Four Points make me FOR Bernie

[Octafish]

34. Agents for Bush

"The best way to predict the future is to make it happen." -- U.S. Army saying.

1980 campaign:

Agents for Bush

by Bob Callahan*
Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 33 (Winter 1990)

EXCERPT...

Bush and Terrorism

The Bush presidential campaign not only set the tone for the role and structure of the intelligence apparatus in the new Reagan administration, it also took up a new foreign policy theme which would reap huge political dividends in the years to come. This new theme was terrorism/counterterrorism.

In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem where this theme was given its first significant political discussion before leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It would take an enormously important event to keep a major American presidential candidate away from campaigning on the Fourth of July weekend. For George Bush, the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was such an event. The Jerusalem Conference was hosted by the Israeli government and, not surprisingly, most of Israel’s top intelligence officers and leading political (figures) were in attendance. (6)

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rose to the podium on July 2, 1979 to provide the conference with its opening address. By the summer of 1979, even Menachem Begin was willing to join in the bashing of his old Camp David friend, Jimmy Carter – a practice which had become almost endemic by the fall of 1979.

The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its Annual Report on Human Rights wherein the Israeli Government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel’s new anti-Carter tone was mile, however, compared to the rhetoric of the two separate U.S. delegations which attended the conference. The first delegation was led by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. It included the noted black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute; and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine. The members of this delegation were registered Democrats, yet all became very active in neo-conservative politics during the Reagan years.

The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and two important members of Bush’s Team B form his CIA days – Major General George Keegan, a Bush supporter who had served as intelligence chief for the United States Air Force; and Harvard professor Richard Pipes. (7)

Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.

As Jonathan Marshall of the Oakland Tribune explains: “At the conference, Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response of frustrated minorities, but rather a preferred instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications.(8)

In Ray Cline’s imagination, terrorism had now hardened into a system – an international trouble making system. Richard Pipes elaborated on the Cline hypothesis. “The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism,” Pipes states, “date back to 1879….It marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Weathermen, Red Brigade or PLO. I refer to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will.”(9)

According to Philip Paull, who wrote his master’s thesis on the subject of the Jerusalem Conference, “If Pipes was to be believed, the Russians not only support international terrorism, they invented it!”(10)

The Bush/Cline/Pipes definition of terrorism was of course both expeditious and powerfully political. “Left out of their equation,” Jonathan Marshall comments, “was any mention of terrorist acts by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Israeli ties to Red Brigades, or the function of death squads from Argentina to Guatemala. Soviet sponsorship, real or imagined, had become the defining characteristic of terrorism, not simply an explanation for its prevalence. Moreover, there was no inclination whatsoever to include, under the rubric of terror, bombings of civilians, or any other acts carried out by government forces rather than small individual units.” (11)

Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. The same day Congressman Jack Kemp placed selected quotes from the conference in the Congressional Record. In his syndicated column of July 28, 1979, former CIA employee William F. Buckley blasted two of his favorite targets in one single mixed metaphor: “No venture is too small to escape patronage by the Soviet Union,” Buckley stated, “which scatters funds about for terrorists like HEW in search of welfare clients.” Then in August, George Will, who also attended the conference, wrote about it in the Washington Post.

Before the year was out Commentary, National Review, and eventually New Republic writers would all church out yard after yard of copy on this theme. Soon after, Claire Sterling, who had also attended the conference, would create the first "bible" of this new perspective with the publication of her highly controversial book, The Terror Network.(12)

With the help of George Bush and Ray Cline, the Jerusalem Conference had managed to start a propaganda firestorm.

In the following decade, the theme of terrorism/counter-terrorism would grow increasingly important to George Bush. He would become the ranking authority on this subject in the Reagan White House. Indeed, it would be Bush’s own Task Force – the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terroris, -- which would eventually provide Oliver North back channel authorization through which he would bypass certain dissenting administration officials in his ongoing management of the Reagan/Bush Secret War against Nicaragua.(13)

CONTINUED...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeBushTheCompanysMan-CovertActionInformationBulletinNo.33

And that is how Poppy got his neat job.