Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Manchurian Candidate

[reprehensor]

by Maureen Farrell

"I am writing this from Frederick, Maryland. I've just been filming, for Channel 4, a press conference in which the son of a CIA officer who died in suspicious circumstances presented his evidence that vice-president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld were, in 1975, when part of the Gerald Ford administration, involved in a cover-up of the events surrounding his father's death. The press conference was due to have been two weeks ago, but when the son, Eric Olson, called the New York Times to invite them, they said, "Whoa! Do you really want to release such complex information to a bunch of journalists who'll probably screw it up? Let us do it properly instead."

I must try this ruse sometime. It worked on Olson. He postponed the press conference. The New York Times finally called him and said, "We missed Watergate because we thought it was just a small, unimportant break-in." What they seemed to mean was they believed his evidence but they couldn't decide if it was a huge, government-toppling White House cover-up of a murder, or a small, unimportant White House cover-up of a murder, the kind of stuff that doesn't mean much.. . "

-- Jon Ronson, The Guardian, August 17, 2002

In the summer of 2003 (back when President Bush was renouncing the use of torture ) author Douglas Valentine reminded us why blind trust in any government official or agency has historically been a bad idea. "The war on terror, and its ‘homeland security’ counterpart are flip sides of the same coin," he wrote. "They are the same ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like CIA agent Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, their evil intention is wrapped in a complex matrix of transparent lies."

Drawing uncomfortable conclusions about the Bush administration’s secret agenda, Valentine also pointed to Miramax's Vietnam-era love story which had been put on hold following Sept. 11 due to its "anti-American" content -- a content that wasn’t so much anti-American as anti-CIA. "Horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy," Valentine wrote, of the CIA’s brutal underhanded activities that both the Quiet American and history underscore.

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Very interesting.