Kirwan Articles 

One Thousand Days 

June 8,  2004

You can also view this article at Rense and  Old American Century

This USA was born in a Revolutionary War. Within these last thousand days we're beginning to see the end of this Republic, along with all that we said it once stood for. In less than four years we have allowed amateurs to rip apart the fabric of this society. Those who have strangled freedom here are beginning to create from her corpse a monster that stands for lies, for deceit, for corruption and for stolen power and wealth, anywhere where people fail to resist them.

Coincidently, one of the founders of this group just died. The death of Ronald Reagan might have seemed convenient for the embattled current president. An entire week has been struck from the calendar of events for the United States, just to morn the death of Reagan. Bush could use a break from all the wars and the investigations, and the bad news that's becoming Tsunami-like, rather than just the news of the day. But this 'break' may turn out to hold a great deal more than Bush &Company might want to hear.

Flashback to 1980: and to the presidential election that brought Ronnie into office. There was a major scandal being born that grew out of the Iran Hostage Crisis. It seemed that the American Embassy hostages held 444 days by Iran, would magically be coming home if Ronnie won. A grateful nation didn't question how this came to be, not at that time. How this was accomplished has never been fully explained.

Bush Senior directed the CIA from January of 76 to January of 77. It was rumored that GWH Bush may have been the mystery liaison between the Iranians and the Regan campaign, and that he was the one who negotiated this very convenient swap of arms for hostages. What is known is "In 1980 Bush became Reagan's running mate despite earlier criticism of Reagan's "voodoo economics" and by the 1984 election had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda."

After the prisoners were released, the US turned to Saddam to begin serious attacks upon Iran, just to keep Iran from expanding their influence in the region. It was in this atmosphere that the US began to cultivate and direct Saddam as a US instrument in the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iran-Contra Affair became public, at the end of Ronnie's second term; this scandal was investigated by the Tower Commission and dealt with trading arms for hostages in Central America; Bush 41 (Daddy) was knee deep in all of it. Drugs were rumored to have also had a role, as well as weapons; this was a very dark chapter in American foreign policy. There was one man who knew what happened and that was William J. Casey, the director of CIA, but he died in 1987 before he could testify. www.angelfire.com/

Why is this not all a matter of public record? George W. Bush "signed Executive Order 13233, sharply restricting public access to the papers of former presidents. The Bush order overrides the post-Watergate, 1978 Presidential Records Act, guaranteeing that a president's papers must be made available to the public 12 years after he leaves office. Now George W. Bush can personally decide when the White House documents of Ronald Reagan and his father will be made public."
www.public-i.org/

Bush junior claims that this was done for national security reasons. It looks a lot more like protecting the possibly criminal past of his father and or Reagan, than anything else. To show the world that this is not the case - all George needs to do is release the documents. That would end any problem with what really happened between George Senior and Ronnie, back when 40 was elected with 41 as his running mate. It might also tell us exactly what happened in the Iran-Contra Affair.

In the unauthorized biography of George Bush (Sr.), Webster Tarpley says: "Church {The Church Committee} was especially diligent in attacking CIA covert operations, which Bush (Sr.) would be anxious to defend. The CIA's covert branch, Church thought, was a "self-serving apparatus." "It's a bureaucracy which feeds on itself, and those involved are constantly sitting around thinking up schemes for [foreign] intervention which will win them promotions and justify further additions to the staff... It self-generates interventions that otherwise never would be thought of, let alone authorized."

"It will be seen that at the beginning of Bush's tenure at the CIA, the Congressional committees were on the offensive against the intelligence agencies. By the time that Bush departed Langley, the tables were turned, and it was the Congress which was the focus of scandals, including Koreagate." www.tarpley.net/

Is there a pattern here? Being devious is part of every pragmatic political career, however Bush Senior was particularly adept at covert and back channel operations. This is one of the reasons that those papers from Bush Senior's time as both President and Vice-President need to be available to researchers to clear up any hint of criminality. There can be no national security threat from the papers of the Vice-President, as that office carries with it no national responsibilities beyond presiding over the Senate-and that's all a matter of public record. So why did Bush choose to seal them away from the public eye, and why did Congress let that happen? Of course when one looks at the current Vice-President maybe the responsibilities of that office have changed?

Given that so many of the tainted people now serving in this White House, came directly from the failed Iran-Contra Affair; John Negroponte, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, not to mention the "background boys" from previous iterations of this crowd, Rumsfeld and Cheney among them. Yet there were no official questions raised by the appointments of any of these people, why not? One reason might just be because of what really happened first in Iran, and later in the Iran-Contra Affair.

One thing clearly arises from this stench. United States foreign policy in the Middle East got screwed up very badly over Iran when that country seized our Embassy and held our people hostage. We have never recovered from that event, and that includes the bungled war by Bush senior in 1991, and Bush junior in 2003. In both cases force was used when diplomacy and statecraft were called for. In both cases the task of stabilizing the region for American interests was too large for either Bush to manage. War was used because each man lacked the skill or the ability to deal with the real problems there as leaders. That's our real problem: those that we have either chosen or allowed to act for us, and in our names.

In only a thousand days; after all the years of preparation and back-room schemes that have gone on for decades, it all comes down to this. The complete and secret compartmentalization of the government, coupled with the isolation of the very people who put them in office. "Freedom, liberty and justice" are no longer "for all," but only for the few who have decided that since we no longer matter, we no longer have a need for any of those "rights."

Given the complete fiasco that has been junior's turn in the chair: What will the next one thousand days be like? What will your children inherit from those who say they represent us? For that matter who will still be here, to be called "us," in the next one thousand days?