"The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga)," by Anonymous, translated by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson

In politics the homestead, with its franklin-owner, was the unit; the "thing", or hundred-moot, the primal organisation, and the "godord", or chieftainship, its tie. The chief who had led a band of kinsmen and followers to the new country, taken possession of land, and shared it among them, became their head- ruler and priest at home, speaker and president of their Thing, and their representative in any dealings with neighbouring chiefs and their clients. He was not a feudal lord, for any franklin could change his "godord" as he liked, and the right of "judgment by peers" was in full use. At first there was no higher organisation than the local thing. A central thing, and a speaker to speak a single "law" for the whole island, was instituted in 929, and afterwards the island was divided in four quarters, each with a court, under the Al-thing.

Webster Griffin Tarpley, "George Bush:  The Unauthorized Biography"

Bush is a bureaucrat and administrator at heart, with all the sinister overtones these have rightly acquired during the twentieth century. His discourse is highly bureaucratic, and is famous for being so. Bush's obsessions with "things", as in the notorious "vision thing," reflects the essence of Aristotelian bureaucratic cataloguing. We saw the "adversary thing" back in 1976; since then we have seen the "Super Tuesday thing," "the vice presidential thing," and a nostalgic glance at "this drilling thing," in reference to Bush's "experience in offshore drilling." [fn 12] When Bush talked by telephone with the astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis, he asked, "How was the actual deployment thing?" Sometimes this can even occur in the plural, as in this reference to his dog Millie's puppies: "Kids just love those little fuzzy things."

George Bush's involvement with Panama goes back to operations conducted in Central American and the Caribbean conducted by Senator Prescott Bush's Jupiter Island Harrimanite cabal. We recall Bush's pugnacious assertions of US sovereignty over the Panama Canal during his 1964 electoral contest with Senator Yarborough. For the Bush clan, the cathexis of Panama is very deep, since it is bound up with the exploits of Theodore Roosevelt, the founder of the twentieth-century US imperialism which the Bush family is determined to defend to the farthest corners of the planet. For it was Theodore Roosevelt who had used the USS Nashville and other US naval forces to prevent the Colombian military from repressing the US-fomented revolt of Panamanian soldiers in November, 1903, thus setting the stage for the creation of an independent Panama and for the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty which created a Panama Canal Zone under US control. Roosevelt's "cowboy diplomacy" had been excoriated in the US press of those days as "piracy;" the Springfield Republican had found the episode "the most discreditable in our history," but the Bush view was always pro-imperialist. It was the comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's bucaneering audacity that made poor George look bad.

During 1991, reports surfaced of a joint project of the CIA and the Mossad in central America which included large-scale smuggling of illegal drugs from Colombia through Panama to the United States. This was code-named "Operation Watchtower." According to an affidavit signed by the late Colonel Edward P. Cutolo, a US Army Special Forces Commander who was in charge of operations in Colombia subsumed under this project, "the purpose of Operation Watch Tower was to establish a series of three electronic beacon towers beginning outside of Bogota, Colombia and running northeast to the border of Panama. Once the Watch Tower teams were in place, the beacon was activated to emit a signal that aircraft could fix on and fly undetected from Bogota to Panama, then land at Albrook Air Station." [fn 30] According to Cutolo, the flights were often met at Albrook Air Station by Noriega, other PDF officers, CIA agents, and an Israeli national believed to be David Kimche of the Mossad. Another Israeli involved in the flights was Mossad agent Michael Harari, who maintained a close relation to Noriega until the time of the US invasion of December 20, 1989. According to Cutolo's affidavit, "I was told from Pentagon contacts, off the record, that CIA Director Stansfield Turner and former CIA Director George Bush are among the VIPs that shield Harari from public scrutiny." According to Cutolo, "the cargo flown from Colombia to Panama was cocaine," which ultimately ended up in the United States. The profits were allegedly laundered through a series of banks, including banks in Panama. According to published reports, Cutolo and a long list of other US military personnel who knew about Operation Watchtower died under suspicious circumstances during the 1980's, one of them after having vainly attempted to interest the CBS News "60 Minutes " staff in this matter. Mike Harari of the Mossad is reportedly a prime suspect in the death of one of these US officers, Army Col. James Rowe, who was killed in the Philippines on April 21, 1989.