GEORGE H.W.BUSH: PRIME SUSPECT IN THE CASE OF 9/11: A Review

There is one overwhelming problem with Joseph J. Trento's Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA. Trento is an investigative journalist and a good one, who has made excellent use of his acquaintances among the insiders. But after a number of well-written and fascinating chapters showing how the CIA has become increasingly privatized, tainted by its association with foreign dictators, and corrupted by its dealings in arms and drugs, he stops short of drawing the obvious conclusion. In his final chapter he says that today's CIA has become "at best irrelevant and at worst a joke" (p. 353). Try telling that to the poor wretches it is torturing in its prisons all over the world! His conclusion is contradicted by all the evidence he presents, for the CIA which emerges from his narrative is one that is having the most profound influence upon both American political life and the world at large. Why does Trento start out as such a critic of the CIA and end up its apologist? I think because he cannot face the implications of all the evidence he presents, which is that the CIA's goal has never been to assist the president by providing intelligence which could save American lives, but to maximize its own power. In that endeavor it has been supremely successful, trampling on human rights and civil liberties to an extent unparalleled in human history. Today it can apprehend anyone in any part of the world and send them to its gulag of concentration camps, beyond the reach of their families, lawyers and even the Red Cross, to be held indefinitely, tortured and possibly murdered. Neither Hitler nor Stalin enjoyed this kind of global reach.

Trento's focus upon George H.W. Bush is appropriate, for in the march toward totalitarianism which is now reaching its climax, the forty-first president of the United States played a pivotal role. One can indeed say that his presidency-- the first in which a former Director of the CIA held the office-- marks the "Rubicon moment" in American history, the moment when this country took a turn on to the toad to totalitarianism from which it is no longer possible to turn back. To be sure, the stage was set by the establishment of the CIA in 1947, with help of Bush's father Prescott Bush, who had made a fortune from doing business with the Nazis. But before the Bush presidency, it was possible for Americans to stand back and say, "Stop!" After all, the enemy which confronted us then was a real one, even if its power was grossly exaggerated by the Right. The American people had not yet fallen for the Big Lie. That no one took the initiative to rein in an ever more out-of-control CIA is the fault above all of a spineless and self-interested Congress. It is heartbreaking to read, in Trento's account, of how the Church Committee degenerated into a mere platform for Frank Church's presidential aspirations (pp. 60-61). For this was the moment, right after Watergate, when something could really have been done.

It was also the moment when Bush, who had been working for the CIA from his early days with Zapata Oil, was given control of the Agency by President Ford. Although he never went through Junior Officer Training, Bush does indeed, as Trento says, possess the character of a career intelligence officer (p. 13) This is why people have described him variously as "having no core" and "moderate": the face he presents to the world is but the facade of the classic intelligence operative who never reveals his true self-- if indeed he is even aware of it. Throughout his life, Bush fought for one thing above all: the furtherance of the interests of the CIA. In the face of timid congressional investigations-- investigations he openly opposed in principle-- he was easily able to strenghthen it and raise its morale although he only held the office of DCI for one year. And the re-invigorated CIA survived the reforming efforts directed at it by President Carter and his DCI, Stansfield Turner. When Reagan was elected, Bush played a key role in running the Iran-Contra affair. But in 1986, something vitally important happened to change the world in which the CIA operated. Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Russia had long been a frustration to Cold Warriors because its massive nuclear arsenal made war directly against it impossible. The U.S. was confined to doing battle with Soviet proxies such as North Vietnam, and such wars could and did turn out to be debacles. With the advent of Gorbachev, it became impossible to whip up the kind of fear and hatred of the Soviet Union which could sustain the military-industrial complex. But Bush, who as Trento shows had a long and close relationship with the Saudi royal family, could see that there was another alternative which would work even better than anti-Communism. After he was elected president, he moved quickly to end a now useless Cold War and initiate a confrontation with the Muslim Middle East.

When I read about the First Gulf War in Trento's book, I could not help but think of my own perception of that war as it was occurring. For it was abundantly clear to me even then that far from being a surprise to the United States, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a set-up. After all, the Iraqi dictator had gone to Bush's ambassador to Iraq to sound her out on the possible reaction of the U.S. to such an invasion, and she had given him the green light. And Bush himself was obviously egging him on with comments such as "He's going to get his ass kicked," language unworthy of America's chief executive which was bound to be given the most offensive interpretations in the Arab world (it may even have carried overtones of homosexual rape). Saddam Hussein's response could not have been better suited to the interests of a president whose ratings were falling and a military-industrial complex which was trembling at the prospect of peace breaking out. And most telling of all was something I heard from a policy analyst on what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour: he said that Americans should expect terrorist attacks on their own soil. This scared the hell out of me, not because I thought that there was any prospect of such attacks occurring, but because I knew then that the Big Lie was being born, and that its purpose could only be to deprive us of our civil liberties. The first war against Iraq ended without any such incidents, but then, it takes a long time to get such things rolling, and maybe Bush was having trouble convincing his friend Osama bin Laden to take the rap. Besides, he had a son who was very likely to run for president in his turn. What better legacy to pass on to him than 9/11? This is where Trento really falls down. If the attacks were really a surprise to the CIA, how can one explain the complaisance of the Secret Service in not whisking Bush Jr. to safety as soon as they learned of the collapse of the Twin Towers? In fact, 9/11 was the CIA's greatest success. For it now had the American people right where it wanted them: in such an hysteria of fear and hatred that they would finally give the intelligence establishment what it had wanted all along-- total power.

It is time for Americans to realize that they are being manipulated. Take for instance such a small thing as the constantly rising cost of stamps. The revenue of course goes to finance America's now endless wars. But we are being told that it is the cost of fuel-- why? To put Americans in a mood of resentment against the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, in the hope that that country will retaliate against U.S sanctions by closing the Straits of Hormuz and in so doing justify an attack on it. Such an attack may well involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. Those Americans who do not believe that it is worth killing Iranian children just so that one can drive to one's corner grocery store when one could easily walk are already on the list compiled through NSA/AT&T spying and will be arrested as Unlawful Enemy Combatants and sent to the concentration camps which are now being built for that purpose by Kellogg, Brown and Root under the Military Commissions Act. The CIA gulag is growing. Trento's title, "Prelude to Terror", is a good one, but the terror about to be unleashed on our society is the product of our own government.