Former President Gerald Ford, the 38th president, has died at the age of 93. It is announced that Ford’s cause of death is undisclosed, which makes you wonder why that is. The media is trying to pass off Gerald Ford a man who tried to help “heal a divided country.”

Gerald Ford, whose brief U.S. presidency is remembered mainly for his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon, was honored … as a man who tried to heal a divided country.

This is the bullshit that was used to cover all the wrong doings for another former President, Ronald Regan. During my time off, I was not able to access the Internet. Some people who have been blogging for while may find it as a relief; I found it to be opposite. Not because I was going through withdrawal because once your eyes have been open to the truths, it is hard to re-enter a matrix of lies and half-lies. We live in world that is bombardment of propaganda and counter-propaganda.

The truth must be told and the American people must not let Ford just fade away but must be aware in his role in the neocon take over. Most people remember Gerald Ford as the klutzy fool who tripped down the stairs of Air Force One, who couldn’t eat tamales and who indefensibly pardoned Nixon. What most people seem to forget is his role in Indonesia�s genocidal campaign against East Timor. Or his membership in the Warren Commission, which determined that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone perpetrator of the JFK assassination. Or laying down the path of the neocon take over in the 1980s.

Ford’s path to Vice President is an interesting one. Ford was a member of the House of Representatives for twenty-four years, from 1949 to 1973. Ford became Vice President on October 10, 1973, after the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. As to why Agnew resigned, that depends on who is telling the story, the story told to the American public, Agnew was had to resign because of tax evasion, extortion, and bribery. According to Agnew, he said he resigned because Nixon and General Alexander M. Haig told him to “go quietly… or else.”

Haig assured Agnew’s staff that, if the vice president resigned and pleaded guilty on the tax charge, the government would settle the other charges against him and he would serve no jail sentence. But if Agnew continued to fight, “it can and will get nasty and dirty.” From this report, Agnew concluded that the president had abandoned him. The vice president even feared for his life, reading into Haig’s message: “go quietly�or else.”

During his time in Congress, Ford flew under the radar until 1963 as a mediocre congressman. So how does a mediocre congressman get elected as Minority Leader to fill the country’s two executive posts without receiving a single electoral vote?

For those who believe that there is something sinister about Freemasonry and that there is power at the top of Masons food chain, then the argument can be made it was not until Ford was made a Sovereign Grand Inspector General, 33� in 1962 that Ford stopped flying below the radar.

The Warren Report
It was not until 1963 Ford began making a name for himself. During that year, Republican members of the House elected him Minority Leader and later that year he appointed to the Warren Commission by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a special task force set up to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The commission was under the chairmanship of Earl Warren. Other members of the commission included Richard Russell, Thomas Hale Boggs, former CIA chief Allen Dulles, John McCloy and John Cooper.

According to Bobby Baker, Johnson selected Ford because he was under the control of J. Edgar Hoover. In his 1978 book, “Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator,” Baker, who was also under investigation for by the FBI, wrote that Ford had been secretly taped by the FBI when he had attended meetings with Fred Black.

In 1997, it was revealed that he personally altered the report of Kennedy’s assassination, through released records by the Assassination Records Review Board, a body constituted under the JFK Act, passed in the wake of public outcry from Oliver Stone’s film JFK. According to the 1997 AP story, Ford had elevated the location of the wound from its true location in the back to the neck to confirm the single bullet theory.

Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission’s key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy’s body when he was killed in Dallas.

The effect of Ford’s change was to strengthen the commission’s conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.

A small change, said Ford on Wednesday when it came to light, one intended to clarify meaning, not alter history.

”My changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory,” he said in a telephone interview from Beaver Creek, Colo. ”My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.”

Altering the report Ford allowed Americans to believe that the appropriate criminal had been captured. So why did Ford revise the report?

The Making of a President
After Nixon and Agnew were reelected in 1972, Agnew soon came under investigation by the Justice Department for corruption extending back to his days as a Maryland county executive. Agnew called the charges of bribery �damned lies� and vowed never to resign the vice presidency. That never happened. Agnew did resigned and he never served a single day behind bars.

It is no secret; Ford was not Nixon first choice to replace Agnew. Nixon wanted former Texas governor John Connolly, but he was warned he would have a difficult time getting through confirmation from Congress. This is not say, Ford was selected unexpectedly, Ford already had a close working relationship with the Nixon administration. Alexander Butterfield, former White House chief of staff HR Haldeman’s White House deputy, had said that Nixon consistently had the minority leader completely under his thumb - “He was a tool of the Nixon administration, like a puppy dog. They used him when they had to - wind him up and he’d go ‘arf arf.’”

To prove his loyalty to Nixon, in 1970 Ford had led a failed attempt to impeach Justice William O. Douglas from the Supreme Court. Ford had very little support, which brought the investigations to a close quickly. The motive behind the impeach was meant to get back at the Senate for not confirming two of Nixon’s conservative nominees to the Supreme Court - Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell. As for Ford’s reward for this little stunt, he was appointed vice president under the newly ratified 25th Amendment.

One year later Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate Scandal. Ford therefore became the first man in history to become the president of the United States without having been elected as either president or vice president. Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller, son of the robber baron John D. Rockefeller who built the Standard Oil empire, as his vice president. During his confirmation hearings, it was revealed that over the years he had not paid his income taxes and had made large gifts of money to officials such as Henry Kissinger.

In his memoirs, A Time To Heal, Ford reveals that it was Nixon who was the one who first proposed Rockefeller for Vice President and that the idea of giving a blanket pardon to Nixon was by Gen. Alexander Haig. Bob Woodward wrote in his book Shadow that Haig told Ford that he had three pardon options: (1) Nixon could pardon himself and resign, (2) Nixon could pardon his aides involved in Watergate and then resign, or (3) Nixon could agree to leave in return for an agreement that the new president would pardon him.

It is interesting that Nixon had suggested that Rockefeller for Vice President because Rockefeller’s top competitor was George H. W. Bush. The Bush and the Rockefeller’s were not the best of friends. In the 1964 presidential campaign, Bush’s father, Senator Prescott S. Bush, Republican from Connecticut, condemned Rockefeller’s divorce of his wife of 32 years and remarried a woman about twenty years his junior at a graduation speech at Rosemary Hall girls’ school in Greenwich, CT.

Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state — one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for president of the United States — can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade the mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?. . . Have we come to the point where one of the two great political parties will confer upon such a one its highest honor and greatest responsibility? I venture to hope not.

And on September 8, 1974, Ford set the wheels in motion for the neocon take over when he gave Nixon a full presidential pardon.

It was Gerald Ford who took today’s famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators out of the lower quadrants of the twisted bowels of the Nixon White House and lifted them to the highest levels of American government. It is these players who now play a central role in the current Bush administration and in shaping Bush’s Iraq war policy. Ford selected George H. W. Bush to be his liaison to the People’s Republic of China in 1974 and later became Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975. Ford’s transition chairman and first Chief of Staff was former congressman and ambassador Donald Rumsfeld and in 1975, Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense, the youngest ever to serve. Ford appointed a young Wyoming politician, Richard Cheney, to replace Rumsfeld as his new Chief of Staff and he later became Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign manager. Paul Wolfowitz served in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Funny how the outcome of today’s war is the same that occurred during Ford and Henry Kissinger’s involvement in East Timor. It was Ford and Kissinger who gave the blessing for Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor � an act of state-sponsored terrorism that killed more than 200,000 people. Could it be that it was practice for Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz for what is taking place today in Iraq? According to the National Security Archive, declassified documents reveal that CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described �coercive techniques� are the same being used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

We are often led to believe that the story of the United States in the twentieth century was a story of the unstoppable advance of liberal democracy: ranging from women’s suffrage in the teen to the civil rights movement of the 60s. There are those who are old enough to recall the country’s survival through the dark days of the Depression and triumph over the forces of totalitarianism in World War II. However, the truth is, this country has been blindly led into a quagmire of lies with minor bouts of hope. At a time it seemed possible that the entire society might be willing to wake up and start the work of building a real democracy in place of the mere facade of democracy we had formerly known never materialized. Ford was no healer.

It is his short stint at the White House has only set forth a precedence that makes it possible for any President to be unaccountable for their action against the laws of the United States. As a consequence, our society has grown weaker rather than stronger, and the myth of liberal democracy has been damaged beyond repair.

It is said that Ford opposed the Iraq war, but one has to consider if it was his way of begging for forgiveness before he meet his maker.

Technorati Tags: President Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, General Alexander M. Haig, Warren Commission, J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, East Timor

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