 |
Bushwhacked:
Inside Stories of
True Conspiracy
by Uri Dowbenko
Just $19.95
Order Form Here
or Charge by Phone
Call Toll FREE
1-866-317-1390 |
|
BOOK REVIEW
|
|
|
"The US Secret Govt Rears Its Ugly Head in the Bush Cabal"
By Jackson Thoreau
If the United States truly practiced the concept of
"liberty and justice for all," retired Navy Lt. Cmdr.
Al Martin would be the one with the national radio
talk show and prestige, and Ollie North would be
having to hide out in a remote site, or better yet, in
prison.
George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, George Bush Sr., Richard
Armitage, and others sure would not be in the
positions of power they are. Some people would not be
sitting in prisons for what they knew about the
Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Other people would
not have died under odd circumstances since then,
possibly because someone was afraid they’d talk too
much, or find out too much.
And two books I’ve recently read, Al Martin’s "The
Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider"
[National Liberty Press, LLC, P.O. Box 43, Pray,
Montana 59065, Toll-free 1-866-317-1390,
http://www.almartinraw.com, 2002] and Uri Dowbenko’s
"Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy"
[Conspiracy Digest, Pray, Mont., Toll-free
1-866-317-1390, http://www.conspiracydigest.com,
2002], would be required reading in all U.S. college
government courses.
But of course, as the Denzel Washington character
says in Philadelphia, we don’t live in a perfect
world, now do we?
The books made my head spin, once I finally found
some time to really read them and not just skim over
them. They deserve careful readings by anyone
interested in learning more about why the U.S. bullies
much smaller countries like Iraq, Syria, Iran, and
Nicaragua.
If you want to know why the Bush administration is
on the verge of invading Syria when its adventures in
Afghanistan and Iraq are not even complete, buy these
books. They connect the dots between North and the
Bush syndicate – and even prominent Democrats that
profited from and helped cover up Iran-Contra and
Iraqgate, such as Janet Reno. They pull no punches.
They give credence to your suspicions that something
is frightfully wrong with the direction Bush Inc. are
leading us.
Martin, one of the bravest whistle-blowers who has
graced the U.S., was actually an officer in the
powerful Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle
player in Iran-Contra, the scheme that on the surface
illegally sold American weapons to Iran, then used
that money to illegally fund the right-wing Contras’
war on the leftist Nicaraguan government. But as he
shows, Iran-Contra was a lot more than that; it was
bank fraud, savings and loan fraud, drug running,
apparent murder, falsely imprisoning people who knew
too much.
Martin describes numerous meetings with none other
than Jeb Bush, the man who stole Florida for his
brother in the 2000 election heist. At one, Bush, who
Martin calls a "real sharp cookie," tells him how to
illegally "short" stock in companies to make a hefty
profit that can then be sent to the Contras. Martin
explains how he incorporated dummy companies with Bush
that were used to funnel illegal money between the
Middle East, Central America, and other regions.
"Jeb likes any kind of fraud – banking, security,
real estate, oil and gas, gold bullion, aircraft
brokerage," Martin writes. "Neil [Bush] was much more
in the real estate end of the fraud. But George Jr. –
I would classify as an insurance fraudster, in terms
of his Iran-Contra profiteering….At the top of that
[Iran-Contra fraud] pyramid, there are people like
George Bush [Sr.] and a few others like Oliver North.
George Bush is at the very pinnacle of that pyramid."
This is the same Bush Sr., who Martin quotes as
saying, "The greatest reliever of stress is shredding
documents."
As Martin writes, the repercussions of Iran-Contra
did not stop in the 1980s. American taxpayers are
still paying for all of the banks and S&Ls that failed
due to the fraud.
Americans are still financing the illegal and
immoral adventures in the Middle East and Latin
America of this "secret government," a term for the
Iran-Contra U.S. government hijackers of the 1980s who
exist stronger than ever under Bush Jr.
Many obvious players in Iran-Contra, such as North
and Bush, are still heavily involved in the current
U.S. secret plans to do whatever the hell the rich and
powerful forces that really run our government want to
do.
In a chilling precursor, Martin describes Operation
Orpheus, a secret plan in the 1980s to fake a nuclear
attack by Russia to cover up Iran-Contra misdeeds and
install a military dictatorship in the U.S.
It was a similar plan to Operation Northwoods,
another phony terrorism campaign which some of the
late President Kennedy’s military advisors, led by
then-Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, devised to help
justify an invasion of Cuba in 1962 to overthrow Fidel
Castro.
Among the ideas these U.S. government officials
discussed were killing innocent Americans in cities
and blaming Cuban "terrorists," blowing up U.S. ships
and blaming Castro, blaming Cuba if the spaceship with
John Glenn exploded [as some blamed Arab terrorists
for the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia this
year], provoking a war by flying a plane over Cuba,
and paying a Cuban official to attack U.S. forces at
the Guantanamo naval base. Kennedy rejected the phony
campaign and was assassinated the following year. Some
said military planners enraged by JFK’s rejection of
Operation Northwoods could have participated in the
assassination.
Now it seems as if Bush Jr. has accepted a similar
plan – both bin Laden and Hussein were trained and
financed by U.S. military and intelligence agents at
one time, and both somehow escaped capture and death
in the latest military operations.
Were deals made with bin Laden and Hussein? Is this
"war on terrorism" as phony as the previous U.S.
military schemes to justify invasions and funneling
more funds to the military-industrial complex and even
implementing a military dictatorship with Bush Jr. as
head puppet today?
There are many more ties between the 1980s scandal and
the present one. For instance, U.S. Sen. Rick
Santorum, a Caucasian Republican from Pennsylvania,
was among the beneficiaries of the Iran-Contra
scandal, Martin says. Santorum is now a key supporter
of Israel who is leading the charge in the Senate to
invade Syria and other countries. He and Sen. Barbara
Boxer, a Jewish Democrat from California, plan to
introduce legislation that would set the stage for the
Syrian invasion, if they haven’t done so already.
Rep. Eliot Engel, a Jewish Democrat from New York,
and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Hispanic Republican
from Florida, introduced similar legislation in the
U.S. House on April 11, before the Iraqi mission to
make that country another U.S. puppet state was
finished.
Predictably, they called Syria a "rogue nation"
[idle question: When has Syria defied the UN and
bombed another sovereign nation back to the Stone Age,
killing and maiming thousands of innocent people in
the process?]. They accused Syria of supporting
terrorists, which it does, but only the kind that
fights back against Israeli-sponsored terrorism
against Palestinians. What one side calls terrorists
the other side calls soldiers – see
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon.html for Israeli
leader Ariel Sharon’s record of war crimes. They said
Syria has these dreaded "weapons of mass destruction,"
which UN inspectors and U.S. troops have yet to find
in Iraq, another country the U.S. invaded supposedly
because it had these awful weapons.
Hey, if the U.S. wants to find "weapons of mass
destruction" so much, all it has to do is look in its
own backyard. Or the backyard of Israel, which has
more than 400 nuclear weapons, a primary reason why
countries like Iraq, Syria, and Iran want more potent
weapons to provide a balance in the region. But of
course, the U.S. won’t look in its own backyard or the
backyard of its favorite lapdog state, next to Great
Britain.
The U.S. secret government wants to make sure
certain other countries don’t keep the weapons it
developed and sold to them at one time [yes, to Iraq,
to Syria, to Iran, and others] to make a quick buck.
That’s not hypocritical, it’s just part of what we
have to do in the war on terrorism, right? Wrong. It’s
part of our "leaders" latest attempts to divert our
attention from their selfish plans to control the
Middle East and ultimately the planet, and
inadequacies in providing for our domestic needs.
Meanwhile, the propaganda war against Syria rages
in the mainstream media, and public support to invade
that country because "hey, we will have to do it
someday" will increase. Syria will be an even easier
"opponent" than Iraq was, as it spends even less on
national defense than Iraq, according to the
well-respected, non-partisan Center for Defense
Information.
Syria is near the bottom of the worldwide list,
spending only $1 billion, compared to Iraq’s $1.4
billion and the United States’ $399 billion [add
another $100 billion or so for the Iraqi invasion].
Israel is a respectable 14th in military spending at
$10.6 billion, with the only other Middle Eastern
country higher being Saudi Arabia, which is eighth at
$21.3 billion.
And the Secret Teamers want us to believe we should
fear countries with relatively small militaries like
Iraq, Syria, and Iran? Are we really that stupid?
Anyway, Santorum profited from the International
Signals and Controls scandal, where the Pennsylvania
company shipped missiles and component parts to Iran
and Iraq during the Iran-Contra days, Martin writes.
At least one official from that company ended up in
prison, but obviously not Santorum.
The list goes on – these books need indexes so you
can look up certain people. Besides the Bush clan,
Martin implicates Bush’s Interior Secretary Gale
Norton, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage,
and White House National Security Council aide Elliott
Abrams, Reno, Bill Clinton, U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, the
adulterer who tried to drive Clinton from office for
lying about an affair, former Reagan National Security
Advisor Frank Carlucci, and former Republican
presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Bob Dole,
among others. Among those who deserve commendation are
numerous reporters who tried to get bits of the story
out, and Sen. John Kerry, who headed a commission that
attempted to expose the truth.
Some fellow progressives might bristle at the
mention of Clinton and Reno, but I’ve never been naïve
enough to think that Clinton got so far merely by
making goody-goody deals. I just liked Clinton’s
politics on the surface better than other recent
presidents, and I enjoyed the way he infuriated
conservatives, who hate Clinton so much they are
wasting millions of dollars to open a "Counter Clinton
Library" in Little Rock later this year.
Have liberals opened a "Counter Reagan Library" or
"Counter Bush Library" in the cities that house their
libraries? No – that just lends more evidence on who
the real hatemongers are in this country, the
Limbaughs and Norths and Liddys that Clinton loved to
piss off. But I admit I’ve overlooked Clinton’s
excesses, though not near as much as the average
Bush-can-do-no-wrong supporter overlooks his.
Martin also exposes Israeli involvement in
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate, an important link in the
current situation in the Middle East. Hard-line
Zionists will accuse me of being anti-Jewish for
daring to criticize Israel. I may be anti-Sharon
administration like I’m anti-Bush administration. But
as much as certain people yell at me that I’m
anti-Jewish, I’m not. Just as many Bush supporters
call me anti-American for opposing the
anti-American-ideals Bush administration, many Israeli
supporters call me anti-Jewish for opposing the far
right, bulldoze-the-Palestinians-out-of-existence
Sharon government.
Now, a conspiracy theorist, that’s a different
matter. Look at this situation with Syria. Rather than
focusing on the declining economy, runaway budget
deficits, growing chasm between the haves and
have-nots, and other important domestic issues, Bush
administration officials, many Congressional
Republicans and Democrats, and the wealthy
international interests behind them are salivating
over the prospect of invading and controlling Syria
next.
Then it’s on to Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Bush
Inc. are playing right into Sharon’s hands, if they
are not directly conspiring with Sharon, which I
suspect is more likely the case. By the time the
U.S.-Israeli crusaders are done, the Middle East will
lie in ruins and be ruled over by a Jewish-American
King accountable only to multinational oil companies.
While many Americans are giddy about our "victory"
in Iraq, it was like an NFL Super Bowl champion
playing a junior high school football squad. When one
side spends $399 billion-plus on high-tech weapons and
the other side spends $1.4 billion on scud missiles
and used tanks, is anything fair about that contest?
Ironically, the U.S. kept claiming the Iraqis
weren’t "playing fair" for faking surrenders and other
tricks, but that’s like the NFL team claiming the
junior high team was playing dirty for trying some
trick plays [excuse the sports analogy – in a past
life I was a sports reporter – it’s the best one I can
think of, though I know war is by no means a game].
Another note of personal disclosure here: I am a
Caucasian American born in Washington, D.C., whose
family originally derives from Lithuania, Ireland,
England, and Austria. I married a woman who was born
in Pennsylvania whose parents are from Syria.
Therefore, my two young children are half Syrian
American. We have many relatives in Syria. I
admittedly do not want my tax dollars used to kill and
maim and make homeless my relatives in Syria, as they
have already been used to kill and maim and make
homeless thousands of innocent Iraqis and innocent
Afghans.
I do not buy the Bush-Cheney Inc. line that
people’s lives in these countries will be improved –
ask the families of those killed if the U.S. military
action improved their lives. Obviously, those who are
dead would speak otherwise, if they could. Ask the
families of the more than 100 American and British
soldiers who died if this invasion was really worth it
in a few years, when another dictator takes control of
Iraq.
Did I miss it, or have all the ruling clans in
Afghanistan held free elections and decided not to
kill each other? What about Kuwait, another American
colony still run by an unelected, dictatorial prime
minister 12 years after we "freed" that country? Don’t
tell me Kuwait elects a national assembly – that body
has even less power than the U.S. Congress against the
dictators in the White House.
Beyond that, I understand the government in Syria
is a dictatorship. But I also understand that I live
under a more subtle dictatorship, one that can install
a leader in power who was not elected by the majority
of voters and control other leaders through
corporations and money. I can write and scream and
march and protest all I want, and Bush-Cheney Inc. are
not going to listen to my request to stop these
immoral, idiotic invasions. Millions of people can
protest, Michael Moore can use the Oscars stage to
protest, and Bush barely can get his
cocaine-and-alcohol-destroyed brain working long
enough to ask Karl Rove, "What does ‘fictitious’
mean?" Because I refuse to give a penny to any
politician, much less hundreds of thousands of dollars
that is the going rate for bribery these days, I have
about as little influence on my government as the
average Iraqi had on Hussein or the average Syrian has
on its dictatorship.
The challenge is to find ways to live under our
forms of dictatorships without destroying each other.
The challenge is to find ways to survive when we have
only surface control of our government, whose leaders
ultimately do whatever the rich, powerful people who
fund their campaigns want them to do, which is gain
more land and wealth for them.
You say you don’t think Israel has much influence
over U.S. Middle Eastern policy? Look at who is
running the Iraqi "interim" government. You have Jay
Garner, a retired general hand-picked by Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz for "viceroy designate" of Iraq – meaning he
is the Big Cheese in Iraq right now. Garner was most
recently head of the Pentagon's Office for
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, whose
motto is "Bomb the Hell out of Those Damn Foreigners,
Then Send a Few Crumbs of Bread to Give Those Who
Survive for the Media Cameras and Give Fat
Reconstruction Contracts to Friends in the Defense
Industry."
Garner has strong links to both the international
arms industry and a Jewish lobby group, according to
syndicated columnist Molly Ivins. He has visited
Israel as the guest of the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs and signed a statement in
October 2000 blaming the Palestinians for the violence
in the region after the collapse of peace talks –
which Bush stopped when he took over in early 2001.
Garner has also commended the Israeli army for its
"remarkable restraint." This is the same army that
showed such "remarkable restraint" in killing
thousands of Palestinians, bulldozing thousands of
homes, and even killing a few American and European
peace activists like Rachel Corrie [see
http://www.rachelcorrie.com/] who try to stop the
violence.
The Israeli military has destroyed more than 7,000
Palestinian homes since the beginning of the Israeli
occupation in 1967, leaving 30,000 people homeless.
Most home demolitions target civilians who have not
been charged with any crime. The Caterpillar
bulldozers that destroyed many homes and Rachel are
partly financed by U.S. tax dollars - Israel is the
world's largest beneficiary of American military and
economic aid. It receives more than $5 billion a year
from the U.S., and 75 percent of those funds are spent
on arms and equipment from U.S. corporations.
So, Israel can use tanks and bulldozers and
automatic weapons to kill Palestinians, and it’s OK.
But when a few Palestinians fight back through suicide
bomber missions – which I don’t condone but understand
– they’re branded as dirty terrorists. At least three
times as many Palestinians have died as Israelis in
the last two years. Who are the terrorists here?
And now we claim Syria is harboring terrorists and
even Iraqis who fled Baghdad. So are we going to bomb
Idaho and Montana and other U.S. states because they
give refuge to KKK members and anti-government U.S.
terrorists like Tim McVeigh who bombed Oklahoma in
1995? How about Ireland, which has terrorized the
British since the 1920s? Oh, they're white terrorists,
so we don't mess with them. I forgot.
The bottom line is Bush-Cheney Inc., with help from
many Republicans and Democrats in Congress, are
running a racist policy to exterminate Arabs and hand
over control of the Middle East to wealthy, powerful
oil and real estate cronies.
More and more, I’m beginning to think the secret
government conspirators are closer to the truth than
most of us head-scratchers know. Maybe there is a
group of wealthy business-types who call most of the
shots on our planet from some secretive island off the
coast of South Carolina or in the Pacific.
Maybe there doesn’t appear to be much the average
person can do to stop the secret teamers from running
roughshod over people. Maybe it’s easier not to think
too much about it, to go on with our lives gliding
along the surface, unaware of why the latest tragedy
occurs.
Still, I’ve never been one to just glide on the
surface. I want to dig deeper, I want to know more.
When I was five, my older sister died at the age of
nine of a still-undiagnosed disease that took her
quickly, within a couple of days. I don’t remember
crying. I only remember sitting around a room full of
sobbing family members, bewildered at the scene. I
couldn’t cry like my younger sister who cried just
because everyone else was. I had to know why I should
cry, what had really caused such a scene. I had to
know why my older sister died.
I’ve continued my search for that truth and many
others. My sister died in Florida – another reason why
I dislike that state - and I suspect environmental
causes, perhaps pesticide poison from some fruit she
might have picked from a tree and eaten. The medical
staff of that Tampa hospital in 1965 and the county
medical examiner were not exactly the most skilled –
they didn’t even perform a complete autopsy, or at
least they won’t release such records. The cause of my
sister’s death remains another mystery.
That experience has shaped my life, sent me
head-long into searches that many people don’t dare
take, such as psychic medium sessions, poring over
obscure books and documents in more obscure libraries
and government offices for days, back-alley rendezvous
in tough neighborhoods, and 5,000-mile walks through
the heart of the global military-industrial complex. I
don’t believe at face value anything anyone tells me –
not even a family member. I listen politely, for the
most part, but I have to make my own investigation, to
search beyond the obvious surface clues for the
underlying story.
As a freshman reporter for my college newspaper way
back in 1978, I didn’t turn away an eyewitness to the
JFK assassination who wanted to share some insight
that others wouldn’t digest. I not only listened to
the man, I wrote story after story, read book after
book, interviewed person after person, walked down
dangerous alley after dangerous alley, fought off
critic after critic, ignored threat after threat, in a
search that continues to this day.
That search leads me to believe that the Warren
Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted
alone in killing JFK was erroneous, and that
commission was covering up misdeeds by powerful
people, agencies, and institutions. Former and current
government agents and military officials, members of
the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, wealthy far-right oil
barons and industrialists, and members of the current
secret government were most likely involved. When
someone challenges me on this conclusion, I say to
them, read the books I have, talk to the people I
have, and then we’ll talk. When someone calls me a
"conspiracy nut," I say to them, all I want is the
truth, and I don’t believe we have been told the truth
about this.
And let me say something about conspiracies –
conspiracies have existed as long as human beings
have. The Bible and other books are full of such tales
of conniving rulers and wannabe rulers plotting
against people to consolidate their power. To ignore
conspiracies just because you’re afraid of being
labeled a "conspiracy nut" is to ignore a vital trend
and component of our society that can lead you farther
along on your path to the truth. To ignore
conspiracies is to compromise your search for the
truth.
The bottom line is our government, our
corporations, our media, our institutions, lied to us
then, and have lied to us many times before and since.
The most powerful government officials and corporate
leaders have engaged in conspiracy after conspiracy
since Day One. And we’ve let them with our silence,
our inertia, our unwillingness to confront them, our
unwillingness to expose their misdeeds to the light of
day and bring them to justice.
Exposing the lies has become a passion to me, a
reason to live. When a newspaper I work for refuses to
publish something I write, I find another way to get
it out. With the Internet – thank God Al Gore invented
that, huh? - it is easier these days than it was back
when I had to publish my own newsletters, pamphlets,
and books. It’s easier to take a
too-controversial-for-mainstream-journalism article to
the Web than quit your job in protest and take a story
on the powerful local defense establishment trying to
shut down the nuclear freeze movement to the
competition newspaper, which I did in 1984.
The truth shall set you free, someone said, but I’m
sure not yet free. I guess I have yet to really
uncover as much of that truth as I think I can. Even
then, I remain skeptical that I’ll ever really be
free, except for perhaps in my own mind.
I’m most free when I read books like Martin’s and
Dowbenko’s. "Bushwhacked" is a great complement to
"The Conspirators," as it further exposes the crimes
of the powerful, usually-unseen-to-the-general-public
forces that prop up the Bush regime and prior regimes.
The book is an indictment of our system in which most
people worship the wealthy and mindlessly justify
their excesses, and would rather watch Survivor on
television than do something about helping us all
really survive on this planet. For those who want to
do something, it provides much ammunition and insight
we need to execute our plan of action.
I tell people again and again you cannot look at
Bush on the surface. He appears to be a nice, affable
doofus to many. But he is conniving and politically
astute, more so than his father. He is more willing to
engage in dirty campaigning than the former CIA
director was. He is more willing to win at any cost,
as we saw in the 2000 election. He is more willing to
bomb civilians in some faraway land if he can gain
politically from those deaths, as we saw in
Afghanistan and Iraq and probably will in Syria and
other countries.
But to really know what Bush is about you must know
something about the people around him and those who
fund him. You must know something about the murky
origins of DynCorp, which Dowbenko explains began as
an Air Force contractor in 1954 and has gained a
reputation as a front company for the CIA, performing
dirty tricks throughout the world. This Virginia-based
"security" firm was one of Bush’s biggest campaign
donors in 2000 and has been awarded all kinds of
lucrative government contracts, from protecting Afghan
officials to providing "security" in Iraq.
"Even more sinister is the fact that DynCorp
manages email and information systems for many federal
investigation agencies like FBI, DOJ, and SEC," writes
Dowbenko, one of the alternative media’s foremost
writers who founded Conspiracy Digest, Al Martin Raw,
and Steamshovel Press. "What does that mean? Whenever
criminal behavior is detected, DynCorp controls the
information, giving it defacto power to subvert the
process of law and cover up corporate-government
criminal activities."
Dowbenko includes a more-than-interesting chapter
about Bush skeletons like a U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency video allegedly showing Jeb and Dubya with a
large amount of cocaine. There are more stories on how
investment banker Catherine Austin Fitts was ambushed
by corporate-government criminals, the last known
interview with the late best-selling author Malachi
Martin on the "end of religion," and bizarre mind
control programming.
So is what’s in these books, and in this essay,
really true? It’s hard to say what’s really true.
Ultimately, we all have to figure it out on our own.
But I do believe in the law of karma, that what goes
round comes round. No empire, not the Romans, not the
British, not the U.S., lasts forever. Someday, our
kids and their kids will pay for our sins. I just hope
they understand that not everyone merely went along
with the crowd, just as not every German went along
with the Nazis in the 1930s.
So if you believe the Bush administration is
controlled by a secret government, what can you really
do about it? For one thing, expose it to the light of
day. Spread the word, via whatever means you have. Let
them know there are a lot of people on our planet who
are fed up with their selfish, violent actions.
What’s the alternative? To do nothing? To live in
fear? Better to light a candle than curse the
darkness. Better to march a mile than sit around
wringing your hands.
Better to read a book like "The Conspirators" or
"Bushwhacked" that goes deeper than mere headlines
than watch more CNN coverage that only skims the
surface.
Jackson Thoreau is co-author of We Will Not Get
Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The
updated, 120,000-word electronic book can be
downloaded on his Internet site at
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html.
Citizens for Legitimate Government has the earlier
version at
http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html.
Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com.
|
|
