Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

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“Family of Secrets”: A VERY Important New Book

Com­ment: Jour­nal­ist Russ Bak­er has writ­ten a land­mark vol­ume about the deep polit­i­cal his­to­ry of the Bush fam­i­ly, George H.W. (“Pop­py”) Bush in par­tic­u­lar. Fam­i­ly of Secrets (Blooms­bury Press [SC]; Copy­right 2009 by Russ Bak­er) is a must for seri­ous stu­dents of the real­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary pow­er struc­ture.

Painstak­ing­ly trac­ing evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries  run­ning through decades of pow­er polit­i­cal intrigue, Bak­er high­lights the unwa­ver­ing, Machi­avel­lian maneu­ver­ing of gen­er­a­tions of Bushes–operations dom­i­nat­ing  much of the his­to­ry of the late 20th and ear­ly 21st cen­turies.

Pre­sent­ing com­pelling evi­dence of Bush fam­i­ly involve­ment with intel­li­gence mat­ters dat­ing back decades, the author has “con­nect­ed the dots” link­ing Pop­py Bush to events as seem­ing­ly dis­parate as the JFK assas­si­na­tion, the Viet­nam War, Water­gate and the ascent of his son to the White House. (Although vet­er­an lis­ten­ers to these broad­casts and users of this web­site will be famil­iar with much of what Bak­er presents, there is a wealth of infor­ma­tion that will open the eyes of even rel­a­tive­ly knowledgable–and jaded–Emory lis­ten­ers.)

Under­ly­ing many of the fas­ci­nat­ing, trag­ic and (in many cas­es) bloody events detailed in this chron­i­cle is what Tex­ans refer to as the “Ahl Bid­ness.” Much of Pop­py Bush’s career as an intel­li­gence offi­cer has involved a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between intel­li­gence mat­ters and the petro­le­um indus­try, with his petro­le­um ven­tures serv­ing as “cov­er” for covert oper­a­tions,  many of which, in turn, fur­thered the inter­ests and prof­its of the mer­chants of black gold.

Read­ers will come away with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of why the res­i­dents of Khaz­a­khstan refer to oil as “the Dev­il’s tears.”

Over the years, many have asked the ques­tion, “What can I do about it?!” One thing every­one can “do about it” is to buy and read this remark­able book, and dis­sem­i­nate the infor­ma­tion in it via any and all means avail­able. “Get­ting the word out” via the Inter­net is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the dis­clo­sures that typ­i­fy this book is Bak­er’s dis­cus­sion of Pop­py Bush’s selec­tion of a man­ag­er to run Zap­a­ta Petro­le­um’s  facil­i­ty at Medellin, Colom­bia. (Bak­er presents com­pelling evi­dence that Zap­a­ta had been, to a large extent, a cov­er for glob­al CIA oper­a­tions.) One of the inter­est­ing things about select­ing this site is that Zap­a­ta was an off­shore oil drilling facil­i­ty. Medellin isn’t on the shore!

” . . . In any case, while in Wash­ing­ton, Pop­py had a warm rela­tion­ship with [Lyn­don Baines] John­son. . . . One of the more pecu­liar rela­tion­ships in an already bizarre enter­prise result­ed from Bush’s choice of a sur­ro­gate to run Zap­a­ta Off­shore’s office in Medellin, Colom­bia. To begin with, there was the ques­tion of why a small, unprof­itable com­pa­ny need­ed such far-flung out­posts. Why, in par­tic­u­lar, did it need one in Medellin, 150 miles from any off­shore drilling locale–a city whose very name would lat­er become syn­ony­mous with the cocaine trade? Bush’s choice to rep­re­sent Zap­a­ta in Colom­bia was Judge Manuel B. Bra­vo, of Zap­a­ta Coun­ty, Texas.

Judge Bravo’s sin­gu­lar claim to fame was his role in Lyn­don John­son’s fraud-rid­den elec­tion to the U.S. Sen­ate in 1948. As reports of an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly close race came in on elec­tion night, Bra­vo con­tin­u­al­ly revised upward the John­son count from Zap­a­ta Coun­ty’s Bal­lot Box 3, until LBJ was assured vic­to­ry.  A fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion led to a tri­al, but by that time the bal­lots from Box 13 in Jim Wells Coun­ty had con­ve­nient­ly dis­ap­peared from the judge’s office. The lack of evi­dence effec­tive­ly end­ed John­son’s per­il. John­son won by eighty-sev­en votes. . . .” (Fam­i­ly of Secrets, pp. 132–133.)

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