January 5, 2004

Hinckley Can Go Home

Now that John Hinckley, the man convicted of attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan, is being granted unsupervised visits with his family (see DC Indymedia), it lends support to John Judge’s theory that he was the errant son of the Hinckley family, set up to do a job. Because it happened in DC where the insanity plea could be used, he would do some time, but never really be harmed. It was like sending him to boot camp.

There is a great deal of fascinating information on the Web about the Bush-Hinckley family connection, but you don’t have to go to any fringey sources. What you can find in the mainstream media is enough to blow your mind, and to make you wonder why the obvious questions were never pursued.

Several of the mainstream articles about the subject from 1980 are posted on the FreeRepublic website. Of course the Freepers are fiercely partisan, consider themselves right wing and are big supporters of the war in Iraq, at least they were well represented among the very few who came out demonstrating for the war when hundreds of thousands demonstrated against it. But I don’t care whether they are right wing, left wing, no wing, triple wing. The point is whether a given point is true or not. For only posting mainstream articles about facts that have never even been denied by the Bush family, they generated responses like, "Un F***ing believable! You guys are getting so desperate, your starting to look like candidates for the looney bin."

These are responses from the conspiracy phobics, whose minds snap shut whenever they hear what they conceive of as "conspiracy theory." I’ve never figured out exactly what qualifies. It appears that anything that implies nefarious behavior is "conspiracy theory." Apparently illegal or dishonest behavior is not possible in the world view of these people – at least not among prominent politicians. They cling desperately to the "Leave It To Beaver" vision of American life.

In any case, here is a summary of the basic facts via mainstream reports.

On March 31, 1980, the day after John Hinckley had attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, The Houston Post ran an article headlined, "Bush’s son was to dine with suspect’s brother."

The article began “Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley Jr., who is charged with shooting President Reagan and three others, was to have been a dinner guest Tuesday night at the home of Neil Bush, son of Vice President George Bush, the Houston Post has learned.”

NBC’s John Chancellor also reported the “bizarre coincidence.”

On that day the Post said Neil Bush admitted to being personally acquainted with Scott Hinckley, having met him on one occasion in the recent past. He also said he knew the family and was aware of its large contributions to the Bush campaign for president in 1980. Both were oil men based in Denver. Scott Hinckley was vice president of Vanderbilt Energy of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation and Neil Bush worked for Standard Oil of Indiana. John Hinckley Jr., the shooter, lived off and on with his parents in Evergreen, Colorado, near Denver.

Neil Bush told the Post he didn’t know if he knew John Jr. or not. His wife Sharon said, “From what I know and have heard, [the Hinckleys] are a very nice family ... and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign. I understand he [John Jr.] was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful.”

In response to a question about the incident, Vice President Bush’s press secretary said, “I don’t know a damn thing about it. I was talking to someone earlier tonight and I couldn’t even remember [Hinckley Jr.]’s name. All I know is what you’re telling me.” The vice president, he said, had “made no mention of it whatsoever” and didn’t indicate that he knew the name.

On March 31, Neil Bush refused to take calls from the media, but then held a press conference on April 1, saying he would meet with the media once and “leave it at that.”

The Rocky Mountain News reported that Neil Bush had confirmed that if the shooting had not taken place, Scott Hinckley was going to be at a dinner party at Bush’s house that night. He said Hinckley was “a good an decent man” and he had “no regrets whatsoever in saying that Scott Hinckley can be considered a friend of mine.”

He said he did not know the shooter or his father John Hinckley Sr., who was president of Vanderbilt Energy Corp. Bush said his wife’s assertion that there had been large contributions from Hinckley Sr. to the Bush presidential campaign were not true.

On April 1, the Houston Post reported “Vice president confirms his son was to have hosted Hinckley brother.” Bush spokeswoman Shirley Green described the connection as “a bizzare happenstance, a weird occurrence.”

Later that day Bush spokesman Peter Teeley denied any campaign donations from the Hinckleys.

The Associated Press reported on March 31 that “Neil Bush served as campaign manager for his brother, George W. Bush, the Vice President’s eldest son, who made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Neil lived in Lubbock, Texas, throughout most of 1978, where John Hinckley lived from 1974 through 1980."

There is no record of any of the Bush’s being questioned by the FBI about the contacts. There was no investigation at all. According to the memoirs of Donald Regan, Reagan’s aide, treasury secretary and chief of staff at different times, the whole idea of anyone but the “lone assassin” being involved in the shooting was dismissed shortly after Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room less than five hours after Reagan was shot. Regan said, “the Vice President arrived with Ed Meese, who had met him when he landed to fill him in on the details. George asked for a condition report: 1) on the President; 2) on the other wounded; 3; on the assailant; 4) on the international scene...” Then, “After the reports were given and it was determined that there were no international complications and no domestic conspiracy, it was decided that the US government would carry on business as usual.”

John Hinckley Sr. was president of World Vision, a right wing evangelical association which describes itself as the largest “international Christian relief and development agency” active in the third world, beginning in 1976. He was president of the organization when Mark David Chapman was working for it, one of its lost boys. The organization has deep ties to the intelligence community and has assisted the CIA in many of its projects. Its largest contributor is the U.S. State Department Agency for International Development.

Judge says, World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and "good work" operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there. From it's inception, it was rabidly anti-Communist and it focused on refugee populations of people running from countries that had been taken over by Communism. This was from the fifties on.

World Vision had a hand in the movement of the Cubans into the United States and other refugees of revolutionary regimes. When you're a refugee you're cut loose, basically, and pretty much fair game to be manipulated by whoever is willing to give you a hand because you don't have a home or any place to stay and somebody has got to accept you.

World Vision was able to recruit out of these mercenary populations, people who could be politically turned to their intelligence purposes. World Vision served as a penetration force -- not as visible as the military actually going in or the CIA going in -- going in as missionaries and working among the people. This link between missionary and intelligence for capitalistic infiltration operations goes way back. It was part of the internationalism with the Rockefellers. It's talked about in a book called Thy Will Be Done[4] about Rockefeller, Venezuela, and Latin American Oil, the Summer Linguistic Institute, World Vision and others. But they operated in this way for a long time.

They were paid by the CIA for a long time during the Vietnam war and went into SE Asia -- Cambodia and Laos. Throughout Vietnam they were given U.S. military equipment to use. They still maintain a budget under USAID (Agency for International Development), which was just a pass-over in order to give the CIA more cover. They ran operations through USAID. The current cover replacing that is the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which is supposed to be how we're exporting democracy around the world.

Here are some great links on the Bush-Hinckley connection and the World Vision connection to Mark David Chapman.

"The Afternoon of March 30." is a fictional treatment of the questions by Nathaniel Blumberg. Too bad fiction is the only place this kind of information can appear in the US mainstream, which is almost all fiction.

North Star Zone on the Shadow Government. Offers a good basic wrap-up of the strange facts.

Mack White has a brilliant page on the assassination of John Lennon with a comicbook narrative and a great list of links.

"Reagan, Hinckley and the ‘Bushy Knoll’ Conspiracy" by ParaScope Editor Charles Overbeck.