The "Surge" to screw Iraq out of its oil
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1617.shtml
Jan 9, 2007, 00:51
It took an article from the distant New Zealand Herald (via a reader) to tell me Oil giants to profit from law change. That is, the third largest reserves in the world are about to be fed to the Western oil lions under another sell-out law that the Iraqi Parliament will vote on in days. Of course, the US government had a grease-stained hand in drawing up the law, a draft of which the NZ Herald got to see early on. God forbid the New York Times or Washington Post should know . . .
But Big Oil's Boyz, BP, Shell and Exxon will get 30-year contracts to suck up the crude and permit the first large-scale operation of foreign oil hands on Iraq since the industry was nationalized in 1972. And you were wondering if they really were bombing Iraq into the Stone Age for oil. This should put an end to your suspicions.
But then the Herald reminds us Vice President Dick Cheney said in 1999, while still chief exec of oil services company Halliburton, "that the world would thirst for an additional 50 million barrels a day by 2010." So where would the oil come from? Prophetically, he announced, "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." Thus spake the Cheney, spouting oil wells in the reflection of his outsize glasses.
Naturally, the oil executives claim that the "law" to permit Western companies to loot up to three-quarters of the profits in the early years is the only way to get Iraq’s oil industry back on its feet, before we kick it down with sanctions, more war and loss of technical expertise. Ah, but don’t go away feeling like The Ugly American, like your country is nasty.
We will move forward through ‘production-sharing agreements’ (PSAs), unusual in the Middle East, where the oil business in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s two biggest producers, is state controlled. At least, theirs is a semblance of autonomy, even though the Saudis are in our bag, the latter, who knows, on the way.
PSAs permit a country to hold on to legal ownership of its oil, but hands out a share of profits to foreign companies that invest in infrastructure as well operation of wells, pipelines and refineries. Of course, we’ve invested, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, some $2 trillion in the cost of the Iraq war, all things on and off the books counted.
Critics say that Iraq, where oil sustains 95 percent of the economy, is being held up, forced to give up an unacceptable (illegal?) share of sovereignty. What do you think?
Yet, let us remember those dark days of 2003, when Tony "the mouthpiece" Blair said nay to the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq’s oil income. He wanted the money put into a trust fund. What like our Social Security? Well, it would be run by the UN, but the idea went nowhere.
That same year, then Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute the war." [I love the verb]. "But the oil of the Iraqi people" [speaking of prosecution], "belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil." That’s okay, CP, the check is in the mail.
I remember, if I may inject a personal anecdote, asking guest speaker Mario Cuomo at the 92nd Street Y, if indeed Iraq wasn’t about seizing it’s oil, and he gave me a huge "ohhhh nooooo," and filibustered for 10 minutes, till it was safe enough to ask for the next question. By then the audience had fallen asleep. And he’s a Democrat.
Anyhow, the provision’s backers say the 75 percent take on the profits will go on until drilling costs have been recouped. Err, that could take a couple of years right? After that, the Oil Boyz would skim about 20 percent of the profits. But that will double the industry skim for such deals. Tony Soprano would whip you up a frying pan of sausage and peppers for an offer like that.
But Greg Muttitt, a researcher for Platform, one of this nagging human rights and environmental groups which sticks its wise nose in the oil biz, said in so many words Iraq was being screwed, i.e., asked to pay an enormous price over the next three decades for the very instability we created. And they get screwed because, basically, they don’t have the clout to really bargain for the terms of any deal, including being let the hell alone.
Remember, the placement of Saddam as Iraq’s gangsta leader came from GHW Bush, as well as leading him to believe he could steal Kuwait to fill his coffers after the eight-year Iran/Iraq War. We also fed money in that war to both sides so they’d kill each other quicker. Bonking Iraq with Gulf War I really came when Hussein got to feeling his oats and started fluctuating OPEC supplies and prices. A decade later, this triggered Junior's going back for Hussein’s literal head, lying about him having Weapons of Mass Destruction to create Operation Shock and Awfulness.
Nevertheless, Khaled Salih, spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government, a party to the negotiations, said the so-called Iraqi government plans to have the skim on the books by the Ides of March. Hail Caesar!
Several oil majors sent teams to Iraq to lobby for deals before the law is rubber-stamped. The big names are not likely to invest until the violence in Iraq calms down. Don’t worry, fellas, the cavalry is on the way.
Meanwhile, James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, an international government watchdog, bow-wowed, "It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this. To do it anyway, with minimal discussion within the (Iraqi) Parliament is really just pouring more oil on the fire."
Liberal Democrat's Treasury spokesman Vince Cable, former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds to rebuild Iraq. Who would that be: Halliburton, Brown & Root, Robber and Barons?
Cable added, "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair." Yes, illusion is all. Remember "I reminded the government that that oil belongs to the Iraqi people and the government has the responsibility to be good stewards of that valuable asset and valuable resource." That was our own George Bush on June 14, 2006.
Then there was Paul Wolfowitz, March, 2003: "Oil revenues of Iraq could bring between US $50 billion and US $100 in two or three years . . . Iraq can finance its reconstruction. And thus . . .
We have the "Surge"
And I am reading in the New York Times Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs. David Sanger writes, "President Bush’s new Iraq strategy calls for a rapid influx of forces that could add as many as 20,000 American combat troops to Baghdad, supplemented with a jobs program costing as much as $1 billion intended to employ Iraqis in projects including painting schools and cleaning streets, according to American officials who are piecing together the last parts of the initiative."
One billion dollars billion for painting schools and cleaning streets, jobs for Iraqis, uh huh. And 20,000 more combat troops to keep the peace and close the oil deal.
Of course, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki agreed to it all, including matching five American combat brigades that would go in at a rate of about one a month. He would send three more Iraqi brigades to Baghdad over the next month and a half. He likes the present placement of his head between his shoulders. Shades of Vietnam and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam South).
Two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force are Kurdish pesh merga units from northern Iraq. Doubts prevail as to whether they would show up in Baghdad and/or would quell the civil war (sectarian fighting).
This also would put Bush head-to-head with the new Congress. Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stand up against Big Oil and Bush Junior? How will Bush continue to con the American people this is about democracy? Will he call the Democrats traitors if they shut the money spigot? Who will believe we should get in the middle of the Shiite/Sunni slicing/dicing machine?
What’s more, Sanger tells us the plan calls for more than doubling "Provincial Reconstruction Teams," small groups of "State Department officials empowered to coordinate local reconstruction efforts, chiefly hiring Iraqi companies." What a novel thought. Is Bechtel busy? The teams will be "embedded with combat brigades," in an attempt to show Iraqis that American forces were not just occupiers. We’re pacifiers, too.
This is the "greater sacrifice" in Mr. Bush’s speech, which he will make in his last-ditch effort "to salvage our mission in Iraq," which is to keep Big Oil rich.
Let’s hope, after the speech that the Dems pick apart the details of the plan to save lives, billions of dollars, and the neglected United States economy, which is operating in the blood red. Bush will also want to "increase our resolve" concerning "adventurism by regional adversaries, especially Iran," Iraq’s former enemy in the eight-year war of the 80s.
Condi Rice will go off "to shore up confidence among Washington’s Islamic allies in the region as well as to warn its adversaries," leaving "for the Middle East by next weekend."
Bush is also planning to increase the number of American military trainers working with Iraqi security forces. Where have we heard that before? Mr. Maliki is going to renew efforts to rid the Army of sectarian influences. He didn’t say too much about the beef-up of American forces. He assured us "no outlaws," like Iraqi freedom fighters, could "expect protection."
In fact, his last words were, "The Baghdad security plan will not provide safe haven for all outlaws, regardless of their political or sectarian identities." Uh huh. At least, they won’t have Saddam Hussein to kick around anymore. We may be soon wishing he was still there.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
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New Oil Law Means Victory in Iraq for Bush
Chris Floyd, t r u t h o u t
http://www.uruknet.info/?colonna=m&p=29654&l=e&size=1&hd=0
Monday 08 January 2007
ÊÊÊÊI. Surging Toward the Ultimate Prize
ÊÊÊÊThe reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not that he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and online. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.
ÊÊÊÊAt any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reported. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," says the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.
ÊÊÊÊAs the paper notes, the law will give Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion - indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: "Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and "The US Takeover of Iraqi Oil."
ÊÊÊÊFrom those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry - while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits - more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.
ÊÊÊÊOf course, at the moment, the "security situation" - i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq - prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.
ÊÊÊÊThe American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."
ÊÊÊÊThe "surged" troops - mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty - are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on - and it will go on and on - the Bush administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises to uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" - as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.
ÊÊÊÊSo Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse - as it almost certainly will - Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" - a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, who then answered his own question: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
ÊÊÊÊAnd therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."
ÊÊÊÊThis is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits - and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neo-cons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.
ÊÊÊÊII. The Win-Win Scenario
ÊÊÊÊAnd this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq - they care about what comes out of the ground. The end - profit and dominion - justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.
ÊÊÊÊAnd in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction - and the elite interests they represent - has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.
ÊÊÊÊPut simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation - indeed, the world - as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them - not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases.
ÊÊÊÊThe Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions - like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh - have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.
ÊÊÊÊThe aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the US arms industry - and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.
ÊÊÊÊBut that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything - their bases, their contracts, their collaborators - the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by US taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan US war machine - 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.
ÊÊÊÊNor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths - or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles, and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street - both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.
ÊÊÊÊ[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues - the neo-cons - somehow "hijacked" US foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined to pursue an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neo-cons and their bag of tricks - their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes - as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]
ÊÊÊÊSo Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights - because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" - who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state - until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.
ÊÊÊÊSo Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq - these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is - and they like it.
ÊÊÊÊChris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly political column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from 1996 to 2006. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored award in 2003. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
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http://realnews.org/rn/content/zapata.html
CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project
January 8, 2007
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 Òcleared and witting commercial assetÓ 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 Òoil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.Ó 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.
ÒTheir joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,Ó 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 ÒI'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 ÒMr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence AgencyÓ and the other as ÒCaptain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.Ó
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, ÒThirty-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.Ó
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 Òinvestment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.Ó 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, ÒMr 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.Ó
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]
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 [at] realnews.org.
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