1975 sound familar? unelected President, discontent....

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2002/08/23/120.html

Friday, Aug. 23, 2002. Page XX

Global Eye -- The Secret Sharers

By Chris Floyd
This article is the second of two parts.


Washington, 1975. It was a long hot summer of discontent in the White House. The unelected president, Gerald Ford -- who'd taken office after the resignation of Richard Nixon -- was raging. Every day seemed to bring fresh horrors from the congressional committees investigating the United States' intelligence agencies. Assassination plots, terrorist acts, coups, secret armies, subversion of allied governments, mafia connections, torture, press manipulation, domestic surveillance -- the revelations were endless, a bottomless pit of corruption and criminality being dredged up by the House and Senate panels.

Where was their sense of duty, the code of omerta that had for so long protected those who toil in the shadows, who do the dirty work to keep the United States fat and safe and happy? What right did these mere senators and representatives have to tell the people -- the big dumb dazed mobocracy out there -- the truth about what their leaders were doing in their name? They were like children, they could never understand the higher wisdom that guided the elite. Oh, it was a far cry from the old days, back on the Warren Commission, when a good soldier like Gerald Ford knew just what to do: You accepted whatever the agencies told you, and you steered investigations away from anything that might break the code and pierce the shadows.

So Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong over there at the Central Intelligence Agency, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on things? Colby had even come clean about Operation Phoenix, for Christ's sake. More than 20,000 Vietnamese murdered in the CIA-run program -- did Joe Lunchbucket really need to know about that?
What next? Are they going to find out about Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited thousands of Hitler's best and brightest -- including Klaus Barbie and a cadre of SS veterans -- to work for the Agency? Sure, it would look bad, but come on: Gehlen was championed by Allen Dulles himself -- the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942. Dulles and those Yale boys knew what was best -- but try explaining that to some poor schmuck whose father got killed at Normandy or Auschwitz or some other godforsaken hole, eh?

As it happened, the "Gehlen Organization" stayed secret for another 26 years. But in July 1975, Ford had still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent a memo to Rumsfeld, warning him about an upcoming lawsuit. The family of Army scientist Frank Olson had found out -- through the congressional investigations -- that he had been secretly drugged by the CIA not long before he apparently committed suicide in 1953 by jumping through a hotel window. Now they were suing the government for damages.

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[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. Sounds VERY FAMILIAR BUT........

I make no apology when I say that Gerald Ford was a good man as a whole! What he inherited was not his fault! It was Nixon's!!!!!!
Ford lost his political career trying to clean up the mess that Nixon made!

[DealsGapRider]

3. I wish Ford had decided not to run in 1976.

If he had accepted the position of president, served during time of crisis and then stepped aside when his term was over without making a grasp for power, he would be regarded as the Cincinnatus of the United States. Instead, he was infected with the power of the presidency and sought to seek it for himself even though he had never been elected in the first place.

I think Ford is basically a decent guy, but he passed up the opportunity to go down as one of the great Americans in history.

[dolstein]

4. Sorry, but I cannot forgive Ford for pardoning Nixon

Nixon was rotten to the core and deserved to go to prison. By pardoning Nixon, Ford prevented the public from learning about the full scope of Nixon's malfeasance.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

5. don't forget the Warren Commission!

Gerald did his part there too!

[bamademo]

2. I can't access that link

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