New Bush family expose: "Family of Secrets"
The Secrecy News reports a new Bush family expose from journalist Russ Baker:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/01/family_of_secrets.html
What does it say about the American political system that someone like George W. Bush was able to ascend to the highest office in the land, despite his meager and ambiguous record?
In pursuit of an answer to that question, investigative journalist Russ Baker has constructed a full-fledged counterhistory of the last half-century as it pertains to the Bush family. He writes in his new book "Family of Secrets" that he discovered a "dimension of power" that conditions and distorts the American political process. It lies at the intersection of corporate oil interests, finance and intelligence, and the Bushes have been at the heart of it.
With a brief apology to the reader, Baker revisits the JFK assassination (and George H.W. Bush's peculiar response to it) and he embraces a radical reinterpretation of Watergate in which President Nixon is the target and victim of the conspiracy rather than its instigator.
"Family of Secrets" postulates a network of politically and financially powerful individuals working behind the scenes to advance their interests at the expense of the nation. Because the book consciously challenges the generally accepted record of several decades of public events, it assumes a burden of proof that it cannot fully discharge. It relies heavily on insinuation based on isolated facts, it emphasizes "relationships" as a primary manifestation of political allegiance and influence, and in the end it does not clearly state a significant hypothesis that could be corroborated or refuted by further investigation.
But Baker is an energetic reporter and a good storyteller. He has conducted prodigious research and interviewed both familiar and unfamiliar sources to produce riveting (if occasionally appalling) revisions of the JFK assassination and Watergate stories. Even readers who find his methodology unsound may profit from the fruits of his research. It is astonishing to learn, for example, that ousted CIA Director Allen Dulles was a contributor to the 1963 Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook entry on the Bay of Pigs. And I had forgotten, or never knew, that the Central Intelligence Agency refused a direct request from President Nixon to provide documents concerning the Bay of Pigs and other topics.
Baker makes a cogent case for a "deep" interpretation of the JFK assassination, Watergate and other events. He stresses the fact that Kennedy and Nixon each had real personal and political enemies who benefitted when these presidents were removed from office. In each case, he says, the Bush family was among the beneficiaries.
Because of its undisciplined use of historical data and the absence of rebuttal (the Bush family did not agree to be interviewed), "Family of Secrets" should not be the only book of recent history that anyone reads. But at its best, it provides a reader with an arsenal of new questions with which to interrogate and rethink the historical record.
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Don't forget...
Poppa wants Jeb Jeb to be a Pwesident to.
Do these people deserve to know how and why their loved ones were murdered? Do we deserve to know how and why 9/11 happened?
http://www.familyofsecrets.com
http://www.familyofsecrets.com/2008/12/18/family-of-secrets-on-the-newss...
Graphic:
http://mtblog.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2008/12/30/BushGraphic12-30...
Russ Baker on The Thom Hartmann Show Jan. 6th, 2008
http://a1135.g.akamai.net/f/1135/18227/1h/cchannel.download.akamai.com/1...
Listen to it at the archive here. Peace.
From FAMILY OF SECRETS website
BLOOMSBURY PRESS
FAMILY OF SECRETS:
The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House,
and What Their Influence Means for America
By award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker
ISBN: 1-59691-557-9; $30.00; Pub January 2009
Contact:
Gene Taft, GeneTaftPR@aol.com, m: 917/701-4072, p: 301/593-0766
Peter Miller, Peter.Miller@bloomsburyusa.com, 646-307-5579
Revelatory new book on Bush family
publishing January 2009
How did Bush happen? How did George W. Bush, of all people, rise to the most powerful position in the world? This simple question sparked a five-year investigative odyssey by Russ Baker. What he found will force us to rethink virtually everything we thought we knew about the Bush family and its role in shaping recent American history.
In FAMILY OF SECRETS, Baker reveals that Bush, the people around him, and his policies are but an extreme, very public manifestation of what his family and its circle have always been about: an interlocking web of covert and overt machinations on behalf of a small cluster of elites-social, financial, industrial, military, intelligence-that enabled the Bush dynasty and propelled George W. Bush to the top.
Russ Baker’s deep background profile of the Bushes reveals a family with ongoing connections to the shadow world of intelligence, utilizing the dark arts of the trade to achieve their positions at the pinnacle of America’s political elite. Baker lays bare the stealth substructure that created the Bush dynasty, powered its rise, and brought America to its current state of crisis. Given the disastrous results of the last eight years, the story Baker has uncovered is must reading today-because the forces that shaped the Bush dynasty remain powerful and capable of exerting enormous influence on the fate of the country and the world
FAMILY OF SECRETS reads like a spy thriller. At the center stands George W.’s father, George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, whose public persona has always been that of a bland, patrician “genial bumbler.” In chapter after chapter, Baker unveils another “Poppy,” this one a ruthless master of elaborate covert operations and perception-management campaigns. Although the Bushes went to great lengths to create the notion of a substantial divide between father and son, the truth is that W. was essentially a bumptious and indiscreet version of his father.
Baker’s meticulously researched investigative history includes these revelations:
* George H.W. “Poppy” Bush’s role in covert operations that profoundly affected America’s history long before he became CIA Director or President.
* Personal secrets that George W. Bush and his handlers worked for decades to suppress.
* The untold story behind George W. Bush’s religious “awakening.”
* Why Bush Sr. cannot recall where he was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
* The little-known Russian émigré who was linked to Bush Sr., the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Kennedy assassination and who met an untimely demise.
* The most authoritative case ever presented that George W. Bush walked away from his US military obligations, an act with potentially serious legal consequences and no statute of limitations.
* How the CIA monitors the White House and its occupants.
* The story of the Bush family operative who graduated from babysitting an adult W. to fronting for a vast Saudi money pipeline into Texas.
* The hidden connections between the investment funds of America’s most prestigious universities and covert intelligence operations connected to Bush family businesses.
Baker systematically follows previously invisible threads that reveal Watergate to be a bloodless coup in three parts: creating the crime, implicating Nixon, and then ensuring that an aggressive effort would be mounted to use the ‘facts’ of the case to force him from office. Baker provides gripping new information about how Poppy Bush, Bob Woodward and White House counsel John Dean were connected to this still-mysterious American epic.
Baker’s research led him into even deeper waters. While reporting on Bush Sr.’s activities in the early 60’s, Baker discovered curious inconsistencies in Poppy’s account of his activities on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. “At 1:45 pm on November 22,” Baker reports, Bush Sr. “called the FBI to identify James Parrott as a possible suspect in the president’s murder, and to mention that he, George H.W. Bush, happened to be in Tyler, Texas.” As Poppy was making the call, Baker writes, Poppy’s own assistant was visiting Mr. Parrott at home. Baker goes on to describe what appears to be a virtuoso performance on Bush Sr.’s part at the time, creating a misleading paper trail regarding his own whereabouts that day while protecting his business interests and political future.
But Bush Sr.’s biggest operation was engineering his son’s rise to the presidency. Baker’s reporting presents Bush Jr. as an unruly scion who nevertheless relied heavily on his father’s extensive contacts and CIA expertise to erase all records of his misdoings and build a resume befitting a future president. Digging deep into Bush Jr.’s still-murky National Guard service record, Baker provides the most thorough account yet of what really happened. He also documents how W’s long track record as a womanizer and party animal was sanitized via a carefully calculated born-again Christian conversion that few dared question. Baker interviews the man who wrote the memos to the Bush family on how to gain the vast evangelical vote that put him in the White House.
When George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003, one Texas journalist, Mickey Herskowitz, was not surprised. “He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told Baker. “He said to me, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief… My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade…I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”
Combining gripping stories, explosive revelations and trenchant analysis, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a secret history of the elites that have shaped American politics over the last century.
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
………………………………………………………………..
For media inquiries, please contact Gene Taft at GT/PR, LLC
Email: GeneTaftPR@aol.com
Cell: 917/701-4072
Land line: 301/593-0766
Or Peter Miller, Director of Publicity, Bloomsbury
Email: Peter.Miller@bloomsburyusa.com
Phone: 646-307-5579
………………………………………………………………..
Book Information:
Hardcover: 592 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press,
175 Fifth Avenue New york, NY 10010
Peter.Miller@bloomsburyusa.com
646-307-5579, fax 212-982-2837
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596915579
ISBN-13: 978-1596915572
Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 2.1 inches
………………………………………………………………..
Praise for Family of Secrets
“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight-from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today’s headlines-this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism.”
–Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America
………………………………………………………………..
Praise for Russ Baker
“In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know.”
–Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers’ Journal (PBS)
“If Russ Baker’s proposed book does nothing more than catalog, analyze, amplify, and contextualize the bewildering array of Bush II crimes and misdemeanors that we already know about, it will perform a needed and valuable service. I ‘m betting that it will show us a good deal more than that-that what we’ve seen so far is smoke, and that Baker will expose the fire.”
–Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor, the New Yorker
“Russ Baker has the three most important attributes of any great investigative reporter: He is skeptical, he is fearless, and he is indefatigable. Whenever he examines anything-including the most allegedly wellcovered topics-he breaks important new ground.”
–David Margolick, author and contributing editor, Vanity Fair
“This is the right moment for just such a project, I think. The country is waking up asking itself who is this Bush guy and how did he do this number on us. It seems to me that we need a book that narrates what happened and how. As to Russ Baker, he doesn’t need me to say that he is not only among the best at his craft but also a man of rock-solid integrity. I look forward to reading this book.”
–Nicholas von Hoffman, author, columnist, and former Washington Post journalist
Shine a light
Baker systematically follows previously invisible threads that reveal Watergate to be a bloodless coup in three parts: creating the crime, implicating Nixon, and then ensuring that an aggressive effort would be mounted to use the ‘facts’ of the case to force him from office. Baker provides gripping new information about how Poppy Bush, Bob Woodward and White House counsel John Dean were connected to this still-mysterious American epic.
That's what we basically knew because of Team B:
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente." On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear—for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world."
...
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm
Now we have the means, the opportunity and the how about. Gimme a real prosecutor.
just don't call it a conspiracy
You notice that Aftergood says "a network of politically and financially powerful individuals working behind the scenes to advance their interests at the expense of the nation," rather than using the word "conspiracy," which says the same thing in far fewer words.
That he goes to these lengths to avoid the "C" word in an indicator of how much that word has been tainted in a relentless effort to paint all CTs as moonbat looney-tunes nutters who need to "get a life."
The word has been used so often as a joke it has been rendered virtually unusable in any serious context.
Russ Baker acknowledges this problem in the "Conclusion" ...
Page 493 of "Family of Secrets""
"Time and again, there has been a rush to bury inquiries into the most perplexing events of our time, along with a determination to subject dissenting views to ridicule. And the media weren't just enabling these efforts; they ere complicit in them -- not least by labeling anyone who dared to subject conventional views to a fresh and quizzical eye as a *conspiracy theory*
"I'll admit it. Fear of being so labeled has haunted me throughout this work. It's been an internal censor that I've had to resist again and again. And also an external one, as friends within the journalistic establishment reviewed my findings, found them both credible and highly disturbing, and yet urged me to stay away from them for my own good.
"I began to realize that I was experiencing the very thing the process is designed to induce. The boundaries of permissible thought are staked out and enforced. We accept the conventional narratives because they are repeated and approved, while conflicting ones are scorned. Isn't this how authoritarian regimes work? They get inside your mind so that overt repression becomes less necessary.
"Whose interests does this serve? As this book demonstrates, the deck has long been, and continues to be, stacked on behalf of big-money players, especially those in commodities and natural resources -- from gold to oil -- and those who finance the extraction of these materials. The defense industry, and the aligned growth business of "intelligence," provide muscle. On a lower level is an army of enablers -- the campaign functionaries, the PR people, the lawyers. This was the Bush enterprise. The Bushes embodied it as a dynasty; but it is larger than them, and will prove more enduring.
---
"DECEPTION RESIDES AT the very center of our national psyche. It affects us in incalculable ways, from decisions in the voting booth to our own life choices.
"The solution, clearly, is to pull away the veil. " (...)
Back in the 60s we had a meme: The medium is the massage (pun: mass age). We need a new meme -- The medium is the mirage, the medium is the deception, the medium is the misdirection.
It is the end of the(ir) whirled. The FIRE this time: In the 'last days' -- the veil of the temple that hides the alter must be rent and torn asunder. That which was hidden must be revealed and laid bare. LIES BURN UP when men see them for what they are.
we need to keep pointing this out
"I'll admit it. Fear of being so labeled has haunted me throughout this work. It's been an internal censor that I've had to resist again and again. And also an external one, as friends within the journalistic establishment reviewed my findings, found them both credible and highly disturbing, and yet urged me to stay away from them for my own good.
"I began to realize that I was experiencing the very thing the process is designed to induce. The boundaries of permissible thought are staked out and enforced. We accept the conventional narratives because they are repeated and approved, while conflicting ones are scorned. Isn't this how authoritarian regimes work? They get inside your mind so that overt repression becomes less necessary."
I've written several times about the hollowness of the attacks on CTs, and we need to keep this up. It is one of the opposition's most powerful weapons to keep people from taking us seriously.
www.dissidentvoice.org/author/SheilaCasey/
Russ Baker, the reluctant conspiracy theorist
I'm presently 3/5ths of the way through the book and will write a blog about it when I'm done unless someone else beats me to it.
So far, Mr. Baker has connected George H.W. Bush to the CIA years before he was appointed its director, the JFK assassination, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, the Paris meeting connected to Reagan's October surprise (he waffles there), BCCI and an ongoing series of activities designed to keep him, his family and cronies swimming in Saudi money and controlling the levers of U.S. political power.
My quick perusal of the book on Christmas morning indicates that Mr. Baker goes nowhere near Mr. Bush's involvement in the attempt on Reagan's life or even the fact that he was at the head of a continuity of government exercise running that day. He also espouses a blowback theory regarding the events of 9/11/01.
The book is not the easiest read, imo, and could probably be 100 pages shorter if the redundancy and excessive prose were edited out.
Stay tuned.
The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.
In US, conspiracy isn't theory, it's a career path.
There's sixteen.. count them, sixteen intelligence agencies in the United States.
http://www.intelligence.gov/1-members.shtml
The job of any/all Intelligence agencies is to plan various conspiracies and act on those plans. That's the job description.
"Clandestine Service
Make a world of difference.
The CIA’s Clandestine Service is the cutting-edge of American Intelligence. It is an elite corps, providing vital information needed by US policymakers, the military and law enforcement services to protect the national security interests of the American people. For the extraordinary person who wants more than just a job, the Clandestine Service offers a unique career — a way of life that challenges the deepest resources of an individual’s intelligence, self reliance and responsibility...."
https://www.cia.gov/careers/jobs/clandestine-service/view-jobs/index.html
All in the "Family"
Henry Kissinger 1-5-09 Calling for a NEW WORLD ORDER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aROay5kufxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9Syi12RJo
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The CONSTITUTION is NOT going to "collapse" into pulverized dust no matter how much thermate/explosives or planes they throw at it
CNN's John King on Stephen Colbert's show.
Check out the moment starting at the 15:04 mark in this video.
"What does it say about the
"What does it say about the American political system that someone like George W. Bush was able to ascend to the highest office in the land, despite his meager and ambiguous record?"
What does it say about Obama?
Sorry, kids - nothing is changing here.
I'm half way through
and can not imagine how one could not draw the right conclusions of that scheme regarding 9/11. The money funneling and outsourcing intelligence dirty work through the Saudis, the Team B part, covert operations, the banking scheme behind all that- and Bush and his crownies allways in the middle.