then some. One has been
this: "Punishing the figurehead puppet president would amount to excusing
the real powers behind the throne." And, of course, some of us have never
doubted that such powers existed, but considered letting Bush and Cheney
walk free as a surer way to protect other guilty parties than punishing them
would be. There are guilty parties in Congress too, of
 course, but how the
pervasiveness of guilt justifies letting everyone off the hook has always
escaped me. The arrests have to begin somewhere. In any case, I bring up the
image of presidents as puppets because Baker provides a new variation on
that theme. In his account, Bush Jr. is indeed not the driving force, but a
clique centered around his father is.

Baker does not focus on Bush Jr.'s grandfather, Prescott Bush, and does not
even mention his role in the plot to overthrow President Roosevelt in 1933 (
http://davidswanson.org/node/1337  ). Baker's focus is on Poppy, although
Prescott and his anger toward Kennedy are in the background. It is not a
completely new idea to suppose that Kennedy was killed because he angered
the CIA and powerful Americans with business interests in Cuba. It is, as
far as I know, new to show, as Baker extensively documents and then
summarizes, that:

"Poppy Bush was closely
 tied to key members of the intelligence community
including the deposed CIA head with a known grudge against JFK; he was also
tied to Texas oligarchs who hated Kennedy's politics and whose wealth was
directly threatened by Kennedy; this network was part of the
military/intelligence elite with a history of using assassination as an
instrument of policy.

"Poppy Bush was in Dallas on November 21 and most likely the morning of
November 22. He hid that fact, he lied about knowing where he was, then he
created an alibi based on a lead he knew was false. And he never
acknowledged the closeness of his relationship with Oswald's handler George
de Mohrenschildt.

"Poppy's business partner Thomas Devine met with de Mohrenschildt
during
that period, on behalf of the CIA.

"Poppy's eventual Texas running mate in the 1964 election, Jack
Crichton,
was connected to the military intelligence figures who led
 Kennedy's
motorcade.

"Crichton and D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository
building, were both connected to de Mohrenschildt -- and directly to each
other through oil-business dealings.

"Byrd brought in the tenant that hired Oswald shortly before the
assassination.

"Oswald got his job in the building through a friend of de
Mohrenschildt's
with her own intelligence connections -- including family ties to Allen
Dulles."

You start to get a taste of the sort of case Baker builds. It's persuasive,
but not conclusive. If you buy into the basic outlines of it, you come up
against a history of American politics in which our top "elected"
officials
are not just chosen through a process openly corrupted by money and media
and parties, but are also chosen through a process of covert ops. Kennedy
was replaced by Johnson because he was more obedient to Texas oilmen. Nixon
was
 replaced by Ford for similar reasons. Bush Sr. made a deal with Iran not
to release American hostages until Reagan defeated Carter. (Baker recounts
but adds nothing new to this story, already reported elsewhere.) Bush Sr.
and Jr. ran election campaigns that employed CIA-like techniques. It's a
compelling narrative with probably a great deal of truth to it, and the
viciousness of Republican attacks on President Clinton fits into it. So does
the reluctance of Carter, Clinton, Obama, and others to stray too far from
positions acceptable to those (like Robert Gates) with places in the more
permanent power structure. So does the possibility that Michael Connell was
murdered last week.

The interesting thing about Baker's claims regarding Kennedy and Nixon is
that they would suggest that the CIA actually succeeded at something, that
-- in fact -- the CIA or members thereof managed to keep major secrets for
decades. Of
 course, they were morally reprehensible secrets and provide
further rationale for eliminating the CIA and all secret government
agencies, not any sort of justification for keeping them going.

While Nixon and Kennedy appear in this account almost exclusively in the
role of victims, we should remember that their failures to please a certain
powerful group do not absolve them of their own sins, even if that group may
have done them in. While Kennedy may have courted the wrath of certain
powers by refusing to do to Cuba what Dubya later did to Iraq, Nixon's
failing was not any deficiency in the area of war criminality. While part of
what Nixon was covering up may have been staged to frame him, his most
serious offenses -- those involving the mass slaughter of human beings --
have been marginalized in all accounts, old and new, of our attempts to hold
him accountable. And Nixon himself secretly derailed a possible
 peace
agreement in order to get himself into the same White House that he was
later chased out of in disgrace.

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories
Press
and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case
for
Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at
Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the
University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a
communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis
Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the
International Labor Communications Association, and three years as
communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of
AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of
 ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington
Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of
America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a member of the
legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and convener of
the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and
Justice.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11495

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/doctorplum/




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