September 10, 2002
Dark Secrets: Cheney and Rumsfeld 1975
The Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang and the Killing of Frank Olson by Chris Floyd in Counterpunch tells a tale that will give you the chills. It goes back to the days of Gerald Ford, the unelected president who came to "bind up the nation's wounds" after the Nixon administration, but pardoned Nixon so the public would never know the true depth of government crime at the time. Ford was seen as so innocuous, so benign in contrast with the dark, corrupt Nixon. But there was more to Ford. Ford had been on the Warren Commission, helping to divert attention away from what happened when President Kennedy was killed. He was a close ally of the CIA in Congress. And in this story, it will be shown that his administration was really a turning point in the history of this country and of the role of the CIA in particular.Figuring into the story is one Frank Olson, a CIA scientist at the Army's biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who was later found dead of an apparent suicide. He had been found on the pavement after apparently jumping from a window many stories high. Many years later when his body was exhumed, it was found that his body's condition did not match the official story. He had not jumped through a glass pane and leaped to his death. He had been drugged. He had received a powerful blow to the head and then fallen.
When Olson's family started getting close to the truth of what had happened to him, Ford's chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld and a top White House aide Dick Cheney concocted a plan to divert them. They would get Congress to pass a special bill authorizing a payment of money to the family. They would have a ceremony at which the president would apologize for the CIA's behavior. They would only reveal what truth was already out of the bottle, keeping the rest nicely submerged.
Early this year the memos of Cheney and Rumsfeld about the whole sordid coverup -- paid for as usual by U.S. taxpayers. Another change was made to repair the damage created by too many loose lips at the CIA. Its director Bill Colby was taken down.
For his sins--his "weakness" in allowing a few spears of sunlight into the shadows--he was summarily dismissed a few months later. He was replaced by a man who also lived by the code, who would keep the precious Agency--and all its Gehlens, its torturers, its dopers, its shooters--safe from the mobocracy, the ignorant rabble with their pathetic fairy-tale notions about democracy, justice, law and honor. He would guard the shadow world so well that one day the headquarters of the CIA would proudly bear his name:
George Herbert Walker Bush.
Any wonder why these guys are so into secrecy?
-- By David Cogswell