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Exiled again by the US media for trying to tell secret history, Seymour Hersh uncovers an illegal covert ops unit set up in the early 1980s by Vice-President Bush Snr to bypass a bumbling President Reagan, hoodwink Congress and mislead a compliant media lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/seymou…
One Congressman who knew how things were being done off the books was Bush’s close friend Dick Cheney. He used the same methods himself as vice-president to avoid Congressional oversight when, under Bush's son, he launched an endless ‘war on terror’ after 9/11
Hersh’s piece offers yet more evidence (if it were needed!) of a US permanent intelligence / security bureaucracy, or Deep State, looking after its own interests alone – permanent war and rocketing military budgets
Hersh shows Bush's covert unit had made the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi a top priority back in 1984. It set the framework for a US regime-change policy dressed up as humanitarian intervention that led to Gaddafi's savage murder more than 25 years later
Bush’s unit decided Gaddafi had to go because of his supposedly ‘bizarre’ behaviour supporting Peru, Venezuela and the Palestinians, as well as independently selling arms. A US official told Hersh: ‘Gaddafi was a primary military and oil threat, and he became a strategic target’
Bush’s unit was also behind the Iran-Contra scandal, but ensured CIA director William Casey took the fall as a way to avoid exposure of its wider illegal role in covert foreign operations
Bush’s role in the illegal arms sales to Nicaragua's opposition, the Contras, was hushed up so he could run for President in 1988, with Congress encouraged to focus on Reagan. Ultimately, none of the officials paid a price for their involvement
