OBAMA
"Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office."
military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the President and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America’s enemies, includ- ing North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency’s dirty tricks office but wound up instead a victim of it—and a one-term President. Those who avoided problems—Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr.
and Jr.—were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case: No babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornet’s nest. As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of
power by the national security state itself. Their family had prof- ited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator, and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director and then, 12 years later, President. Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement
and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush’s top military brass—even Bush’s Defense secretary, Robert Gates,
who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush’s father. Obama has trod very carefully with the spy agency and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush Administration wrongdoing on tor- ture and wiretapping. Obama’s campaign rhetoric about disengag- ing from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency. The old boys’ network is very much in place, and it is hard at
work to force Obama’s hand, à la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of General Stanley McChrystal’s supposedly “confidential report” call- ing for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the mili- tary and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release, but what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter. Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies con-
tinue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October 2009 came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country’s opium trade, has been on the CIA’s payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia. Throughout its six-decade history the CIA has resisted account-
ability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency’s most troubling activities. As for the pub- lic’s elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Con gres sional overseers. None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge
fight. Half a century after Ike’s famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufactur- ers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency. So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people,
and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back con- trol of our government—and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold “the most powerful office in the world.” However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads is another matter.
Russ Baker is an investigative journalist and
founder of the nonprofit reporting Web site WhoWhatWhy.com. His latest book is Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (FamilyofSecrets.com). Now available in paperback, Gore Vidal calls it “one of the most important books of the past ten years.”
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