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Corn noted in an article first published in The Nation: "In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, [Democrats] Clifford and Altman (for participating in 'some of BCCI's deceptions'), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was 'a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations.' The report was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since, there's been nothing like it."
Which brings us to what may be the most recent Bush family political dirty trick.
Back during the years when BCCI and the Bin Ladens were helping prop up one of George W. Bush's failing oil businesses, Karl Rove was perfecting the art of using misdirection to win political campaigns. James Moore and Wayne Slater, who wrote "Bush's Brain" - the unauthorized biography of Rove - noted that when Rove ran Bill Clements' campaign in Texas in 1986, he is alleged to have bugged his own office to distract voters from the real issues of the campaigns. "Who bugged Rove?" became the big story in the news for weeks, pushing other issues off the front page (and implying that Rove and his candidate were the victims of dirty tricks). Rove's candidate won an upset victory.
Others have suggested - although there is no clear evidence one way or the other - that Rove was behind the appearance in the Gore campaign of Bush's debate prep notes. Had Bush "lost" the debates in a big way, the issue could have been deftly shifted to the Gore campaign having had advance copies of his notes.
Perhaps it's a short leap from bugging your own office, to planting debate prep materials with your opponent, to placing phony documents to kill an issue.
For example, Robert Sam Anson points out in a September 16, 2004 article in The New York Observer that, "Mr. Rather's report hadn't been over 10 minutes when a post appeared on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com from 'TankerKC,' saying the documents were 'not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF . can we get a copy of those memos?'"
This was followed in a few hours by a detailed typographic analysis from another blogger named "Buckhead" - even though the typography had only been shown on television, not exactly a medium conducive to examining typographic nuance.
The blog site that "broke" the story of the alleged forgery of the documents Dan Rather had shown the world was, to quote Robert Sam Anson, "the repository for anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual, anti-John Kerry rants by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D."
For some, the name may sound familiar. As Anson continues: "And whom, you ask, is Dr. Corsi? Co-author of the best-selling 'Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,' that's who."
And now we learn from CBS that "Buckhead" - the blogger who posted to Corsi's website detailed information about the memos' typography just 3 hours after the story had aired on CBS - wasn't a typesetter or typographer at all. Instead, he's a lawyer, Harry MacDougald, who the LA Times notes, has "strong ties to conservative Republican causes who had helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal" and has connections, at least institutionally, to Ken Starr and other senior Republicans.
Most recently, it's been reported by The New York Times that the Texas man who may have passed the documents along to Dan Rather was Texas Air National Guard senior advisor and former Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett.
In February of 2004, USA Today reported Burkett claimed to have witnessed and overheard senior Guard officers working to do a thorough "cleansing" of George W. Bush's National Guard records for a biography Karen Hughes was writing before his last run for president. If true, Burkett - another Bush family enemy - is now on the short list of potential fall guys in this case.
It's enough to make you wonder who's next on the schedule for temporal-lobe brain surgery...
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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