What Obama Is Up Against [View All]

[Octafish]

A bit o' history:



PDF of article in graphic above.

And an excellent reminder of the current day from the author of Family of Secrets -- The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America.

What Obama Is Up Against

Monday 02 November 2009
by: Russ Baker
t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

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The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game; it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the "military industrial complex." (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy's agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals "mad" and spoke angrily to aides of "scattering the CIA to the wind." The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

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In December 1971, Nixon learned of a 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, including 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.

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As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US 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.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthout.org/11020910

It's no idle about Secret Government or the unbelievable-yet-true NAZIs chums with CIA, Obama is up against The Beast. He needs us -- as in DU and as in We the People, not only to help him see the way, but to watch his back.