The Career of George H. W. Bush

By Arun Gupta on Facebook December 3, 2018

Having read new material on and re-familiarized myself with the career of George Herbert Walker Bush, I am floored.

The amount of criminality, corruption, dictators, death squads, and drug dealing he enabled during his shadowy intrigues in office up to the presidency far outstrips anything Donald Trump has done.

This is no exaggeration. Bush set up a secret government with CIA chief William Casey. Bush subverted FBI investigations and independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. He lied to, stonewalled, and withheld evidence from Walsh who concluded the conspiracy went up to and included Reagan and Bush. Right before leaving office in December 1992, Bush pardoned six Iran-Contra figures, sparing himself from being called as a witness and possibly criminal prosecution.

George Bush Sr. trashed the Constitution and rule of law. He was an architect of the state terror, corruption, and lawlessness that gave rise to Trump. But Bush actually conspired and committed virtually all the types of crimes and misdeeds Trump may or may not have committed.

Bush did even worse. His legacy includes the horror show in Central America that remains as refugees flee violence and poverty. He used veterans of the Phoenix Program, the CIA death squad in Vietnam, to organize torture and murder in El Salvador while running the illegal scheme to arm the Contras.

Bush was tied to the BCCI and BNL banking scandals where billions of dollars were funneled to Saddam Hussein so he could buy weapons during the time when he gassed 5,000 Kurds to death in Halabja. The bank scandals involved laundering Saudi funds for the Contras. That illegal war saw Bush's office and the CIA enable and ignore a drug-smuggling network by the Medellin Cartel, cartels, the Contras, Panama's Manuel Noriega, and notorious freelancers like Barry Seal who shipped in many tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine, feeding the crack wars that decimated cities devastated by Reagan's neoliberal policies.

Bush oversaw the destructive invasions of Panama and Iraq. His death squad network and senior officials like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Powell, Abrams, and Negroponte returned with a vengeance after 9/11 creating the killing fields of Iraq, the global war on terror, the worldwide torture and black site gulags, and a destabilized Middle East.

Mind you, I'm not even mentioning his criminal sons, choosing Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, Willie Horton ads, the hostility to the AIDS crisis, indifference to the Rodney King riots, the war on unions, the poor, and cities, the staggering concentration of wealth.

Just to be clear, I think Trump is a grave danger. But he is very different than Bush. He is the danger of the cultish dictator, the ethnonationalist autocrat. As he is incompetent, he only can rule by tantrum and tweet, however. Bush was far smarter. His destruction involved knowing how to use the levers of power.

Here is some reading material. Start with this excellent Rolling Stone report on the secret government, death squads, Israelis, and drug smuggling. It covers the period before Oliver North comes along, who was used as a fall-guy. This era is when the alternative press shined. The Progressive, The Nation, Mother Jones, Village Voice, and other lefty outlets broke many important stories.

These reports show the media, Congress, and the courts all failed to do their job and hold the Reagan-Bush White House accountable. Trump's lawlessness is nothing new. He is just the latest and most extreme iteration of a system that's been broken and bankrupt for more than 30 years.

Read the executive summary in Lawrence Walsh's final report on Iran-Contra.

This article by Parry details how Reagan used Argentinian dirty war veterans to train the Contras, as well as how U.S.-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia encouraged cocaine production and smuggling to fund anti-Communist dirty wars.


For books, read:

Family of Secrets by Russ Baker
American Dynasty, Kevin Philipps

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion, Gary Webb

The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era, Jonathan Marshall and Peter Dale Scott

Lost History, Robert Parry

Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up, Lawrence Walsh

Crimes of a President: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover Up in the Bush and Reagan Administration, Joel Bainerman

The Dirty Secrets of George Bush Rolling Stone