This post will probably sink like a stone...

[Kid Berwyn]

19. No Long-Term Memory is how bastards get the US Taxpayer on the Hook

Last edited Tue Dec 24, 2024, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

First off: Absolutely agree about the importance of memory and history to democracy. As a former newspaperman, I don't completely blame the media -- more its ownership -- but include a number of educators both public and private and too many parents for breeding and then raising idiots.

Like Crime, Ignorance Pays. Two cases:

Neil "Silverado" Bush should still be busting rocks in Leavenworth. The S&L Crisis was a disaster for the whole country...

Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit

But it was a practice run for the Banking Crisis...

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

"Control Fraud" is the term Edwin Black coined to describe what happens when the crooks buy the bank they plan to rob. Of course, no one who stole the money had to put it back. That privilege was given to the US Taxpayer.

Know your BFEE: Goldmine Sacked or The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One

Uniting both the worlds of business and government are the professional criminal class known as the GOP. How they got that way, paperwork and making sure it never does anything but mark them as anything but the owners:

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

SNIP...

NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985

The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.

The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.

The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.

Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified. The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.

CONTINUED...

CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.

So, not only is ignorance strength, it makes crime (and treason -- Hi, Donald!) pay handsomely.

ETA The Most Important Part: Happy Holidays to You, PCIntern and to ALL DU!!!!