TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Saturday, January 17, 2004

From a review in The Washington Post

The Bushes seem to have come away from all those years of privileged schooling with two things: "a state of permanent adolescence" -- viz., the fondness of both Bush presidents for "pranks, initiations, oaths of secrecy, inner sanctums and other rites of loyalty far into middle age" -- and a "penchant for secrecy and apparent elimination of records and documents." This last was learned on the campus of Yale and in the hallowed chambers of Skull and Bones, that incubator of preppy silliness, clubbiness and secrecy. Yale and Skull and Bones were primary breeding grounds for the OSS, the spy agency of World War II, and the CIA that supplanted it, and Phillips correctly argues that the Skull and Bones world view is essential both to the Bush psyche and to the family's history in public life, from George H.Walker right through to George W.

"Over the years," Phillips writes, the family has had an intimate involvement "with the mainstays of the twentieth-century American national security state: finance, oil and energy, the federal government, the so-called military industrial complex, and the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the intelligence community." Every effort is made to avoid accountability. The Bush culture is one in which public action is decided in private and conducted with as much secrecy as possible, with no real consultation with the public and as little as possible with its representatives on Capitol Hill: "to script arms sales, launch missile strikes, and order invasions from Panama to the Persian Gulf." As Phillips writes:

"It is an extraordinary record. If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the U.S. military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state and the 21st-century imperium, no one has identified them. Certainly no other established a presidential dynasty."
[...]
"All in all, if presidential family connections were theme parks, Bush World would be a sight to behold. Mideast banks tied to the CIA would crowd alongside Florida S&Ls that once laundered money for the Nicaraguan contras. Dozens of oil wells would run eternally without finding oil, thanks to periodic cash deposits by old men wearing Reagan-Bush buttons and smoking twenty-dollar cigars. Visitors to 'Prescott Bush's Tokyo' could try to make an investment deal without falling into the clutches of the yakuza or Japanese mob."

It is a gloomy, even frightening picture: "global oil ventures, national security, sophisticated investments, arms deals, the Skull and Bones chic of covert operations, and committed support of established business interests. . ."

| Posted at 00:36 | PERMA-LINK |

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