Looking Through a Glass Onion

"Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident." -- John Lennon



Where were you when you learned that John Lennon had been shot?

Me, I was fumbling through my sophmore year of college, and that night I was in bed, listening to the same radio/alarm clock that I had owned since the ninth grade. In that world that once was , before cell phones, laptops or twenty four hour cable news coverage, that little radio was my source of news and entertainment, and that same tiny dusty speaker that struggled to capture the Dr. Demento show late on many long ago Sunday nights, also crackled that night with the news of Lennon's death.

That is where I was. Morgantown, West Virginia.

I wonder were George H.W. Bush was.

For you see, even in an event as seemingly distant from the Bush family as the murder of John Lennon, connections to and traces of the Bush octopus are there for the finding.

Mark David Chapman, the "lone nut" who twenty-five years ago spun Lennon to the ground with a hail of flat-tipped bullets, is but another thread woven into the dirty tapestry that , when viewed from the proper angle, blazons the heradlry of family Bush.

George H.W. Bush had a friend back in the wildcatting days of 1960's Texas. This friend was a neighbor and frequent dinner guest of the Bush family. This friend has a common ancestor with the Bush family, going back to the late 1600's.This friend was a long time contributor to Bush's political campaigns, always giving the maximum stack of dollars that the law would allow. This friend was also an oil man, and when his company, Vanderbilt Oil, got into trouble with it's six dead wells, old pal George's Zapata Oil stepped in and helped put things aright, and Vanderbilt was soon millions of dollars richer.

This friend of the Bush's eventually became the president of a right wing evangelical association that called itself World Vision, which describes itself as the largest “international Christian relief and development agency” active in the third world.The organization has deep ties to the intelligence community and has assisted the CIA in many projects.Not surprisingly, George Bush's friend and neighbor was also rumored to have CIA connections.

This friend, neighbor, contributor and fellow oil man was of course John Hinckley Sr.,whose son, John ,who also worked for World Vision, would later fail in an attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan.

During Hinckley Sr's term as president of the CIA-backed penetration force that was World Vision, there was an interesting young man working at the organization's Fort Chaffee Refugee Camp for Laotian, Thai, and Vietnamese refugees. The son of a wealthy Amoco oil executive from Decatur, Georgia, this was a young man who also spent some time just prior to December 1980 in Lebanon at a YMCA long rumored to be a CIA front. This young man was Mark David Chapman, future assassin of John Lennon.

Were John Hinckley Jr. and Mark David Chapman subject to CIA MKULTRA mind programming conditioning? Perhaps. The opportunity was certainly there. Don't forget the business of both being in possession of a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when they did their thing.

John Lennon was a man on the rise in 1980. With a new album high on the charts, one of the most influential counter-culture figures in the US was making a strong and popular return to public life. With the power to speak to millions through his fame, John Lennon could be a concern for the incoming Reagan administration and their future plans. With one of the thickest FBI files in history, Lennon had long been a concern to the US government. Eliminating Lennon would in effect eliminate the protest movement.

For George H.W. Bush, the behind-the-scenes power of the Reagan administration, stifiling the
protest movement was highly beneficial, knowing as he did what he was about to wreak upon the world.