Talk:George Herbert Walker Bush
I agree with Steven - the list reads like a classic excerpt from a conspiracy pamphlet and it sits uncomfortably with the style of the rest of the profile. So I deleted it. While no doubt some of those links listed exist, I think they are better dealt with individually as stand alone paragraphs with the appropriate citation. There are other links suggested in the list I think are fanciful and unsubstantiated -- but there's no point deleting only part of the quote -- bob
I removed the following to Talk until such time that the entries can be supported ... or not. AI
"As head of the CIA, Bush was answerable only to President Ford. He was supposedly the first CIA “outsider” to hold the agency's top position. During his tenure as DCI he maintained a policy of disinformation and secrecy, despite a public show of cooperation with congressional investigations of CIA abuses such as assassination plots using Mafia hit men. In September 1976, Chilean dissident leader Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington D.C. by agents of DINA, Chile’s secret police. The CIA knew of such plots, and the two assassins entered the U.S. using fake Paraguayan passports. But the FBI was kept in the dark about this information.
"In 1979, the year before he campaigned for the Republican nomination for president, Bush claimed a nuclear war was winnable. Ronald Reagan won the 1980 nomination and chose Bush as his running mate. As vice president, Bush cast three tie-breaking votes to renew chemical weapons production, supported sale of missiles to “terrorist” Iran and the illegal arming of the Nicaraguan contras and other paramilitary groups he called “freedom fighters. He also chaired The Presidential Task Force on Deregulation which, according to Mary Fricker in her book Inside Job, “set the tone” for bank deregulation which led to the savings and loan financial disaster of the 1980s."[1] . . . "In 1982, Vice President Bush was personally ordered to stop lobbying the IRS on behalf of the drug companies by the U.S. Supreme Court."[2]