Dick Cheney. (photo: Brent Lewis/Getty Images)
Here's
a Nice Little Dick Cheney Story to Ruin Your Day
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
01 March 16
He would have been right at home in any authoritarian regime.
There's
no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's
work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University.
Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was
formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories
in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert
assassinations. It seems that kindly old Gerry and his minions did all they
could to “deflect” the commission's report. And, lo and behold, you'll never
guess who was leading the
“attack.”
The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report
of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA
domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according
to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security
Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).
The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination
plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White
House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney. Today's posting includes the entire
suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney's handwritten marginal
notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial
section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the
public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed
commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence
to White House political operatives.
Richard
Cheney cares less about American democracy than he cares who he shoots in the
face. And this has been true since he first crawled out of the primordial
authoritarian soup. He would have been the perfect Hauptfuhrer, the
ideal Politburo conniver. He'd have risen high in the Stasi, and Pinochet would
have had him over for Scotch and electrodes at least twice a week. And the
great irony of this latest expose is that we can at least partly thank Oliver
Stone for it.
This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for
decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the
John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents
were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College
Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow
John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not
willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than
we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into
standard accounts of the events of this period.
And,
to the surprise of practically nobody, these documents show that a lot of the
internal wrangling within the Rockefeller Commission traced its roots all the
way back to Dallas in 1963.
There had already been revelations of illegal domestic activities
by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under Vice
President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses of
the United States Congress. Ford's January 1975 admission of CIA involvement
posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to
head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations
to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy. That proved unacceptable to some members of his own commission,
among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When the Rockefeller
Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA assassination plots
in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman. Rockefeller's key opponent
in the fight over investigating assassinations was the panel's staff director,
David W. Belin. A lawyer for the Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the
Kennedy assassination in 1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the
Rockefeller group. Ford, one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of
Belin's loyalty, but this time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.
When
even a Warren Commission lawyer smells a bag job, you can be pretty sure that
there's burlap over something important.
Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the
Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American
citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam.
In this instance the Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the
files and lists of citizen dissenters were "improper." The White
House edit changed this conclusion, indicating that the "standards
applied" had resulted in materials "not needed for legitimate
intelligence or security purposes," and that this merely applied to "many"
records gathered about the antiwar movement (see unnumbered page revising p. 41
in the report). White House editors eliminated a Commission recommendation
(number 17 in the original text) that applicants for agency positions and
foreign nationals acting on behalf of the CIA be informed more clearly that
they could be subjects of U.S. security investigations.
Bernie
Sanders, remember, is a kooky extremist because, at the exact time Cheney was
developing his authoritarian chops and becoming the most loathsome government
apparatchik since A. Mitchell Palmer, Sanders said that it might be good idea
to reduce the CIA to smithereens. Crazy talk.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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