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Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
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Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
Exclusive to The New Hampshire Gazette
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S.
media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives
and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of
President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S.
banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine
from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against
Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to
reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to
conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz
Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s,
personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of
democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his
associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of
American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker,
President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings
with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the
U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the
mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the
Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the
media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also
escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential
historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II
and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The Summer of '42
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises,
all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway
under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in
the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had
been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline.
The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's
original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had
aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according
to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also
acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler,
Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's
U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels,
Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
Business is Business
The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of
Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was
Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to
government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number
of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a
dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas
gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's
activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born,
naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as
president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a
managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as
executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were
partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that
period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that
politically prominent individuals were about to come under official
U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued
unabated.
After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman
made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen
financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that
UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.
Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners
increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and
ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S.
entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense,
Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his
Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for
nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators
any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of
Thyssen in it.
UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert
Walker, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in
1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to
set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations,
which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and
coal.
The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included
partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise,
Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust
that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor
and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war
effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to
seven years in prison.
The Family Business
In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's daughter, Dorothy,
Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and
investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush
became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman
and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush
became a director of and stockholder in UBC.
However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense
and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom
shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they
acted at the direct behest of their German client.
Seized
On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy
Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the
war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S.
Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien
Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.
In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of
the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line,
under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after
the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act
again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses -
Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless
Steel Equipment Corp (Vesting Order No. 259). In November, Congress
seized the Nazi interests in Silesian-American Corporation, which
allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership
with I.G. Farben, Hitler's third major industrial patron and partner
in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.
The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and
Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel
and U.S. Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as
Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that
sparked World War II.
That's One Way to Put It
Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four
Bush-Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on
December 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had "received
authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway."
The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the U.S.
government or that the new address was the U.S. Office of the Alien
Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other
UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.
Still No Story?
Since then, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage
of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the
major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in
George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and
Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an attorney in the 1940s
for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family's
long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on
or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by
the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which
was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors
struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book
was published by a Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it
easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.
The essence of the story been posted for years on various Internet
sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online
media seem to have independently confirmed it.
Likewise, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since
World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi
collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to
dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or "unauthorized" books
without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.
Loyal Defenders
The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House
correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of Bush-Hating." It begins
mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush -
indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's
Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the
way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?" York goes on to
discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the
Nazi connection.
The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason
magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to "Bush-o-phobes on the
Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family's
alleged Nazi connections."
Poles Tackle the Topic
Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition, published a short
piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item
reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor
prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp," according to a
copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media
(www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various
Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
Still Not Interested
Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, The New York
Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami
Herald, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when
information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them
beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael
Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the
Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept
an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.
Aftermath
After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with
Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the U.S. government quietly
settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and
Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their
seized business assets.
In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press
accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any
U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political
campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George
W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story
in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but
inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.
John Buchanan is a journalist and investigative reporter with 33 years
of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. His work
has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books. He can
be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net.
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| User: "Leigh_Bee" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
09 Nov 2003 05:46:25 AM |
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(Natasha Thompson) wrote in message news:<cbd527a.0311082357.26987e61@posting.google.com>...
Founded in 1756, The New Hampshire Gazette is The Nation's Oldest
Newspaper?,
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi%20Link
SNIP>
In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press
accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any
U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political
campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George
W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story
in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but
inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.
John Buchanan is a journalist and investigative reporter with 33 years
of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. His work
has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books. He can
be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net.
Maybe when you realise the CIA was set up with the help of the certain
Nazis, and money no matter how much blood has spilled on it is still
bankable.
LB
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
09 Nov 2003 07:09:53 AM |
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On 9 Nov 2003 03:46:25 -0800, (Leigh_Bee)
wrote:
Maybe when you realise the CIA was set up with the help of the certain
Nazis, and money no matter how much blood has spilled on it is still
bankable.
LB
Al-Qaeda was also set up by the US, see the picture now?
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
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| User: "torque wrench" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
12 Nov 2003 11:33:45 PM |
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<DaarkSyde@home.com> wrote in message
news:r3fsqv8dnhl8rctda3rlvos6ifmqv1bh15@4ax.com...
On 9 Nov 2003 03:46:25 -0800, (Leigh_Bee)
wrote:
Maybe when you realise the CIA was set up with the help of the certain
Nazis, and money no matter how much blood has spilled on it is still
bankable.
LB
Al-Qaeda was also set up by the US, see the picture now?
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
Don't overlook the fact that there are also close Bush family ties to the
Bin Laden clan and the fact that on September 11, 2001 George Bush senior
had a meeting with a member of the Bin Laden family. Another little known
fact is that while all commercial air traffic in North America was grounded
for several days a few Saudi Arabian planes were allowed to leave for home
during that time. That was probably the result of executive action.
Lugnut
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| User: "Natasha Thompson" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
09 Nov 2003 03:08:59 PM |
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The Nazi's are not a thing of the past. The neonazis are not
representative of the power, which the real NAZI's still wield, world
wide. To them WW2 is just a lost battle. The WAR goes on, and they are
winning it. They are because too many believe it is over, and that
Naziism is no longer a threat.
Sadly our Nation's future is in the hands of a people drunk on
materialism, blinded by self interest, and deluded by the corporate
controlled news media and entertainment industry.
For these things, the entire world shall be completely dominated by
the remnants of the Third Reich. Those same who at this very moment,
without restraint, bring to fruition the nightmare conceived by the
powers of darkness. The same evil which now decimates our entire
planetary ecosystem, and pollutes the minds of people everywhere.
They create chaos globally, and then offer their solutions to the very
problems they create, in order to further their agenda of world
domination. Ask yourself how those who were capable, of perpetrating
the evil they employed during WW2, could have ever given up seeking to
control the world? They want it that bad, and they shall have it.
Was 911, which has been used as an excuse to transform our democratic
republic into a Police State, really the work of Islamic terrorists?
Or was 911 really a very carefully planned event? Scheduled on a date
synonymous with emergency in the US, was it merely a ploy to galvanize
public support for the deployment of US military power? Isn't it
obvious by now, since no WMD were ever found, that our troops have
been used not to protect us from Islamic terrorists, but really only
to gain control of the very foundation of the world economy, that is
OIL?
George H, W. Bush Sr., promised to usher in a New World Order. It is
now surely obvious, to everyone with eyes to see, that he has made
good on his promise. As soon as they have finished consolidating their
power, The New World Order will finish what Hitler tried to do, and
yet failed to accomplish.
Whoever controls the world economy, will of course have unlimited
political power. In controlling Oil completely, they will control the
entire world, and so everyone who lives in it.
Because OIL is the foundation of the world economy, and BIG OIL is our
government, we live in interesting times. The key to world power lies
neatly in one place for the greater part, and so presents an
opportunity, just to good to pass up.
I am also astonished that so many people think that The New World
Order is somehow Christian, or has anything to do with real
Christianity. Far from it, and in fact the converse is true. Yet does
any of this have to do with Christianity really? Yes it does, but
differently than many assume.
Our current President, his father and granddaddy, and Ronald Reagan
certainly, are all fulfilling Biblical prophecy. They really are, and
far more literally than I ever expected anyone would.
The book of Revelation chapter 13 speaks of how to identify the
Antichrist, and the Second Beast who comes 'immediately' after him.
Two men who lead as public figureheads, a world government, which will
have control of all buying and selling world wide. The book of Daniel
in the old testament, explains in detail how they gain such power,
resulting from the application of military force.
Daniel says that the two Beasts will gain control of the world
economy, by attacking and defeating the oil rich nations of the
Persian Gulf, beginning with Iraq at that.
Revelation chapter 13 identifies these two men, whom it refers to as
the Two Beasts, the Antichrist, and the Second Beast or False Prophet.
Revelation states the Antichrist is a human man, with a great speaking
ability. A man who is such a persuasive orator, you could call him The
Great Communicator. It says also that the Antichrist is wounded
mortally while in the world spotlight, and the world is astonished
that he yet lives to survive it.
Revelation then says that he would be followed immediately, by the
Second Beast. The next guy in office who has "the same power and
authority" which he had. It further mentions a rather interesting
juxtaposition concerning the Antichrist's successor, as a man who has
a kind and gentle image like a lamb, who yet talks like a dragon.
This Second Beast makes the world worship 'the image' of the
Antichrist (Beast) who precedes him, and causes all who live upon the
earth to receive the number of that man's name to buy
or sell.
Then it says you just count the number of the first beast's name, and
it sums out as 666. No numerology required. This is referred to as the
mark of the Beast. I am sure you have heard of it.
There is only one significantly powerful man, in all of history, whose
name sums out as 666, just by counting it. Now please count the number
of letters in this former US President's name. There are six letters
in RONALD, six in WILSON and also six in REAGAN. 666
Reagan is the only 'world leader' in all of history to have a birth
name like that. Ronald Wilson Reagan clearly was an 'image President'.
The most popular in US history, he was and still is virtually
worshiped by his many followers. It was his successor Bush senior, who
used his CIA and BIG OIL connections to make him so popular, resulting
in the virtual worship of Reagan's 'image'. I believe really Bush
picked Reagan as a figurehead, because of his charisma and previously
existing popularity.
Reagan was referred to by many, as The Great Communicator, for his
notable eloquence.
Reagan was mortally wounded while in office, and he astonished the
world when he survived it.
Reagan was also succeeded immediately by a tough talking man, with a
kind and gentle "lamby" image. George H. W. Bush Sr., who even ran on
the platform of "a kinder gentler America", talked tough of war and
then invaded Iraq, just as Daniel said he would. His son now carries
on his policies at his direction.
Revelation also states that the second beast would have the power to
call down fire from heaven. Bush and his son have been raining fire
down all over the world. Their catch phrase should be, Bombs R Us.
Here is another thing you may not know.
Reagan, during his first term as President, immediately established
diplomatic relations with The Vatican. This was in stark defiance of
the Constitution, and that really upset allot of people if you recall.
Then Reagan expanded our Social Security number from 9 to 18 digits.
If you don't believe me, look at any post Reagan era Social Security
card. There are the usual 9 digits on the front, and an additional
'new' 9 digits on the back printed in red. You cannot legally have a
job, or a bank account without it.
The US Federal government has long said that eventually we will have
to go cash-less, and all transactions will then be by debit card. This
is to counteract counterfeiting and terrorism they claim. By Federal
law, enacted by Reagan during his Presidency, all Electronic Funds
Transfer accounts, debit cards etc., must use your Social Security
number as your account number. The digits are scrambled to protect
your identity, but it is your Social Security number.
Surely in "response to terrorism", this plan shall move forth quickly.
Natasha
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| User: "Leigh_Bee" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
10 Nov 2003 05:23:12 PM |
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(Natasha Thompson) wrote in message news:<cbd527a.0311091308.5925738e@posting.google.com>...
The Nazi's are not a thing of the past. The neonazis are not
representative of the power, which the real NAZI's still wield, world
wide. To them WW2 is just a lost battle. The WAR goes on, and they are
winning it. They are because too many believe it is over, and that
Naziism is no longer a threat.
Sadly our Nation's future is in the hands of a people drunk on
materialism, blinded by self interest, and deluded by the corporate
controlled news media and entertainment industry.
For these things, the entire world shall be completely dominated by
the remnants of the Third Reich. Those same who at this very moment,
without restraint, bring to fruition the nightmare conceived by the
powers of darkness. The same evil which now decimates our entire
planetary ecosystem, and pollutes the minds of people everywhere.
SNIP
The US Federal government has long said that eventually we will have
to go cash-less, and all transactions will then be by debit card. This
is to counteract counterfeiting and terrorism they claim. By Federal
law, enacted by Reagan during his Presidency, all Electronic Funds
Transfer accounts, debit cards etc., must use your Social Security
number as your account number. The digits are scrambled to protect
your identity, but it is your Social Security number.
Surely in "response to terrorism", this plan shall move forth quickly.
Natasha
Interesting post.
You cannot blame control freaks for being control freaks, it is just
that any means to hold that control, start to become totally counter
productive, in fact we are over here having a French doco on the
crimes of the CIA, and well let us just say, there does not seem to be
many missing skeletons not discussed, this starting back in 1947.
The fact that the US has based it's intelligence on tech surveillance
methods has failed them in that enemy has increased its followers from
a text book knee jerk response from the West so a hardening of
attitudes etc, Oil well apparently 40 years worth, but a distribution
crisis in about 4 peaceful years, and Iraq believe it or not has 5
years worth.
NB the US securing African Oil deposits at present.
LB
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| User: "Natasha Thompson" |
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| Title: Re: Would you believe the Nation's oldest newspaper? |
09 Nov 2003 03:06:32 PM |
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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461953
Case for war confected, say top US officials
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
09 November 2003
An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and
former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush
administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In
their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been
damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.
A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States
features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of
people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director
of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former
ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President
Bush's Secretary of the Army until just a few months ago.
Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war
intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the
picture the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to
the world. They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials
- notably Vice-President ***** Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find
evidence that would fit a preordained set of conclusions.
"There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an
imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this -
was never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a
veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.
The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass
destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert
Baer, largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old
information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda,
according to George Bush Senior's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas
Freeman, was both highly political and profoundly misguided.
"The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of
existence doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so
essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school of thought
about foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been tried."
The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the
Iraq War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer
in the forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected,
when he started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up
and be counted.
"My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys,"
Mr Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone
was against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion
that we had been misled about the reasons for the war."
Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new - the
forged document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium
tubes falsely assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite
images of "mobile biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression
facilities, the "decontamination vehicles" that were in fact fire
engines - what emerges is a striking sense of professional betrayal in
the intelligence community.
As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force,
the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously
accurate source of information and analysis for presidents pondering
grave international decisions. That role, he said, had now been
"prostituted" and the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going
to turn to now? Where is his reliable source of information now Iraq
is spinning out of control? He's frittered that away," Mr McGovern
said. "And the profound indignity is that he probably doesn't even
realise it."
The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by
Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the Veterans
of Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his
nuclear weapons programme and was thus threatening to inflict "death
on a massive scale - in his own region or beyond".
According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up his speech with a
series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with
information to substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely
bogus - contents of his speech.
By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamouring
for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of
everything known about Iraq's weapons programmes. Usually NIEs take
months to produce, but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a
100-page document in just three weeks.
The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had
a track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and
reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political
interest group. In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the
missile capabilities of various rogue states that managed to sound
considerably more alarming than a previous CIA estimate issued three
years earlier. On that occasion, he was acting at the behest of a
congressional commission anxious to make the case for a missile
defence system; the commission chairman was none other than Donald
Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defence and a key architect of the Iraq
war.
Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now
been discredited - Niger, the alumin- ium tubes, and so on. It also
gave the misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in
broad agreement about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts
and misgivings to footnotes and appendices.
By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few
qualifications were excised. When President Bush's speechwriters got
to work - starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led
to a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq - the
language became even stronger.
Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems to have played a
major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin
Powell's powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council
on 5 February. Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film:
"It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true."
.
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