Why the Ruling Class is So Upset About Edward Snowden

[Octafish]

103. See your Riggs and raise you a Nugan-Hand Bank.

And Banco Nazionale del Lavoro. And BCCI. And UBS. And just about every major bank since.

Odd how one name publicly and privately links these. The late, great Jonathan Kwitny wrote all about he seemed to weasel out of any illegality during Iran-Contra:

Who Gave Bush His Teflon Coat in the Iran Contra Scam?

LosAngeles Times
November 04, 1988|JONATHAN KWITNY |

EXCERPT...

But the way George Bush has been let off the hook sickens me--as does the notion that he could be an acceptable candidate for the presidency, let alone leading the polls, less than two years after the Iran-Contra scandal broke.

The Bush-Reagan team rode to office on the issue of terrorism, pledging to halt it by never negotiating with terrorists and stopping others from doing so. For much of their Administration, federal law prohibited waging war on Nicaragua. Yet Bush attended dozens of meetings at which were discussed either our active role in starting and sustaining the Contra war or the secret supply of arms to Iran, which in public he called a leading terrorist state. Bush's assertion now that he didn't know of these activities is preposterous. An aide's minutes show him being briefed on arms shipments to Iran as they were in progress. He says that he misunderstood; he thought that the sales were Israeli. If so, he was muddleheaded on this linchpin issue and lacked leadership, considering our influence over Israel. Alternatively, he is simply lying; records show that he had been told earlier that Israel was acting as our front in the transactions.

In fact, Bob Woodward has reported, and Bush hasn't (to my knowledge) denied, that Bush was with Reagan when the President signed the Bible that was delivered as a gift to the "terrorist" ayatollah along with a planeload of missiles and other arms.

Nor was Bush just a loyal confidant who kept his mouth shut when Reagan erred. Bush, a former CIA director, hired career CIA officer Donald Gregg as his personal vice presidential adviser. When Contra military aid was banned, Gregg began phoning and meeting with an old CIA pal of both men, Felix Rodriguez, who, allegedly as a private citizen, went to the Salvadoran military base where arms were transferred for shipment in small craft to Contra bases.

Guns, ammo, mines and explosives were collected by men close to White House aide Oliver North and used in a terror war against civilian farm cooperatives in Nicaragua. Rodriguez ran the arms depot, at times talking almost daily with Gregg and meeting at least three times with Bush--whose office says that they only discussed other things, and that the presence of the arms deals on the agenda for one of those meetings was a typing error.

It gets worse. As his own assistant Rodriguez hired, under an assumed name, Luis Posada Carriles, another former CIA colleague who had just been sprung from a Venezuelan jail--with his help, Rodriguez has hinted. Posada was in jail for the mid-air bombing of a civilian Cuban airliner that took 73 lives. That surpasses all the Arab terrorist acts that Bush and Reagan have complained of.

Bush's office has said that he didn't know of Posada's background. Nonsense. Posada bombed that airliner on Bush's watch, in October, 1976, and Castro's howls of CIA culpability and U.S. denials were big news. Surely a CIA director worthy of the title would have called for the file on Posada.

CONTINUED...

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-11-04/local/me-984_1_contra-arms

That particular fellah also seemed to have gotten a hand into every thing worth keeping secret since the Bay of Pigs Thing.

Oh well. Must be business as usual for the son of a Senator, another strange coincidence for a former head of the CIA turned vice president turned president turned father of a president.

Sorry to ramble. I get nostalgic.

Look forward, my Friend. And, stay thirsty!