IS IT TRUE DECEMBER 2, 2018

1. The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice

   As corporate media gloss over the former president’s record with fawning tributes and sanitized obituaries, some observers have been highlighting key aspects of the record and legacy of George H.W. Bush, where among the 41st president’s acts during his political life were his role in the Gulf War, Central America, and the Iran-Contra affair

   It’s fair to offer condolences to Bush’s family members as they grieve. But as a public figure with lots of innocent blood on his hands, his record has to be examined without any whitewashing

   Georgie was not the shining star that everyone is trying to rehabilitate. While he may have done a better job in later life after he was defeated by Bill, his record is not the epitome of grace you think.

   I remember when the Willy Horton ad came out. I remember Lee Atwater. I remember Iran Contra. I remember the first Iraq invasion. I have no idea how many crimes he directed and oversaw as director of the CIA

   He wasn’t necessarily a good person, and was definitely not a good president. I would say the bar has been set so low that we now look at Bush I as a statesperson. But the bar doesn’t even exist anymore

   Trump wasn’t all of a sudden. His path was made easier by those who came before him who beat up on the poor and marginalized (me and Bush Senior and Bush Junior), and they (and sadly, we) are as much to blame for what’s going on as the current white house resident

   In the age of Donald Trump, it isn’t difficult for history scrubbers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of him as a great patriot and pragmatist, a president who governed with “class” and “integrity”

   But we should not allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen way. “When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms because it leads to false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts”

   The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him (his son George W. and the current orange-faced incompetent incumbent) than much of the political and media classes might have you believe

   Bush ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should forever be associated with Bush’s 1988 presidential bid, which was run by Lee Atwater. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts (where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor) had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called “Weekend Passes” released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.

   Bush made a dishonest case for war in Iraq. Thirteen years before George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War was sold on a mountain of war propaganda

   For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait “without provocation or warning.” What he omitted to mention was that the American ambassador to Iraq had given an effective green light to Saddam Hussein, telling Saddam a week before his invasion that America “has no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait”

   Bush systematically attacked the civilian infrastructure in Iraq. He turned hospitals into death rows for infants. He widely used depleted uranium, causing cancer rates to skyrocket. He made Iraq a mass graveyard. And the killing hasn’t stopped since

   Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed American troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed that he was doing so in order to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key American oil supplier

   Yet when an independent reporter acquired commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, they found no signs of Iraqi forces, only an empty desert. “It was a pretty serious fib. The Iraqi buildup was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist”

   Bush committed war crimes. Under Bush, America dropped a whopping 88,500 TONS of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, an American airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. Human Rights Watch noted that it was a serious violation of the laws of war.

   American bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure, from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.

   Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard research team concluded in 1991 (less than four months after the end of the war) the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.

   By January 1992 a demographer with our Census Bureau was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Those carefully researched numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.” Sound familiar?

   Bush refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine my presidency (Ronald Reagan). Yet as vice president, the involvement of Bush in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention than it should have. “The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete” wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his final report on the Iran-Contra affair

   Why? Because Bush (who the special counsel stated was fully aware of the Iran arms sale) failed to hand over he personal diary containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/Contra and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on the eve of the trial for Weinberger for perjury and obstruction of justice

   The pardons Bush granted in the Iran-Contra case (notably to Casper Weinberger and Robert McFarlane) were disgraceful. They helped cement a tradition of elite impunity which undermines the rule of law. Those pardons marked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case. The Special Counsel accused Bush of misconduct and helping to complete the Iran-contra cover-up

   Donald Trump’s habit of granting deeply partisan pardons (Joe Arpaio, Scooter Libby, Dinesh D’Souza) fall in that tradition. If there is a constitutional crisis in the Trump era, the roots can be traced back to Bush’s presidency

   Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn’t it? Bush 41’s pardons of his own close aides, several of whom had been convicted of lying to investigators, demonstrated that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence

   Bush escalated the racist war on drugs. In September 1989, in a televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP.”

   Yet a Washington Post investigation later that month revealed that federal agents had “lured” the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that they could make an “undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity.” The dealer didn’t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions. Bush cynically used this prop (the bag of crack) to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors”

   The result? Because of Bush, millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS, all in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ that did nothing to reduce drug abuse. Bush put ideology and politics above science and health. Today, even leading Republicans, such as Chris Christie and Rand Paul, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure

   Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility. Bush engaged in race-baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe

   https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/01/may-his-many-victims-across-globe-rest-peace-george-hw-bush-dead-94

2. Rest in Peace Mr President.

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