...and the plot thickens, as it apppears to go way back.

Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project

New York - Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting commercial asset" of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush." The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

"Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil," the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.

While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.

The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.

Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that "I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.

Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" and the other as "Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency."

When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."

When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.

It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good.

In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, "Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman."

This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.

Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.

Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an "investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE." These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.

George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.

The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, "Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe."

The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.

Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]
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Russ Baker, founder of the Real News Project, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, Real News editorial board member, are at work on a book about George W. Bush and the Bush clan, due out later this year. They may be reached at: russ@realnews.org.

No Time For Healing (writing with Sidney)

Ford's posthumous condemnation of the Iraq war shows that the struggle for the soul of the GOP begun in the Nixon years is as relevant now as ever.

By Sidney Blumenthal

I would like to say that, IMHO, Sydney Blumenthal is one of the best political analysts from either the Left or the Right. His articles always get past around between us, independent pelicans. The man knows who is who is the D.C. stratosphere and he has a stunning command of recent history. (Don't know about ancient history, but we have plenty of other folks who know alot about that.)

Jan. 03, 2007 During the holiday interregnum between the election of the new Congress and its swearing in, the death of former President Gerald R. Ford at the age of 93 evoked nostalgia for his interim "time to heal" (the title of his memoir) after the resignation of President Nixon. Like all nostalgia, it was distorting and disabling. Surprisingly, the one shattering the false mood was none other than Ford himself, speaking from the grave. Beyond the River Styx he could hardly silence the broadcasters attempting to outdo one another in reaching for high notes of banality. But he left behind words cautioning against the abuse of history, especially by those who served as his aides, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who twisted the lessons of his presidency to provide the underpinnings of George W. Bush's policies. Ford's condemnation demonstrated the continued relevance of the contentious politics that enveloped his administration and revealed just how little healing has occurred among the divided Republican elites since Richard Nixon's fall.

The nation never healed either, truth be told. Instead it has been one big festering, self-inflicted wound for over 40 years, though, by the time Nixon resigned, most of us peon citizens were really sick and tired of D.C. and politics in general. Many of us had said, to the Democrats and the Republicans, a pox on both your houses and had become eternal, committed independents, and for awhile, Disco Dancers.

I will only speak for myself here, but I was torn over the Nixon pardon. There was a part of me that believed it would be best for the country to move on and that it was best to err on the side of compassion, even for a man I really despised. There was another nagging, niggling part of me that knew it was a huge mistake. I wasn't sure exactly why, but I knew it was a mistake. The only reason I could give, at the time, was that the pardon had set a very bad precedent in allowing a president, or any high office holder, to be above the law; literally untouchable. I could never have imagined where that act of compassion would lead.

His last testament was a final act of political finesse. Obeying the unwritten protocol of former presidents not to criticize a sitting one (a sketchy rule never upheld by Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter), he vouchsafed his commentary to a reporter guaranteed to publish it for maximum exposure and thus, Ford must have known, damage. Having suffered a stroke in 2000, Ford must also have known that his remarks on Bush and the others would appear while Bush was still in office and therefore of more than historical interest.

"I don't think I would have gone to war," Ford told Bob Woodward in an interview conducted two and a half years ago. "Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do ... I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly, I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war."

The patriotic thing to have done would have been to have said it when it mattred. Now, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions more maimed and psychologically damaged for life. The treausry has been, quite literally, robbed and we are all in debt up to our eyeballs, the very word, "American" has become a four-letter word, all over the world, it will take a long time, maybe generations, to rebuild any credibility with the rest of the world and will we ever get over the fact that our government codified such things as torture while deep-sixing not only the Constitution, but even the Magna Carta's Great writ, that of Habeus Corpus?

Is being polite to a sitting president, any sitting president, worth all that? I don't think so. If you believe that a policy of your government is really wrong and that a huge, deadly and destructive mistake is about to be made; one which may easily due great damage to the country and its citizens, is it ever proper to keep one's mouth shut? ,

Ford also agreed with Colin Powell's assessment of Cheney as having a "fever" about invading Iraq. "I think that's probably true," he said, adding that Cheney had become "more pugnacious."

Or maybe Mr. Cheney has had a few too many heart attacks and there has been damage to hs brain, making it harder for him to pretend to be a nice guy. There is also the possibility that his heart medication has made him psychotic. Some heart medications can do that.

Ford's judgments are best understood as reflections on his own presidency. He describes Bush with a disdain he reserved previously only for one other man he believed had contempt for facts -- Ronald Reagan. If he was anything, Ford was consistent, and he was consistently hostile to Reagan's right-wing politics, which he grasped had metastasized into Bush's radicalism. Even worse, two of his formerly close staff members were chiefly responsible for the "justifying" of a disastrous policy, "a big mistake," contrary to "the facts."

Tis true that Reagan and Bush make Richard Nixon seem like a flaming Liberal by comparison. How did the ideologues take over? Clearly, the push for authoritarianism began in earnest during the Ford presidency and I, personally, he wasn't a part of it.

Nixon chose Ford as his vice president after Spiro Agnew pleaded nolo contendere to bribery charges and resigned. Nixon still had faith in his own obstruction of justice. He never anticipated that he himself would be compelled to resign rather than face certain removal from office in the Watergate scandal. When he did, the pins of his political act collapsed onto Ford. Nixon's style had been to play both ends of the Republican Party against the middle, which he could then claim to occupy. He convinced conservatives and moderates that he was really one of them even as they rightly suspected him of cynical manipulation. When he imploded, the Republican center that he had come to personify was incinerated too. Ford was left to stir the ashes.

As the first unelected vice president, he was the first person to accede to the presidency as the result of a Senate confirmation, not the people's vote. Throughout his brief term he struggled for legitimacy. His pardon of Nixon a month after assuming office heightened his crisis. Saving the country from a drawn-out criminal trial of the disgraced Nixon, he thought he would be relieved of the burden of the past -- "I had to get the monkey off my back," he wrote in his memoir -- but instead he sacrificed himself. His popularity plummeted, never to rise above 50 percent again. The absence of legitimacy impinged on his ability to fend off the Republican right.

Seems President Ford tried to close a wound that was infected and would need further debriding, plus massive doses of antibiotics. He misdiagnosed the country. Now the wound has re-opened in a life-threatening way, revealing a long-standing, infecctuous, degenerative, life-threatening illness. It has become very acute. It is time for surgery and intensive care.

Upon becoming president Ford had called for "recovery, not revenge." But revenge was already in the air. Gov. Reagan of California refused to call on the new president when he traveled to Washington, a calculated snub. Ford's selection of Nelson Rockefeller as vice president triggered Reagan's decision to run against him for the Republican nomination.

Within the Republican Party, Ford's nomination of Rockefeller received far more disapproval than his pardon of Nixon. The governor of New York was the symbol of moderate Republicanism, a hate object for decades. Reagan's motive, however, was ultimately personal pique -- he was "disappointed that he had been passed over himself," according to his biographer Lou Cannon. Reagan thought of himself as the rightful heir apparent and Ford as nothing but a "caretaker."

Wonder what or who ever gave Reagan that idea? Could it have been G.E.?

Ford had a dismally low regard for Reagan, dismissing the threat of his potential challenge. "I hadn't taken those warnings seriously because I didn't take Reagan seriously." Ford considered Reagan "simplistic," dogmatic and lazy. Reagan, for his part, argued that Nixon's 1972 mandate was not a Republican victory but an ideological one for junking the old Republicanism and that Ford was betraying it. "The tragedy of Watergate," Reagan said, was that it "obscured the meaning of that '72 election."

Reagn was an indiot. the election of 1972 wasn't a landslide for fascism. It was a landslide against what the public persceived as the threat of Communism and agsint the national humiliation of losing a war, which was, by the way, already lost. (Sound familiar?)

Reagan accused Ford of fatally weakening national security. He opposed Ford's pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to treaties reducing the production of nuclear weapons and Ford's signing of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, which held the Soviet Union for the first time to standards of human rights. Reagan's critique appeared against the backdrop of the collapse of South Vietnam and the scene on April 30, 1975, of helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel from the roof of the U.S. Embassy.

Ford's battles with the Democratic Congress made him seem impotent. He issued 65 vetoes of major pieces of legislation, including appropriations bills intended to ameliorate the harsh effects of a recession.

In April 1975, the Senate Operations Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, released 14 reports on the abuse of intelligence. It chronicled "excessive executive power," "excessive secrecy," "avoidance of the rule of law," "rogue" operations and even spying on domestic politics. "Whatever the theory," the report concluded, "the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected."

Echoing our Founders, who knew that times would come, on a fairly regular basis, when men would seek to grab power and do with it their very worst. That is one of the reasons they gave to the people the process of impeachment, and if impeachment doesn't work, it means that the Constitution and our rule of law is severaly damaged and our Democracti Republic is at risk. In that case, check the Declaratioon of Independence for further instructions.

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld -- moved from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense as his deputy, Dick Cheney, was promoted to the chief of staff job -- created a Team B of hawks within the Pentagon who attacked the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate for supposedly underestimating the Soviet Union's military strength. Rumsfeld began making speeches assailing détente, claiming that the Soviets were flagrantly violating treaties negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, another hate object of the right who was long associated with Vice President Rockefeller. The CIA officially responded by calling the Team B report "complete fiction." And CIA Director George H.W. Bush said that Team B set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy." Nonetheless, Rumsfeld's inflation of the Red menace, based on faulty data, turned up the flame under Ford. Rumsfeld had his own motive: He wanted to be named vice president, a nomination that in the end went to Sen. Bob Dole, considered acceptable to Reagan.

Don't you just keeep asking yourself, why was a B-grade actor so damned important? Keep that thought in mind.

In anticipation of the contest with Reagan, in December 1975, Ford pressured Rockefeller to announce he did not want to run as his vice president. Ford later confessed that dumping Rockefeller was the "most cowardly thing I've ever done," Barry Werth reports in his recent book on Ford's presidency, "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today." "I was angry at myself for showing cowardice in not saying to the ultraconservatives: it's going to be Ford and Rockefeller, whatever the consequences."

Rockefeller advised Ford: "I'm now going to say it frankly ... Rumsfeld wants to be President of the United States. He has given George Bush [another potential vice-presidential choice] the deep six by putting him in the CIA, he has gotten me out ... He was third on your list and now he has gotten rid of two of us ... You are not going to be able to put him on the [ticket] because he is defense secretary, but he is not going to want anybody who can possibly be elected with you on that ticket ... I have to say I have a serious question about his loyalty to you."

Had Ford run with Rockefeller it's possible he would have lost the GOP nomination to Reagan. Reagan would likely have been buried in a landslide -- and perhaps the right wing along with him. If Ford had been the nominee, it's very possible he would have won the election because with Rockefeller on the ticket he would probably have carried New York.

In the Republican primaries, after faltering initially, Reagan seized on Ford's agreement to turn over the Panama Canal to Panamanian administration as a "giveaway." "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it!" He won the primary in North Carolina, revived his chances and marched into the convention just short of the delegate votes he needed. There he proposed a series of platform challenges to détente, including a denunciation of the Helsinki Accords as "taking from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day getting it." The Ford camp at the convention, led by Cheney, accepted all of these planks.

Well, of course he did.

When Ford barely gained the nomination (James A. Baker, a friend of George H.W. Bush's, served as his delegate counter), Reagan gave the most grudging acknowledgment. At the convention, on the final night, only when Ford persistently pleaded with Reagan, who was sitting in a skybox, to address the convention did he do so. Reagan delivered a speech that ended with an unreferenced quotation from the hero past of the Republican right, Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "There is no substitute for victory." It could not have been a more stinging ideological rebuke of Ford. Afterward, Reagan gingerly campaigned for the Republican ticket, declining Ford's request to join him on the stump in California. After his narrow loss, Ford told interviewers that Reagan's "divisive" candidacy and subsequent behavior had cost him the election. Thus the "time to heal" ended.

As long as there is an ultra-right, any where near the halls of power in this country, no one will be safe from their own worse nightmare; the nightmare of any true American, from one generation to the next. These people are corporatists, socio-economic Darwinists and Dominionists. They are self-righteous, entitled hypocrites who can't even see the poor, the disabled and the elderly, let alone their struggle for lfe with dignity, which any truly wealthy nation should be able to afford, and does not do so at its own peril.

Ford was the last regular Republican to serve as president. Reagan became president campaigning against Jimmy Carter on almost exactly the same charges of weakness and appeasement that he had leveled against Ford, down to the Panama Canal Treaty, which Carter signed. Reagan's running mate, George H.W. Bush, had already made compromises, as a congressman opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, to lend him the coloration of a Texas Republican. Swallowing Reagan's program, including what Bush had earlier called "voodoo economics," was essential to his rise. Yet his son traced the causes of his father's defeat in 1992 to his remaining moderation. George W. Bush's running mate agreed. That Cheney, Ford's chief of staff and the elder Bush's secretary of defense, bolstered and encouraged these impulses provided Bush with conclusive proof of their correctness.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, since their days in the Nixon White House, had observed the imperial presidency besieged. Under Ford, they saw it reach its low ebb, and they were determined to restore the presidency as they imagined it should be -- unchecked by an intrusive Congress, shielded from the press, and unobstructed by staff professionals in the intelligence community who did not clearly understand the present dangers that required just such an executive.

Has anyone else stopped to ponder the fact that every GOP President since Ford has been a sell-out and a fraud, if not out-right criminal in their conduct of national affairs?

None of them are who they seem to be. They are all packaged and sold to the American people as tough-guy heroes, who never served in a war zone, if at all, or cowboys who are afraid of horses. They are people who tell feel-good lies to the American people, even though those lies and the illusions they paint will inevitably cost us dearly.

They are masters of deception.

After the 2000 election, Vice President-elect Cheney held a dinner at his house where he held forth that the new administration would finish off Saddam Hussein, a job that the elder Bush had left undone, opening him to charges of softness. Rumsfeld, appointed by the new president as secretary of defense at the suggestion of Cheney, named one of the key members of the Ford-era Team B, Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary. At the first meeting of the National Security Council with Bush, Wolfowitz raised the question of invading Iraq.
Ford's posthumous dissent on Iraq has carried no more weight with President Bush than those of Ford's (and the elder Bush's) national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker, or even the quiet repudiation of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, theoretician of the Reagan doctrine. Ford stands for the side of his father that Bush associates with defeat.

Sidney, Sidney....please do not try to have us believe that GHWB is a good-guy. He isn't. He just seems angelic and smart, compared to his son.

But as Bush prepares to announce his escalation of the Iraq war, he and Cheney made a final use of Ford, eulogizing him for his pardon of Nixon, which they turned into a metaphor for their own will in the face of crumbling support. "The criticism was fierce," said Cheney. "But President Ford had larger concerns at heart." Bush hailed him for his "firm resolve" and "character." "In politics," Cheney said, "it can take a generation or more for a matter to settle, for tempers to cool." This is no time to heal. Let history sort it out.

The ultra-right is not, and never will be, about healing. Rather, it is a movement which uses hateful divisive tactics to tear apart anything over which it does not have absolute power, and that includes our beloved country, or those beloved by others.

Restoration, Truth and Accountability!