Behind the
Presidency
by Thomas R. Eddlem July 25, 2005 Admire him or despise him, George W. Bush is
essentially a figurehead for the tightly knit Establishment oligarchy that
actually runs the Executive Branch of our government.
When a tiny, single-engine Cessna
150 aircraft wafted into restricted Washington, D.C., airspace on May 11, the
federal government went to a terrorism threat advisory level of red alert, and
the nation's capitol was evacuated. As it happened, the airplane had simply been
off course during a trip from Pennsylvania to an air show in North Carolina. But
the fallout from the incident revealed volumes about how the executive branch of
the federal government is run during a crisis. Perhaps most revealing of all was
the exchange between the White House Press Corps and White House Press Spokesman
Scott McClellan the next day. "Scott, yesterday the White House was on red
alert, was evacuated," noted a reporter. "The First Lady and Nancy Reagan were
taken to a secure location. The vice president was evacuated from the grounds.
The Capitol building was evacuated. The continuity of government plan was
initiated. And yet, the president wasn't told of yesterday's events until after
he finished his bike ride, about 36 minutes after the all-clear had been sent.
Is he satisfied with the fact that he wasn't notified about this?" "Yes
the
protocols that we put in place after September 11th were being followed,"
replied McClellan. "They did not require presidential authority for this
situation." If George Bush is not even informed
of a national red alert terrorism emergency when the Capitol is evacuated and
his own wife is moved to a bomb shelter, then he is clearly not in charge at
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This is not the first time that Mr.
Bush has proven himself to be peripheral in a crisis situation. As captured on
videotape at the time, Mr. Bush's initial reaction to being informed of the 9/11
attacks was to sit immobilized for as much as nine minutes while the children's
book My Pet Goat was read to a classroom of second graders.
Granted, one predictable human response to such a crisis would be a momentarily
paralyzing sense of shock. Yet none of the president's staffers saw fit to jog
his elbow or otherwise snap him out of his lengthy reverie, which would be the
expected course of action if "presidential authority" were really required to
deal with an unfolding terrorist attack. All of this raises a serious
question: if George W. Bush is not running the federal government during times
of crisis, who is? Cheney in
Charge According to White House spokesman
Scott McClellan, one of the key administration leaders in charge at the Oval
Office during the May 11 red alert was Vice President Dick Cheney. According to
the 9/11 Commission Report, while a stunned and distracted President Bush
was contemplating a pet goat during the 9/11 crisis, Cheney issued a shoot-down
order for airplanes in Washington, D.C., airspace and appeared to be in charge.
The vice president is clearly the dominant personality in the Bush-Cheney team
and is plainly the most important member of an informal committee that runs the
executive branch of the U.S. government. "The inner circles of the U.S.
national security community members of the National Security Council (NSC), a
select number of their deputies, and a few close advisors to the president
represent what is probably the most powerful committee in the history of the
world, one with more resources, more power, more license to act, and more
ability to project force further and swifter than any other convened by king,
emperor, or president," wrote David J. Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
That committee, as described by Rothkopf, is headed by a triumvirate composed of
Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who had been Cheney's
superior 30 years prior during the Ford administration), and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. The triumvirs, like many of their associates and subordinates,
are or have been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is Cheney whom Rothkopf
identifies as "the power behind the throne." "Cheney has the largest national
security staff of any vice president in U.S. history one larger than President
John F. Kennedy's entire NSC staff at one time," he observes. "He also has a
network of close associates that extends throughout the government and who
report to him or to Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, his chief of staff." Most of the
details of Cheney's realm including the precise number of staffers who report
to him are unknown, since the vice president's office is exempt from the
Freedom of Information Act. Richard Haass, president of the
Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of both Bush administrations,
explains that Cheney has "three bites at the apple. He has his staff at every
meeting. He would then come to principals' meetings. And then he'd have his
one-on-ones with the president." Rise of an
Insider Dick Cheney has cultivated that
clout during a long history in government, which began with an internship with
liberal Wisconsin Republican Congressman William Steiger. About a year later,
with Steiger's help, Cheney got a foot in the door with Nixon appointee Donald
Rumsfeld, at the time head of the Office of Economic Opportunity a welfare
agency notorious for shoveling out subsidies to subversive groups, including
domestic terrorist groups like the so-called American Indian Movement. When
Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford tapped Rumsfeld to be chief of staff, and Rumsfeld
brought Cheney in tow. Within a year, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and
Cheney, at age 34, was presidential chief of staff. In 1978, Cheney won election to the
U.S. House of Representatives as Wyoming's sole congressman. During an 11-year
tenure in the House, Cheney compiled ratings over 80 percent in this magazine's
"Conservative Index." But during that time Cheney also became an active
internationalist, joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 1982 and
eventually serving as a director of the organization. As Cheney acknowledged in
a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations on February 15, 2002, he was
careful to avoid mentioning that affiliation in dealing with his conservative
constituents: [I]t's good to be back at the
Council on Foreign Relations. As Pete mentioned, I have been a member for a long
time, and was actually Director for some period of time. I never mentioned that
when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming. Cheney left Congress in 1989 to
serve as secretary of defense in the administration of the elder President Bush,
overseeing the invasion of Panama and the first Iraq war. When Bush the Elder
left the White House in 1993, Cheney moved to the private sector sort of
becoming CEO of the Halliburton Company. Capitalizing on his political
connections, Cheney helped the international conglomerate bury its snout deeply
into the corporate welfare trough. As tidily summarized by the left-wing
organization CorpWatch: [Cheney] brought with him a trusty
Rolodex and his former chief of staff, David Gribbin, whom he appointed as chief
lobbyist. In the last two years the pair of them notched up $1.5 billion dollars
in federal loans and insurance subsidies compared to the paltry $100 million
that the company received in the five years prior to Cheney's
arrival. Thus, it is hardly a wonder Cheney
championed the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), which uses taxpayer dollars to
subsidize foreign investments by multinational corporations. During a May 8,
1997 address to an Ex-Im conference in Washington, D.C., Cheney snarled that
opponents of the corporate welfare program "obviously don't know that for every
dollar appropriated to the Bank in the last five years, Ex-Im has returned
approximately 20 dollars worth of exports." While this arrangement is very
lucrative for Cheney and his corporatist cronies, it's entirely unconstitutional
and it does nothing to benefit taxpayers forced to subsidize it. In fact,
Ex-Im has played a prominent role in offshoring manufacturing jobs and draining
the U.S. economy. Cheney doesn't bite the hand that feeds him, that's for
sure. War Hawk
Central Vice president since 2001, Cheney
is among the closest confidants of President Bush in the White House. He was
among the early and most vocal proponents of the unnecessary war against Iraq,
and one of the most persistent and dogged exaggerators of the intelligence on
the Iraq "threat." For example, Cheney told a Veterans of Foreign Wars
convention on August 26, 2002, during the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion,
that Saddam Hussein, "sworn enemy of the United States," was a very credible
threat: The Iraqi regime has in fact been
very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological
agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years
ago. These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are
offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale,
developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses,
in his own region or beyond. Cheney's statement today has long
been revealed for the complete warmongering falsehood that it was. In fact,
although U.S. intelligence agencies had told the administration that they had no
proof Hussein had completely destroyed its biological and chemical weapons
stockpiles as the Iraqi regime had claimed and had presented estimates
suggesting that Hussein likely retained some chemical and biological weapons
capability, no U.S. intelligence source at the time of Cheney's remarks
suggested Hussein had been "enhancing" his capabilities in those
fields. Moreover, independent sources such
as the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on the U.S.
Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq and the
9/11 Commission Report stressed that intelligence agencies had no
indications that there was a relationship between al-Qaeda and the Hussein
regime, though Cheney repeatedly made this claim in public pronouncements before
and after the invasion of Iraq. Cheney's method of promoting war against Iraq
consisted of publicly making statements about unproven allegations of ties, and
then continuing to argue that the ties were credible long after his sources were
discredited. One example of this was Cheney's
allegation that Iraqi Intelligence Service officer al-Ani had met al-Qaeda
leader Mohamed Atta in Prague in April 2001, just months before the September 11
attacks. Cheney made the allegations in an interview on NBC's Meet the
Press on December 9, 2001. "Do you still believe there is no evidence that
Iraq was involved in September 11?" asked host Tim Russert. "Well, what we now
have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that
report that's been pretty well confirmed, that [Atta] did go to Prague and he
did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in
Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," Cheney
replied. In actuality, the CIA had always
remained skeptical of the alleged meeting and never included it in any of its
formal intelligence reports on the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. In a
June 17, 2004 interview with CNBC's Gloria Borger, long after the allegation was
revealed to be a great deal less than "pretty well confirmed," Cheney tried to
deny making such an assertion. "Well, let's get to Mohamed Atta
for a minute because you mentioned him as well," Borger began. "You have said in
the past that it was, quote, 'pretty well confirmed.'" "No, I never said that,"
Cheney interjected. "I never said that.... Absolutely not. What I said was the
Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on
April 9 of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We
have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down, we
just don't know." Note that Cheney said that "we have
never been able to confirm [Atta's Prague visit] nor have we been able to knock
it down." But the truth is that the CIA had "knocked it down" long before that
time. By the time of Cheney's June 2004 interview, the Czech intelligence
service had already backed off its initial allegation, and the CIA had credit
card charges and bank surveillance video that placed Atta in Florida at the same
time he was supposed to have been meeting with Iraqi Intelligence Service
officer al-Ani in Prague. Cheney's Neo-con War
Lobby Cheney visited the deputy director
of the CIA five to eight times between September 11, 2001 and February 2003 to
get up-to-date intelligence on the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, according to
the Senate Select Committee report on prewar intelligence. He also repeatedly
visited the CIA, creating subtle pressure for the CIA to produce more alarmist
reports. But Cheney wasn't alone in trawling for pro-war intelligence at the
skeptical CIA. His colleagues from a powerful neo-conservative organization, the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC), were utilizing Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to pressure the CIA further. Feith established a Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group after September 11 that sought to justify war
with Iraq by forging nonexistent ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. That
group began briefing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, with the latter urging it to meet with the CIA to
"illuminate the differences between us and CIA." Counterterrorism Evaluation
Group officials quickly went into high-gear pressure mode. "[O]fficials under
the direction of Undersecretary Feith took it upon themselves to push for a
change in the intelligence analysis so that it bolstered administration policy
statements and goals," leading Senate Select Intelligence Committee Democrats
concluded. "The CIA Ombudsman told the Committee that he felt the 'hammering' by
the Bush administration on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had previously
witnessed in his 32-year career with the agency." According to the Senate
Report, Counterterrorism Evaluation Group officials began meeting with and
lobbying the CIA to mention Mohamed Atta as being at a confirmed recent meeting
between Hussein and al-Qaeda in September 2002, but the CIA didn't
budge. Wolfowitz, who recently became
president of the World Bank, served as an early and key administration staff
advocate for war against Iraq. In fact, his support for a second Iraq war
preceded the Bush administration. Both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld signed the Project
for a New American Century letter to President Clinton on January 28, 1998,
calling for a war against Iraq: "We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to
enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our
friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Wolfowitz is a current member of
the Council on Foreign Relations, and Rumsfeld is a former member. As deputy
secretary of defense, Wolfowitz sat in on presidential briefings on the "threat"
from Iraq and was able to neutralize the skepticism of fellow CFR members
Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet. PNAC Neo-con
Connection Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz
also served as founding members of the Project for a New American Century,
although the future vice president did not sign the 1998 letter to President
Clinton arguing for a second Iraq war. The Project for a New American Century
became the key powerhouse neo-conservative organization with the election of
President Bush in 2000. The movement now called
"neo-conservatism" actually gestated within a group of former disciples of Leon
Trotsky, one of the founders of the Soviet Union and creator of the Red Army.
Irving Kristol, commonly regarded as one of the chief founders of
neo-conservatism, wrote an autobiographical essay entitled "Memoirs of a
Trotskyist." "I regard myself to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not a
single bitter memory," wrote Kristol in 1995. Other pioneering Trotskyites
included James Burnham, a founder of National Review magazine; and the
husband and wife team of Norman Podhoretz (who once wrote poetry in praise of
the Soviet Red Army, Trotsky's most notable creation) and Midge
Decter. Unlike genuine conservatives, whose
chief preoccupation is the preservation of individual liberty and national
independence, neo-conservatives were primarily preoccupied with power.
Supporters of a welfare state at home and an interventionist foreign policy
abroad, the neo-cons attached themselves to the Republican Party and made an
alliance of convenience with social conservatives despite having little
interest in the social conservative agenda. In a June 11, 2003 essay for
National Review, unrepentant Trotskyist Stephen Schwartz, a prominent
contributor to several neo-conservative journals, praised neo-conservative
"pioneers" Kristol and Burnham for refusing to "apologize
grovel
crawl and
beg forgiveness for having, at one time, been stirred by the figure of Trotsky."
"To my last breath I will defend
Trotsky," Schwartz defiantly wrote. "To my
last breath, and without apology." In a remarkable June 7, 2003
National Post article, Canadian reporter Jeet Heer quoted Schwartz as
saying that "in certain Washington circles the ghost of Trotsky still hovers
around." At a February 2003 White House party, Schwartz recalled, he and Paul
Wolfowitz had a chat about Trotsky's legacy. Another illustration of Trotsky's
influence, wrote Heer, was the fact that Cheney and Wolfowitz turned to Kanan
Makiya, an Arab leader of the Trotsky-founded Fourth International, for "advice
about Iraqi society." Trotsky and his followers believed
in waging a permanent revolution a theme that has certainly been embraced by
the administration of George W. Bush. Another key influence on the thinking of
neo-conservatives was University of Chicago Professor Leo Strauss, who taught
that mankind in general and Americans in particular need to be ruled by a
managerial elite that can manipulate them through the use of lies and myths.
Once again, that approach can be seen in the behavior of the Bush
administration. The Project for a New American
Century began with a June 3, 1997 "Statement of Principles" stipulating that "we
need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our
global responsibilities today." And the "global responsibilities" the military
would carry out would be "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and
values" and to "promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad."
This is, of course, fully consistent with the 1998 letter to President Clinton
to attack Iraq and precisely what the Bush-Cheney administration has done with
regard to Iraq. While the White House has
cultivated a public image of George W. Bush as the man in charge at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, Vice President Dick Cheney, acting in concert with a
shadowy "committee" of neo-conservatives, has quietly led the administration
from behind the scenes for the past five years. Far from being the man in charge
at the White House, Bush the Younger is merely a useful vessel; after all,
Cheney and his neo-conservative comrades were urging that the United States
resume a war with Iraq, and target other nations for "regime change," several
years before President Bush supposedly made up his mind up about whether or not
to invade. During presidential election
campaigns, much attention is lavished on the perceived strengths and failings of
the personality at the head of the ticket. How many Americans knew in 2004 that
when they pulled the lever for George W. Bush they were actually reelecting
Cheney and his shadowy oligarchy the people who are really running
things?
Establishment's
Man Even before George W. Bush became
president, the influence the American Establishment exerts over him was strongly
evident. The photo below shows Mr. Bush at a May 23, 2000 press conference in
Washington, D.C., where he was joined by an entourage of foreign policy gurus,
including (from the left) former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft,
former General (later Secretary of State) Colin Powell, and former Secretaries
of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. Also joining him at the conference
(though not shown in the photo) were Condoleezza Rice, the head of his
campaign's foreign policy team who became his national security adviser and
later secretary of state, and Donald Rumsfeld, a former secretary of defense who
acquired that same post in the new Bush administration. All six are (or were)
members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the most visible manifestation of
the Insider Establishment. http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_1803.shtml YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
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